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Comment by cdelsolar | Hacker News Reader

i've seen "Pareto frontier" literally 500 thousand times in the last two weeks or so, and maybe once or twice before that. Can someone please explain what happened recently

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In case people need a refresher on what the Pareto frontier is, this article does a great job explaining it (with Mario Kart!): https://www.mayerowitz.io/blog/mario-meets-pareto

Everyone started using the term after that article came out, it feels like...

It would appear from google trends [0] this is roughly right (the article came out in 2024), but it was popular in books [1] 15 years earlier.

[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=pareto%2...

[1]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=pareto+frontie...

I would guess that the article came out because the term was getting popular in AI/LLM circles for measuring LLM cost-for-performance metrics. It was probably riding the meme up the wave, rather than fundamentally triggering it.

So for me, literally I was trying to solve a problem with an AI agent and it threw the term at me. It is a real and useful concept, but my hypothesis is that a certain AI release started using and a bunch of people said "Oh this makes me sound smart/trendy" and started using it every chance they got.

We like to think we aren't token predictors, but the amount of sheer regurgitation I see from us humans makes me wonder (also "commoditize your complement", and so many others)

Oh, I'm convinced that at least I'm a token predictor. Most of the time.

People realized AI is expensive and wanted a cool techy way to say "good bang for your buck"

not really what it means. also the Pareto frontier is literally drawn in what I linked

Yeah, it's a pretentious way to draw a line where you find good value.

i think you still don't understand what it means. there's nothing personal about it. the point you pick along the frontier is what's personal to you and your needs. the frontier itself is not.

"my model sucks but it does so cheaper than anybody else"

It sounds fancy and technical. Like when people use "orders of magnitude" six times per thread on this forum but no ever ever use it irl

Ha ha, ask my daughters if I don't use "an order of magnitude better" IRL.

How to say you've never met a physicist....

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