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Comment by drewcon | Hacker News Reader

Humans are not familiar with exponential change so they have almost no ability to manage through exponential change.

Its an apt comparison. The criticisms in the cnn article are already out date in many instances.

As a developer that uses LLMs, I haven't seen any evidence that LLMs or "AI" more broadly are improving exponentially, but I see a lot of people applying a near-religious belief that this is happening or will happen because... actually, I don't know? because Moore's Law was a thing, maybe?

In my experience, for practical usage LLMs aren't even improving linearly at this point as I personally see Claude 3.7 and 4.0 as regressions from 3.5. They might score better on artificial benchmarks but I find them less likely to produce useful work.

5 years ago commercial image gen produced hallucinatory dream like blobs.

2 years ago it was cool but unreliable.

Today I just did an entire “photo shoot” in Midjourney.

Viruses spread and propagate themselves, often changing along the way. AI doesn't, and probably shouldn't. I think we've made a few movies on why that's a bad idea.

> Humans are not familiar with exponential change

Humans are. We have tools to measure exponential growth empirically. It was done for COVID (i.e. epidemiologists do that usually) and is done for economy and other aspects of our life. If there's to be exponential growth, we should be able to put it in numbers. "True me bro" is not a good measure.

Edit: typo

There's individual persons modelling exponential change just fine, and then there's what happens when you apply to the populace at large.

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."

> when you apply to the populace at large

What does this mean? What do you apply to populace at large? Do you mean a populace doesn’t model the exponential change right?

Yep that's what I meant! Context clues did you well here.

“A populace modeling exponential change”. Yeah, that’s just word salad.

We can agree to disagree. After all, even you were able to figure out what I meant :-)

disagree on what? You have not put forward a coherent statement. I had to fix your sentence. ;)

I understand that complex sentences can sometimes be difficult to parse for median Americans or non-native speakers, but we disagree on whether what I said was word salad prior to you rewording it by explicitly enumerating the implied indirect object. As you demonstrated, context clues were ample to determine meaning.

Since I can’t reply under you answer for some reason I put it here.

We can have a constructive discussion instead. My problem was not actually parsing what you said. I’m questioning the assumption if populace collectively modeling exponential change is really meaningful. You can, for example, describe how does it look like when populace can model change exponentially. Is there any relevant literature on this subject that I can look into? Does this phenomenon have a name?

> The criticisms in the cnn article are already out date in many instances.

Which ones, specifically? I’m genuinely curious. The ones about “[an] unfalsifiable disease-free utopia”? The one from a labor economist basically equating Amodei’s high-unemployment/strong economy claims to pure fantasy? The fact that nothing Amodei said was cited or is substantiated in any meaningful way? Maybe the one where she points out that Amodei is fundamentally a sales guy, and that Anthropic is making the rounds saying scary stuff just after they released a new model - a techbro marketing push?

I like anthropic. They make a great product. Shame about their CEO - just another techbro pumping his scheme.

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