Hacker News Reader

> And things are speeding up.

That’s not how technical progress works. It’s not continuous. The past doesn’t predict the future. Progress may stall at any time.

View on HN

Sorry, I didn’t want to sound too sarcastic and negative: I don’t disagree with you. But looking from a broader timescale it is clear that in general we’re speeding up our technological progress in a logarithmic scale.

I have been following closely the NLP field for over a decade and the progress is speeding up. Can it stall? Sure. But everything is pointing out that it won’t.

I kinda disagree. We've made some leaps and bounds, but our actual "progress" has mostly been defined by orgs like OpenAI throwing money at the problem. It's only technological progress in the sense that grinding stone bricks is "technological" or "progress".

The difference between ChatGPT and Talk to Transformer is frankly not that large, at least when treated as a black-box. 90% of the people freaking out over ChatGPT on Twitter would have also freaked out over the original GPT, had they known it existed. The extra nuance that we're adding on feels like stalling, and while some of the optimizations have been cool (gpt-neo-2.7b, Stable Diffusion) it feels like we're hitting the top of our progress curve.

Surely we can say that about our last 10s years of our human existence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com