4 ms·
An exponential curve looks locally the same at all points in time. For a very long period of time, computers were always vastly better than they were a year ago
by idlewords 1y ago
An exponential curve looks locally the same at all points in time. For a very long period of time, computers were always vastly better than they were a year ago, and that wasn't because the computer you'd bought the year before was junk.
Consider that what you're reacting to is a symptom of genuine, rapid progress.
- Retr0id 1y agoI don't think anyone's contesting that LLMs are better now than they were previously.
- Nevermark 1y ago> It creates a never ending treadmill of boy-who-cried-LLM. The crying wolf reference only makes sense as a soft claim that LLM’s better or not, are not getting better in important ways. Not a view I hold.
- Retr0id 1y agoThe implicit claim is just that they're still not good enough (for whatever the use cases the claimant had in mind)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pera 1y agoA flatline also looks locally the same at all points in time.
- EA-3167 1y agoNor does local flatness imply direction, the curve could be descending for all that "looks locally flat" matters. It also isn't on the skeptics to disprove that "AI" is a transformative, exponentially growing miracle, it's on the people selling it.
- godelski 1y ago> An exponential curve looks locally the same at all points in time This is true for any curve... If your curve is continuous, it is locally linear. There's no use in talking about the curve being locally similar without the context of your window. Without the window you can't differentiate an exponential from a sigmoid from a linear function. Let's be careful with naive approximations. We don't know which direction things are going and we definitely shouldn't assume "best case scenario"
- sfpotter 1y agoA curve isn't necessarily locally linear if it's continuous. Take f(x) = |x|, for example.
- nickff 1y agoThere may have been a discontinuity at the beginning of time... but there was nobody there to observe it. More seriously, the parent is saying that it always looks continuous linear when you're observing the last short period of time, whereas the OP (and many others) are constantly implying that there are recent discontinuities.
- godelski 1y agoI think they read curve and didn't read continuous. Which ends up making some beautiful irony. One small seemingly trivial point fucked everything up. Even a single word can drastically change everything. The importance of subtlety being my entire point ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- godelski 1y ago|x| is piece wise continuous, not absolutely continuous
- sfpotter 1y agoFor a function to be locally linear at a point, it needs to be differentiable at that point... |x| isn't differentiable at 0, so it isn't locally linear at 0... that's the entirety of what I'm saying. :-)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]