> I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too. They'd be wrong, of course - for not realizing demand is a limiting facto

> I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too. They'd be wrong, of course - for not realizing demand is a limiting factor here. Airline speeds plateaued not because we couldn't make planes go faster anymore, but because no one wanted them to go faster. This is partially economical and partially social factor - transit times are bucketed by what they enable people to do. It makes little difference if going from London to New York takes 8 hours instead of 12 - it's still in the "multi-day business trip" bucket (even 6 hours goes into that bucket, once you add airport overhead). Now, if you could drop that to 3 hours, like Concorde did[0], that finally moves it into "hop over for a meet, fly back the same day" bucket, and then business customers start paying attention[1]. For various technical, legal and social reasons, we didn't manage to cross that chasm before money for R&D dried out. Still, the trend continued anyway - in military aviation and, later, in supersonic missiles. With AI, the demand is extreme and only growing, and it shows no sign of being structured into classes with large thresholds between them - in fact, models are improving faster than we're able to put them to any use; even if we suddenly hit a limit now and couldn't train even better models anymore, we have decades of improvements to extract just from learning how to properly apply the models we have. But there's no sign we're about to hit a wall with training any time soon. Airline speeds are inherently a bad example for the argument you're making, but in general, I don't think pointing out S-curves is all that useful. As you correctly observe: > But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors. But, what happens when one technology - or rather, one metric of that technology - stops improving? Something else starts - another metric of that technology, or something built on top of it, or something that was enabled by it. The exponent is S-curves on top of S-curves, all the way down, but how long that exponent is depends on what you consider in scope. So, a matter of accounting. So yeah, AI progress can flatten tomorrow or continue exponentially for the next couple years - depending on how narrowly you define "AI progress". Ergo, not all that useful. -- [0] - https://simpleflying.com/concorde-fastest-transatlantic-crossing/ https://simpleflying.com/concorde-fastest-transatlantic-cros... [1] - This is why Elon Musk wasn't immediately laughed out of the room after proposing using Starship for moving people and cargo across the Earth, back in 2017. Hopping between cities on an ICBM sounds borderline absurd for many reasons, but it also promised cutting flight time to less than one hour between any two points on Earth, which put it a completely new bucket, even more interesting for businesses.