8 ms·

Is it official then? Most of us have been waiting for this moment for a while. The transformer architecture as it is currently understood can't be milked any f

Is it official then? Most of us have been waiting for this moment for a while. The transformer architecture as it is currently understood can't be milked any further. Many of us knew this since last year. GPT-5 delays eventually led to non-tech voices to suggest likewise. But we all held our final decision until the next big release from OpenAI as Sam Altman has been making claims about AGI entering the workforce this year, OpenAI knowing how to build AGI and similar outlandish claims. We all knew that their next big release in 2025 would be the final deciding factor on whether they had some tech breakthrough that would upend the world (justifying their astronomical valuation) or if it would just be (slightly) more of the same (marking the beginning of their downfall). The GPT-4.5 release points towards the latter. Thus, we should not expect OpenAI to exist as it does now (AI industry leader) in 2030, assuming it does exist at all by then. However, just like the 19th century rail industry revolution, the fall of OpenAI will leave behind a very useful technology that while not catapulting humanity towards a singularity, will nonetheless make people's lives better. Not much consolation to the world's super rich who will lose tons of money once the LLM industry (let us remember that AI is not LLM) falls. EDIT: "will nonetheless make people's lives better" to "might nonetheless make some people's lives better"

vbezhenar 2y ago
I feel like it was GPT-5 which was eventually renamed to keep up with expectations.
fergonco 2y ago
> will nonetheless make people's lives better Probably not the lives of translators or graphic designers or music compositors. They will have to find new jobs. As llm prompt engineers, I guess.
- yurishimo 2y ago
  Graphic designers I think are safe, at least within organizations that require a cohesive brand strategy. Getting the AI to respect all of the previous art will be a challenge at a certain scale. Fiverr graphic designers on the other hand…
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    absolutely a solvable problem even with no tech advances
  - andy_ppp 2y ago
    Getting graphic designers to use the design system that they invented is quite a challenge too if I'm honest... should we really expect AI to be better than people? Having said that AI is never going to be adept at knowing how and when to ignore the human in the loop and do the "right" thing.
  - bearjaws 2y ago
    There are people generating mostly consistent AI porn models using LORA, the same strategy could be used to bias the model towards consistent output for corporate branding. Even if its not perfect, many startups will be using AI to generate their branding for the first 5 years and put others out of a job. Right now the tools are primitive, but leave it to the internet to pioneer the way with porn...
entropi 2y ago
> will nonetheless make people's lives better While I mostly agree with your assessment, I am still not convinced of this part. Right now, it may be making our lives marginally better. But once the enshittification starts to set in, I think it has the potential to make things a lot worse. E.g. I think the advertisement industry will just love the idea of product placements and whatnots into the AI assistant conversations.
- dkdcwashere 2y ago
  *good*. the answer to this is legislation —- legally, stop allowing shitty ads everywhere all the time. I hope these problems we already have are exacerbated by the ease of generating content with LLMs and people actually have to think for themselves again
km144 2y ago
I'm not convinced that LLMs in their current state are really making anyone's lives much better though. We really need more research applications for this technology for that to become apparent. Polluting the internet with regurgitated garbage produced by a chat bot does not benefit the world. Increasing the productivity of software developers does not help to the world. Solving more important problems should be the priority for this type of AI research & development.
- dgsm98 2y ago
  > Solving more important problems should be the priority for this type of AI research & development. Which problem spaces do you think are underserved in this aspect?
- pera 2y ago
  The explosion of garbage content is a big issue and has radically changed the way I use the web over the past year: Google and DuckDuckGo are not my primary tools anymore, instead I am now using specialized search engines more and more, for example, if I am looking for something I believe can be found in someone's personal blog I just use Marginalia or Mojeek, if I am searching for software issues I use GitHub's search, general info straight to Wikipedia, tech reviews HN's Algolia etc. It might sound a bit cumbersome but it's actually super easy if you assign search keywords in your browser: for instance if I am looking for something on GitHub I just open a new tab on Firefox and type "gh tokio".
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  LLM's have been extremely useful for me. They are incredibly powerful programmers, from the perspective of people who aren't programmers. Just this past week claude 3.7 wrote a program for us to use to quickly modernize ancient (1990's) proprietary manufacturing machine files to contemporary automation files. This allowed us to forgo a $1k/yr/user proprietary software package that would be able to do the same. The program Claude wrote took about 30 mins to make. Granted the program is extremely narrow in scope, but it does the one thing we need it to do. This marks the third time I (a non-progammer) have used an LLM to create software that my company uses daily. The other two are a test system made by GPT-4 and an android app made by a mix of 4o and claude 3.5. Bumpers may be useless and laughable to pro bowlers, but a godsend to those who don't really know what they are doing. We don't need to hire a bowler to knock over pins anymore.
