[deleted]
Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
71–80 of 266 posts
Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
#72Exponential curves don't last for long fortunately, or the universe would have turned into a quark soup. The example of COVID is especially ironic, considering it stopped being a real concern within 3 years of its advent despite the exponential growth in the early years. Those who understand exponentials should also try to understand stock and flow.
Long COVID is still a thing, the nAbs immunity is pretty paltry because the virus keeps changing its immunity profile so much. T-cells help but also damage the host because of how COVID overstimulates them. A big reason people aren't dying like they used to is because of the government's strategy of constant infection which boosts immunity regularly* while damaging people each time, that plus how Omicron changed SARS-CoV-2's cell entry mechanism to avoid cell-cell fusion (syncytia) that caused huge over-reaction in lung tissue.
If you think COVID isn't still around: https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/COVID19-national-data.html
* one might call this strategy forced vaccination with a known dangerous live vaccine strain lol
Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
#73> Instead, even a relatively conservative extrapolation of these trends suggests that 2026 will be a pivotal year for the widespread integration of AI into the economy
Integration into the economy takes time and investment. Unfortunately, ai applications dont have an easy adoption curve - except for the chatbot. Every other use case requires an expensive and risky integration into an existing workflow.
> By the end of 2027, models will frequently outperform experts on many tasks
fixed tasks like tests - maybe. But, the real world is not a fixed model. It requires constant learning through feedback.
Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
#74> Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped. I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too. But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors. With LLM's at the moment, the limiting fac…
Progress in information systems cannot be compared to progress in physical systems. For starters, physical systems compete for limited resources and labor. For another, progress in software vastly reduces the cost of improved designs. Whereas progress in physical systems can enable but still increase the cost of improved designs. Finally, the underlying substrate of software is digital hardware, which has been improv…
> Progress in information systems cannot be compared to progress in physical systems.
> For starters, physical systems compete for limited resources and labor.
> Finally, the underlying substrate of software is digital hardware…
See how these are related?
Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
#75Many of the "people don't understand Exponential functions" posts are ultimately about people not understanding logistic functions. Because most things in reality that seemingly grow exponentially will eventually, unevitably taper off at some point when the cost for continued growth gets so high, accelerated growth can't be supported anymore.
Viruses can only infect so many people for example. If the growth was truly exponential you would need infinite people for it to be truly exponential.
Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
#76> Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped. I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too. But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors. With LLM's at the moment, the limiting fac…
It never ceases to amaze me how people consistently mistake the initial phase of a sigmoid curve for an exponential function.
Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
#77I feel like there should be some take away from the fact that we have to come up with new and interesting metrics like “Length of a Task That Can Be Automated” in order to point out that exponential growth is still happening. Fwiw, it does seem like a good metric, but it also feels like you can often find some metric that’s improving exponentially even when the base function is leveling out.
Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
#78This guy isn’t even wrong. Sure these models are getting faster, but they are barely getter better at actual reasoning, if at all. Who cares if a model can give me a bullshit answer in five minutes instead of ten? It’s still bullshit.
Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
#79Even if the computational power evolve exponentially, we need to evaluate the utility of additional computations. And if the utility happens to increase logarithmically with computation spend, it's possible that in the end, we will observe just a linear increase in utility.
Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
#80> Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped.
The difference between exponential and sigmoid is often a surprise to the believers, indeed.