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It can be tricky to grasp exponential growth. Water trickles into a big pool. The flow was slow to start with but flow rate increases exponentially so that the

It can be tricky to grasp exponential growth. Water trickles into a big pool. The flow was slow to start with but flow rate increases exponentially so that the amount of water in the pool doubles every year. Now, it started flowing 100 years ago when the pool was empty. It's now half full. When will it be full? Remember it's been flowing for 100 years and it's only half full.

ctrwu2843 4y ago
Useful analogy but what makes you think what we're dealing with is exponential ? Human intelligence isn't growing exponentially and moores law is said to be breaking down.
- ranting-moth 4y ago
  https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Where is my human brain capability for $1000 by 2023?
    - BizarroLand 4y ago
      Looks like with the NVIDIA 4090 we're about 1/200th of the way there for $1600, but that's with a lot of commercial markup. I think if you had the credentials you could probably rent a server farm or a cluster of 160 Tesla v100s that would meet that requirement, although how long you would have access to that for $1,000 may be very disappointing.
lm28469 4y ago
> It can be tricky to grasp exponential growth. It can also be tricky to determine if something is growing exponentially, or if you're full of wishful thinking. We landed on the moon in 69, basically haven't done anything since then. All our passenger planes are shrink down or blown up version of a boing 707 from 1957. You car isn't much different than cars in the 70s, and it certainly isn't flying as we were expecting them to be back then. Musk promised fully autonomous cars "in two years" in 2012. I'd say the pool isn't being filled any faster than it was back then, if anything it looks like someone is pumping water out of it, straight in the sewers
random_upvoter 4y ago
Have you considered that GPT may not be at 50% but maybe still needs an exponential improvement to achieve human-like understanding?
- nradov 4y ago
  An exponential improvement in GPT along the same axis will still not achieve human-like understanding. It's a very useful tool with the potential to augment or even replace human knowledge workers in many fields. But to achieve true AGI we're going to need to go in a completely different direction.

ctrwu2843 4y ago

Useful analogy but what makes you think what we're dealing with is exponential ? Human intelligence isn't growing exponentially and moores law is said to be breaking down.

ranting-moth 4y ago
https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
- imtringued 4y ago
  Where is my human brain capability for $1000 by 2023?
  - BizarroLand 4y ago
    Looks like with the NVIDIA 4090 we're about 1/200th of the way there for $1600, but that's with a lot of commercial markup. I think if you had the credentials you could probably rent a server farm or a cluster of 160 Tesla v100s that would meet that requirement, although how long you would have access to that for $1,000 may be very disappointing.

lm28469 4y ago

> It can be tricky to grasp exponential growth. It can also be tricky to determine if something is growing exponentially, or if you're full of wishful thinking. We landed on the moon in 69, basically haven't done anything since then. All our passenger planes are shrink down or blown up version of a boing 707 from 1957. You car isn't much different than cars in the 70s, and it certainly isn't flying as we were expecting them to be back then. Musk promised fully autonomous cars "in two years" in 2012. I'd say the pool isn't being filled any faster than it was back then, if anything it looks like someone is pumping water out of it, straight in the sewers

random_upvoter 4y ago

Have you considered that GPT may not be at 50% but maybe still needs an exponential improvement to achieve human-like understanding?

nradov 4y ago
An exponential improvement in GPT along the same axis will still not achieve human-like understanding. It's a very useful tool with the potential to augment or even replace human knowledge workers in many fields. But to achieve true AGI we're going to need to go in a completely different direction.