rjinman 2y ago
As someone who is terrified of agentic ASI, I desperately hope this is true. We need more time to figure out alignment.
- rgbrenner 2y ago
  "alignment" is a bs term made up to deflect blame from the overpromises the AI companies made to hype up their product to obtain their valuations.
  - DirkH 2y ago
    Big take given how much AI companies hate alignment folks.
- cle 2y ago
  I'm not sure this will ever be solved. It requires both a technical solution and social consensus. I don't see consensus on "alignment" happening any time soon. I think it'll boil down to "aligned with the goals of the nation-state", and lots of nation states have incompatible goals.
  - rjinman 2y ago
    I agree unfortunately. I might be a bit of an extremist on this issue. I genuinely think that building agentic ASI is suicidally stupid and we just shouldn’t do it. All the utopian visions we hear from the optimists describe unstable outcomes. A world populated by super-intelligent agents will be incredibly dangerous even if it appears initially to have gone well. We’ll have built a paradise in which we can never relax.
    - gom_jabbar 2y ago
      > we just shouldn’t do it. I think what Accelerationism gets right is that capitalism is just doing it - autonomizing itself - and that our agency is very limited, especially given the arms race dynamics and the rise of decentralized blockchain infrastructure. As Nick Land puts it, in his characteristically detached style, in A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism: "As blockchains, drone logistics, nanotechnology, quantum computing, computational genomics, and virtual reality flood in, drenched in ever-higher densities of artificial intelligence, accelerationism won't be going anywhere, unless ever deeper into itself. To be rushed by the phenomenon, to the point of terminal institutional paralysis, is the phenomenon. Naturally — which is to say completely inevitably — the human species will define this ultimate terrestrial event as a problem. To see it is already to say: We have to do something. To which accelerationism can only respond: You're finally saying that now? Perhaps we ought to get started? In its colder variants, which are those that win out, it tends to laugh." [0] [0] https://retrochronic.com/#a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism https://retrochronic.com/#a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-...
aurareturn 2y ago
Honestly, I'm not sure how you can make all those claims when: 1. OpenAI still has the most capable model in o3 2. We've seen some huge increases in capability in 2024, some shocking 3. We're only 3 months into 2025 4. Blackwell hasn't been used to train a model yet
PaulRobinson 2y ago
It's worth pointing out that GPT-4.5 seems focused on better pre-training and doesn't include reasoning. I think GPT-5 - if/when it happens - will be 4.5 with reasoning, and as such it will feel very different. The barrier, is the computational cost of it. Once 4.5 gets down to similar costs to 4.0 - which could be achieved through various optimization steps (what happened to the ternary stuff that was published last year that meant you could go many times faster without expensive GPUs?), and better/cheaper/more efficient hardware, you can throw reasoning into the mix and suddenly have a major step up in capability. I am a user, not a researcher of builder. I do think we're in a hype bubble, I do think that LLMs are not The Answer, but I also think there is more mileage left in this path than you seem to. I think automated RL (not HF), reasoning, and better/optimal architectures and hardware mean there is a lot more we can get out of the stochastic parrots, yet.
- highfrequency 2y ago
  Is it fair to still call LLMs stochastic parrots now that they are enriched with reasoning? Seems to me that the simple procedure of large-scale sampling + filtering makes it immediately plausible to get something better than the training distribution out of the LLM. In that sense the parrot metaphor seems suddenly wrong. I don’t feel like this binary shift is adequately accounted for among the LLM cynics.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    it was never fair to call them stochastic parrots and anybody who is paying any attention knows that sequence models can generalize at least partially OOD
    - aoeusnth1 2y ago
      Or equivalently, it vastly underestimates the intelligence of parrots
      - fnordpiglet 2y ago
NotYourLawyer 2y ago
> Not much consolation to the world's super rich who will lose tons of money once the LLM industry (let us remember that AI is not LLM) falls. They knew the deal: “it would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Global, LLC in the spirit of a donation” and “it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-[artificial general intelligence] world.”
mountainriver 2y ago
lol this isn’t a reasoning model, those are doing very well, but cute essay you wrote there
qoez 2y ago
It's always been a combination of data and scale (garbage data on massive scale gives garbage still). Data is continually getting better though so we'll still be able to squeeze a lot out of transformers yet
sebzim4500 2y ago
This seems very dramatic given OpenAI still has the best model in the world `o3`.
- oblio 2y ago
  The best model in the world is still basically a very stubborn, yet mediocre 16 year old with a memory the size of the internet.
diego_sandoval 2y ago
> OpenAI knowing how to build AGI and similar outlandish claims. The fact that the scaling of pretrained models is hitting a wall doesn't invalidate any of those claims. Everyone in the industry is now shifting towards reasoning models (a.k.a. chain of thought, a.k.a. inference time reasoning, etc.) because it keeps scaling further than pretraining. Sam said the phrase you refer to [1] in January, when OpenAI had already released o1 and was preparing to release o3. [1] https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections

