3 ms·
Sigmoidal, not exponential. It would be insane to assume an exponential curve
by throwaway27448 2mo ago
Sigmoidal, not exponential. It would be insane to assume an exponential curve
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bryan0 2mo agothis gets more nuanced because "the sigmoids won't save you": https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you
- throwaway27448 2mo agoIf the sigmoid is incorrect it's certainly more correct than the exponential. > https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you The conclusion of this article seems to be "you should give ai the benefit of the doubt against all reason". Barf
- conformist 2mo agoIsn’t the point more “it’s easy to fall into the trap to believe that predicting when the sigmoid is going to bend is possible and the right heuristic is to instead extrapolate locally”? That aside, I’d question whether applying the Lindy effect in particular to something that’s not really a life expectancy but more a growth rate is credible… or perhaps a bit circular since it “assumes away” the ceiling.
- throwaway27448 2mo agoNobody in this thread is trying to predict when the sigmoid is going to bend. Perhaps they should
- yazaddaruvala 2mo agoPredicting when the sigmoid bends is difficult and predicting how long until it unbends is equally difficult. The simpler assumption is that over enough time, the S functions stack together for long enough that working backwards from exponential is a better predictor of reality. These stacked S curves have continually been true with most technology.
- haldujai 2mo agoIt hasn’t bent already? 2022-2024 certainly seemed far more exponential than 2024 to present.
- NiloCK 2mo agoI find this astounding. 2024 to present thread is can write a coherent 15 line function to ... what exactly? No future for research mathematicians othet than as tastemakers / agenda setters?
- aurareturn 2mo agoA lot of HN posters thought it was already bending at GPT4o/GPT4.5. Turns out, it kept accelerating (at agentic tasks).
- throwaway27448 2mo agoI suppose it depends what you're expecting. From my perspective it bent around november 2025
- annzabelle 2mo agoThe author of that post is a prominent Bay Area "rationalist," who have had a quasi-theistic relationship with the concept of all-powerful AIs for a couple decades now.
- mitthrowaway2 2mo agoSo are they right or wrong about the sigmoids?
- annzabelle 2mo agoI dunno. They've been saying this for decades, including in a very well read Harry Potter fanfic, and I'd always dismissed them as kooks, but maybe they're right in the end.
- synarchefriend 2mo agoYou are confusing Scott Alexander with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
- annzabelle 2mo agoScott Alexander is a follower of Yudkowski and comes out of that general LessWrong space. This is the plural they, not the singular they.
- mitthrowaway2 2mo agoSaying the same thing for decades, when things progress over those decades along the general trend line that you were worried it would, is decent evidence of a prescient prediction. Climate scientists also seemed pretty kooky in the 80s when they sketched out their trendlines, but now their concerns are all over the headlines as reality caught up, and the same is becoming true of the AI safety people.
- vasco 2mo agoAll of the point of that article is that most people that think something is a sigmoid think it'll bend just as they are publishing their analysis. And the article says, don't do that, assume it'll be related to how long we've been on the "goes up" part. Nothing in that article says it's not a sigmoid.
- subygan 2mo agoin the absence of a stalling signal. it's better to assume exponential and work backwards than hope the next bottleneck is impossible.
- slashdave 2mo agoSince when does realism become hope? (It's the other way around)
- scarmig 2mo agoEverything has limits, of course. But if you've not yet seen a deceleration, it's reasonable to expect that at the least you're in the middle of the sigmoid, not the top.
- Arkhaine_kupo 2mo ago> But if you've not yet seen a deceleration We have though. The velocity remains high but the acceleration is decreasing. The improvement between gpt 2-4 where staggering. to 5, 5.6? Much less so. The results improve of course, but the difference is no longer mind blowing. Most of the improvement now has come from agentic harnessing, which is unrelated to the acceleration of the model but the tooling around the use of the model. So we are seeing a deceleration and the speed is still high due to high prev acceleration but its not growing at the same rate as before and the edges are starting to show themselves
- Lord-Jobo 2mo agoI literally don’t understand, and have a deep distrust of people who say we haven’t seen deceleration. The diminishing returns are colossal. GPT 4 is more than 3 years old now, and while Sol is definitely better, it’s better at a tremendous cost. And 3 years of development. And it still fails in nearly all the same places as 4.0. I’m not some “zero AI” person, I don’t think this industry will collapse into nothing and we will go back to a no LLM world. But to look at this industry, which basically began in November 2022, almost 4 years and a trillion+ dollars later and say “oh yeah, definitely riding that exponential growth still” is some of the wildest shit I’ve ever seen, and it’s so common.
- wat10000 2mo agoI'm the other way around. For doing real, useful work, these things were barely more than toys even just a year ago. Now they're very capable when used well, and still getting better at a fast pace.
- piloto_ciego 2mo agoI mean, "sure, technically correct is the best kind of correct" - but where we sit on this right now? It certainly feels exponential. A lot of this sort these sorts of posts are just "appeals to geometry" (aka "cope"). This is coming, it's coming hard. Now you need to decide what you want to do with your life in a world where your smarts aren't as special as they used to be. This is hard (believe me, I know). But what one ought do is not eschew progress and cling to the delusion that things don't change, what one ought to do is try to see how they can leverage these tools for greater and greater accomplishments.
- slashdave 2mo agoShh! Don't upset the hype train
- m0llusk 2mo agoMaybe more like do not interrupt the hype train while it is derailing?
- energy123 2mo agoThat's a false binary. The right binary is whether it's a convergent function or a divergent function. A sigmoid is convergent, which is not well substantiated and more farfetched than a divergent function, even if it's true that 2^x is too optimistic.