> What excites the true believers is the slope, not the intercept.
The phrase "true believers" jumps out to me here. It sure makes AI (well, ML) sound more like a religion than a field of technological research.
Yes, because what OpenAI releases today helps us improve the prediction of what it may release in a decade or so.
Each release of an LLM is largely a black box. We don't know exactly how they work, what they learned, why they learned it, or what their limitations are.
How exactly does that help us predict what could exist in a decade or two? And how do we align that predictive ability with the fact that so many people working in the industry would not have been able to predict where we are today a decade or two in the past?
It does neither. What OAI or others release next does, in the very best case, help set a floor. And if it's a blind alley to a local maximum, even that isn't super-helpful.