vbezhenar 2y ago

I feel like it was GPT-5 which was eventually renamed to keep up with expectations.

fergonco 2y ago

> will nonetheless make people's lives better Probably not the lives of translators or graphic designers or music compositors. They will have to find new jobs. As llm prompt engineers, I guess.

yurishimo 2y ago
Graphic designers I think are safe, at least within organizations that require a cohesive brand strategy. Getting the AI to respect all of the previous art will be a challenge at a certain scale. Fiverr graphic designers on the other hand…
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  absolutely a solvable problem even with no tech advances
- andy_ppp 2y ago
  Getting graphic designers to use the design system that they invented is quite a challenge too if I'm honest... should we really expect AI to be better than people? Having said that AI is never going to be adept at knowing how and when to ignore the human in the loop and do the "right" thing.
- bearjaws 2y ago
  There are people generating mostly consistent AI porn models using LORA, the same strategy could be used to bias the model towards consistent output for corporate branding. Even if its not perfect, many startups will be using AI to generate their branding for the first 5 years and put others out of a job. Right now the tools are primitive, but leave it to the internet to pioneer the way with porn...

entropi 2y ago

> will nonetheless make people's lives better While I mostly agree with your assessment, I am still not convinced of this part. Right now, it may be making our lives marginally better. But once the enshittification starts to set in, I think it has the potential to make things a lot worse. E.g. I think the advertisement industry will just love the idea of product placements and whatnots into the AI assistant conversations.

dkdcwashere 2y ago
*good*. the answer to this is legislation —- legally, stop allowing shitty ads everywhere all the time. I hope these problems we already have are exacerbated by the ease of generating content with LLMs and people actually have to think for themselves again

km144 2y ago

I'm not convinced that LLMs in their current state are really making anyone's lives much better though. We really need more research applications for this technology for that to become apparent. Polluting the internet with regurgitated garbage produced by a chat bot does not benefit the world. Increasing the productivity of software developers does not help to the world. Solving more important problems should be the priority for this type of AI research & development.

dgsm98 2y ago
> Solving more important problems should be the priority for this type of AI research & development. Which problem spaces do you think are underserved in this aspect?
pera 2y ago
The explosion of garbage content is a big issue and has radically changed the way I use the web over the past year: Google and DuckDuckGo are not my primary tools anymore, instead I am now using specialized search engines more and more, for example, if I am looking for something I believe can be found in someone's personal blog I just use Marginalia or Mojeek, if I am searching for software issues I use GitHub's search, general info straight to Wikipedia, tech reviews HN's Algolia etc. It might sound a bit cumbersome but it's actually super easy if you assign search keywords in your browser: for instance if I am looking for something on GitHub I just open a new tab on Firefox and type "gh tokio".
Workaccount2 2y ago
LLM's have been extremely useful for me. They are incredibly powerful programmers, from the perspective of people who aren't programmers. Just this past week claude 3.7 wrote a program for us to use to quickly modernize ancient (1990's) proprietary manufacturing machine files to contemporary automation files. This allowed us to forgo a $1k/yr/user proprietary software package that would be able to do the same. The program Claude wrote took about 30 mins to make. Granted the program is extremely narrow in scope, but it does the one thing we need it to do. This marks the third time I (a non-progammer) have used an LLM to create software that my company uses daily. The other two are a test system made by GPT-4 and an android app made by a mix of 4o and claude 3.5. Bumpers may be useless and laughable to pro bowlers, but a godsend to those who don't really know what they are doing. We don't need to hire a bowler to knock over pins anymore.

rjinman 2y ago

As someone who is terrified of agentic ASI, I desperately hope this is true. We need more time to figure out alignment.

