LLMs have been improving exponentially for a few years. let's at least wait until exponential improvements slow down to make a judgement about their potential
I don't think we can continue simply tweaking the transformer architecture to achieve meaningful gains. We will need new architectures, hopefully ones that more closely align with biological intelligence.
In theory, the simplest way to real superhuman AGI would be to start by modeling a real human brain as a physical system at the neural level; a real neural network. What the AI community calls "neural networks" are only very loose approximations of biological neural networks. Real neurons are subject to complex interactions between many different neurotransmitters and neuromodulators and they grow and shift in ways that look nothing like backpropagation. There already exist decently accurate physical models for single neurons, but accurately modeling even C. elegans (as part of the OpenWorm project) is still a way's off. Modeling a full human brain may not be possible within our lifetime, but I also wouldn't rule that out.
And once we can accurately model a real human brain, we can speed it up and make it bigger and apply evolutionary processes to it much faster than natural evolution. To me, that's still the only plausible path to real AGI, and we're really not even close.
At least for the use cases I've been directly exposed to, I don't think that is the case. They need to keep being priced about where they are right now. It wouldn't take very much of a rate hike for their end users to largely decide that not using the product makes more financial sense.
OpenAI went from GPT-4, which was mind blowing, to 4o, which was okay, to o1 which was basically built in chain-of-thought.
No new Whisper models (granted, advanced voice chat is pretty cool). No new Dalle models. And nobody is sure what happened to Sora.
Based on what ? The gap between the release of GPT-3 and 4 is still much bigger than the time that has elapsed since 4 was already released so really, Based on what ?
We see little progress in "soft" skills like creative writing. EQBench is a benchmark that tests LLM ability to write stories, narratives, and poems. The winning models are mostly tiny Gemma finetunes with single-digit parameter counts. Huge foundation models with hundreds of billions of parameters (Claude 3 Opus, Llama 3.1 405B, GPT4) are nowhere near the top. (Yes, I know Gemma is a pruned Gemini). Fine-tuning > model size, which implies we don't have a path to "superhuman" creative writing (if that even exists). Unlike model size, fine-tuning can't be scaled indefinitely: once you've squeezed all the juice out of a model, what then?
OpenAI's new o1 model exhibits amazing progress in reasoning, math, and coding. Yet its writing is worse than GPT4-o's (as backed by EQBench and OpenAI's own research).
I'd also mention political persuasion (since people seem concerned about LLM-generated propaganda). In June, some researchers tested LLM ability to change the minds of human subjects on issues like privatization and assisted suicide. Tiny models are unpersuasive, as expected. But once a model is large enough to generate coherent sentences, persuasiveness kinda...stops. All large models are about equally persuasive. No runaway scaling laws are evident here.
This picture is uncertain due to instruction tuning. We don't really know what abilities LLMs "truly" possess, because they've been crippled to act as harmless, helpful chatbots. But we now have an open-source GPT-4-sized pretrained model to play with (Llama-3.1 405B base). People are doing interesting things with it, but it's not setting the world on fire.
Isn't that kind of obvious? Even human speakers and writers have problems changing people's minds, let alone reliably.
People are persuaded to change their opinions based on social proof, so this isn’t surprising.
Many people have anecdotally, when I tell them what I do for a living, have told me that any other profession would have the common sense/street smarts to not make their scarce skill redundant. It goes further than that; many professions have license requirements, unions, professional bodies, etc to enforce this scarcity on the behalf on their members. After all a scarce career in most economies is one not just of wealth but higher social standing.
If all it does is allow us to churn more high level software, which let's be honest is demand inelastic due to mostly large margins on software products (i.e. they would of paid a person anyway due to ROI) it doesn't seem it will add much to society other than shifting profit in tech from Labor to Capital/owners. May replace call centre jobs too I guess and some low level writing jobs/marketing. Haven't seen any real new use cases that change my life yet positively other than an odd picture/ai app, fake social posts,annoying AI assistants in apps, maybe some teaching resources that would of been made/easy to acquire anyway by other means etc. I could easily live without these things.
If this is all it is seems Ai will do or mostly do it seems like a bit of a disappointment. Especially for the massive amount of money going into it.
If creating software becomes cheaper then that means I can transform all the ideas I’ve had into software cheaply. Currently I simply don’t have enough hours in the day, a couple hours per weekend is not enough to roll out a tech startup.
Imagine all the open source projects that don’t have enough people to work on them. With LLM code generation we could have a huge jump in the quality of our software.
Well, that's good for them, but bad for humanity in general.
If we had a choice between a system where doctors get high salary and lot of social status, or a system where everyone can get perfect health by using a cheap device, and someone would choose the former, it would make perfect sense to me to call such person evil. The financial needs of doctors should not outweigh the health needs of humanity.
On a smarter planet we would have a nice system to compensate people for losing their privilege, so that they won't oppose progress. For example, every doctor would get a generous unconditional basic income for the rest of their life, and then they would be all replaced by cheap devices that would give us perfect health. Everyone would benefit, no reason to complain.
On a nicer planet sure, we would have a system like that. But most of the planet is not like that - the great advantage of the status quo is that even people who are naturally not altruistic somewhat co-operate with each other due to mutual need. Besides there is ways to mitigate that and still give the required services especially if they are commonly required. The doctors example - certain countries have worked it out without resorting to AI risks. I'm not against AI ironically in this case either, there is a massive shortage of doctors services that can absorb the increased abundance Imv - most people don't put software in the same category. There is bad sides to humanity with regards to losing our mutual dependence on each other as well (community, valuing the life of others, etc) - I think sadly AI allows for many more negatives than simply withholding skills for money if not managed right, even that doesn't happen everywhere today and is a easier problem to solve. The loss of any safe intelligent jobs for climbing and evening out social mobility due to mutual dependence of skills (even the rich can't learn everything and so need to outsource) is one of them.
Though maybe you are just using exponential figuratively in place of meaning rapid and significant development and investment.