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Comment by arctic-true | Hacker News Reader

Most of the impressive accomplishments we’ve seen in the last few months have been the result of huge agent swarms working together and brute-forcing solutions, not massive leaps in intelligence from standalone models. That is still an improvement in the usefulness and power of the technology, but it is NOT evidence that model intelligence is increasing faster than before.

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I don't have any access to any agent swarms (and neither do most) and i still think the models have obviously improved massively in standalone intelligence. Of course they have, agent swarms are not magic. You can swarm all you want around GPT-4 era models and you'll get nowhere. And i've never seen the term 'brute-force' more abused than these LLM discussions. Basically none of the results have been brute force.

Agreed. You can’t “brute force” reality, which has an infinitely large state space. A million monkeys won’t write Shakespeare and all that

Do you use them? I feel like you're talking about the news headlines. But in daily, direct, individual usage (one model at a time) I've found they've improved tremendously over the last few months, for tech/programming work at least

Yes, I do. They’ve definitely gotten better, I wouldn’t dispute that. But we haven’t gone from useless toys to Skynet in the last 6 months, progress is slower and steadier than that.

"This machine-intelligence stuff is overrated, they are just using <insert particular machine-intelligence technique here>" isn't the resounding verdict it may have sounded like when you typed it.

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