Sigmoidal, not exponential. It would be insane to assume an exponential curve
> https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you
The conclusion of this article seems to be "you should give ai the benefit of the doubt against all reason". Barf
That aside, I’d question whether applying the Lindy effect in particular to something that’s not really a life expectancy but more a growth rate is credible… or perhaps a bit circular since it “assumes away” the ceiling.
The simpler assumption is that over enough time, the S functions stack together for long enough that working backwards from exponential is a better predictor of reality.
These stacked S curves have continually been true with most technology.
No future for research mathematicians othet than as tastemakers / agenda setters?
This is the plural they, not the singular they.
Nothing in that article says it's not a sigmoid.
We have though. The velocity remains high but the acceleration is decreasing.
The improvement between gpt 2-4 where staggering. to 5, 5.6? Much less so.
The results improve of course, but the difference is no longer mind blowing.
Most of the improvement now has come from agentic harnessing, which is unrelated to the acceleration of the model but the tooling around the use of the model.
So we are seeing a deceleration and the speed is still high due to high prev acceleration but its not growing at the same rate as before and the edges are starting to show themselves
The diminishing returns are colossal. GPT 4 is more than 3 years old now, and while Sol is definitely better, it’s better at a tremendous cost. And 3 years of development. And it still fails in nearly all the same places as 4.0.
I’m not some “zero AI” person, I don’t think this industry will collapse into nothing and we will go back to a no LLM world.
But to look at this industry, which basically began in November 2022, almost 4 years and a trillion+ dollars later and say “oh yeah, definitely riding that exponential growth still” is some of the wildest shit I’ve ever seen, and it’s so common.
A lot of this sort these sorts of posts are just "appeals to geometry" (aka "cope"). This is coming, it's coming hard. Now you need to decide what you want to do with your life in a world where your smarts aren't as special as they used to be.
This is hard (believe me, I know). But what one ought do is not eschew progress and cling to the delusion that things don't change, what one ought to do is try to see how they can leverage these tools for greater and greater accomplishments.