rgbrenner 2y ago
"alignment" is a bs term made up to deflect blame from the overpromises the AI companies made to hype up their product to obtain their valuations.
- DirkH 2y ago
  Big take given how much AI companies hate alignment folks.
cle 2y ago
I'm not sure this will ever be solved. It requires both a technical solution and social consensus. I don't see consensus on "alignment" happening any time soon. I think it'll boil down to "aligned with the goals of the nation-state", and lots of nation states have incompatible goals.
- rjinman 2y ago
  I agree unfortunately. I might be a bit of an extremist on this issue. I genuinely think that building agentic ASI is suicidally stupid and we just shouldn’t do it. All the utopian visions we hear from the optimists describe unstable outcomes. A world populated by super-intelligent agents will be incredibly dangerous even if it appears initially to have gone well. We’ll have built a paradise in which we can never relax.
  - gom_jabbar 2y ago
    > we just shouldn’t do it. I think what Accelerationism gets right is that capitalism is just doing it - autonomizing itself - and that our agency is very limited, especially given the arms race dynamics and the rise of decentralized blockchain infrastructure. As Nick Land puts it, in his characteristically detached style, in A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism: "As blockchains, drone logistics, nanotechnology, quantum computing, computational genomics, and virtual reality flood in, drenched in ever-higher densities of artificial intelligence, accelerationism won't be going anywhere, unless ever deeper into itself. To be rushed by the phenomenon, to the point of terminal institutional paralysis, is the phenomenon. Naturally — which is to say completely inevitably — the human species will define this ultimate terrestrial event as a problem. To see it is already to say: We have to do something. To which accelerationism can only respond: You're finally saying that now? Perhaps we ought to get started? In its colder variants, which are those that win out, it tends to laugh." [0] [0] https://retrochronic.com/#a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism https://retrochronic.com/#a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-...

aurareturn 2y ago

Honestly, I'm not sure how you can make all those claims when: 1. OpenAI still has the most capable model in o3 2. We've seen some huge increases in capability in 2024, some shocking 3. We're only 3 months into 2025 4. Blackwell hasn't been used to train a model yet

PaulRobinson 2y ago

It's worth pointing out that GPT-4.5 seems focused on better pre-training and doesn't include reasoning. I think GPT-5 - if/when it happens - will be 4.5 with reasoning, and as such it will feel very different. The barrier, is the computational cost of it. Once 4.5 gets down to similar costs to 4.0 - which could be achieved through various optimization steps (what happened to the ternary stuff that was published last year that meant you could go many times faster without expensive GPUs?), and better/cheaper/more efficient hardware, you can throw reasoning into the mix and suddenly have a major step up in capability. I am a user, not a researcher of builder. I do think we're in a hype bubble, I do think that LLMs are not The Answer, but I also think there is more mileage left in this path than you seem to. I think automated RL (not HF), reasoning, and better/optimal architectures and hardware mean there is a lot more we can get out of the stochastic parrots, yet.

highfrequency 2y ago
Is it fair to still call LLMs stochastic parrots now that they are enriched with reasoning? Seems to me that the simple procedure of large-scale sampling + filtering makes it immediately plausible to get something better than the training distribution out of the LLM. In that sense the parrot metaphor seems suddenly wrong. I don’t feel like this binary shift is adequately accounted for among the LLM cynics.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  it was never fair to call them stochastic parrots and anybody who is paying any attention knows that sequence models can generalize at least partially OOD
  - aoeusnth1 2y ago
    Or equivalently, it vastly underestimates the intelligence of parrots
    - fnordpiglet 2y ago

NotYourLawyer 2y ago

> Not much consolation to the world's super rich who will lose tons of money once the LLM industry (let us remember that AI is not LLM) falls. They knew the deal: “it would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Global, LLC in the spirit of a donation” and “it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-[artificial general intelligence] world.”

mountainriver 2y ago

lol this isn’t a reasoning model, those are doing very well, but cute essay you wrote there

qoez 2y ago

It's always been a combination of data and scale (garbage data on massive scale gives garbage still). Data is continually getting better though so we'll still be able to squeeze a lot out of transformers yet

sebzim4500 2y ago

This seems very dramatic given OpenAI still has the best model in the world `o3`.

oblio 2y ago
The best model in the world is still basically a very stubborn, yet mediocre 16 year old with a memory the size of the internet.

diego_sandoval 2y ago

> OpenAI knowing how to build AGI and similar outlandish claims. The fact that the scaling of pretrained models is hitting a wall doesn't invalidate any of those claims. Everyone in the industry is now shifting towards reasoning models (a.k.a. chain of thought, a.k.a. inference time reasoning, etc.) because it keeps scaling further than pretraining. Sam said the phrase you refer to [1] in January, when OpenAI had already released o1 and was preparing to release o3. [1] https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections