Comment by benterix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benterix | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Well, to use the processor analogy, with models we reached the situations where the clocks can't do that much more. So the industry switched to multiplying cores etc. but you can actually see the slope plateauing. There are wild developments for the general public like the immediate availability of gpt-oss-120b that I'm running on my MBP right now, there is Claude Code that can work for weeks doing various stuff and being right half of the time, that's all great, but we can all see development of the SOTA models has slowed down and what we are seeing are very nice and useful incremental improvements, not great breakthroughs like we had 3-4 years ago.

(NB I'm a very rational person and based on my lifelong experience and on how many times life surprised me both negatively and positively, I'd say the chance of a great breakthrough occurring short term is 50%, but it has nothing to do or cannot be extrapolated from the current development as this can go any way actually. We already had multiple AI winters and I'm sure humanity will have dozens if not hundreds of them still.)

Plateauing? OpenAI's o1 is revolutionary, less than a year old, and already obsolete.

Are you disappointed that there's no sudden breakthrough that yielded an AI that casually beats any human at any task? That human thinking wasn't obsoleted overnight? That may or may not happen yet. But a "slow" churn of +10% performance upgrades results in the same outcome eventually.

There's only this many "+10% performance upgrades" left between ChatGPT and the peak of human capabilities, and the gap is ever diminishing.

I think the reason people feel it's plateauing is because the new improvements are less evident to the average person. When we saw GPT-4 I think we all had that "holy shit" moment. I'm talking to a computer, it understands what I'm saying, and responds eloquently. The Turing test, effectively. That's probably the most advanced benchmark humans can intuitively assess. Then there's abstract maths, which most people don't understand, or the fact that this entity that talks to me like an intelligent human being, when left to reason about something on its own devolves into hallucinations over time. All real issues, but much less tangible, since we can't relate it to behaviours we observe or recognize as meaningful in humans. We've never met a human that can write a snake game from memory in 20 seconds without errors, but can't think on its own for 5 minutes before breaking down into psychosis, which is effectively what GPT-4 was/is. After the release of GPT-4 we strayed well outside of the realm of what we can intuitively measure or reason about without the use of artificial benchmarks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com