Posted by Tomte 11 hours ago
My mental model has been 3D computer graphics: doubling the polygon count had huge returns early on but delivered diminishing returns over time.
Ultimately, you can't make something look more realistic than real.
I don't know what the future holds, but the answer to the question "can LLMs be more realistic than real" will determine much about whether or not you think the curve will level off soon.
This is the crux of the article. To a large extent continued progress depends on a stable increase in compute, an increase in training data, and an increase in good ideas to squeeze more out of both of them.
One calculation you could do is a survival function: for each of the above, how long before it is disrupted? For example, China could crack down on AI or invade Taiwan. Or data centers become politically unpopular in the US. Or, we could run out of great ideas. Very hard to predict.
All positive growth eventually flattens out and becomes sigmoid, but a lot of phenomena experience negative growth and nose dive. No gentle curve, but a hard kink and perfect flat line at zero. Forever. I think it would be a stretch to categorize that pattern as sigmoid. Predicting a sigmoid pattern for negative growth implies some sort of a soft landing (depending on your definition of soft).
We can think of many populations that are no longer with us. So just a caution about over applying this reasoning in the negative case.
For example, When a car starts, it's speed and acceleration become more than zero. But what about rate of change in higher degrees? It suddenly doesn't change from zero acceleration to non-zero. That means the car has a non-zero derivative at all degrees. In other words, the movement is exponential. The same thing happens in reverse when the car reaches a constant speed.
While we're at it, the "exponentials are actually sigmoïds" meme is not necessarily true. While exponentials are never exponentials, sigmoids are not guaranteed. Overshoot-and-collapse examples also happen in tech, e.g. the dotcom bubble, or the successive AI winters.
https://xcancel.com/peterwildeford/status/202963666232244661...
Ofc "full labor automation" has a certain spread of meaning. A sliver of population will always find ways to hold to a job or run one or many businesses. But there will be "enough" labor automation for it to be a social ticking bomb. That, in fact, does not depend on better models nor better AI than we have today. By 2045 there will be a couple of generations that has been outsourcing their thinking to AI for most of their adult lives. Some of them may still work as legal flesh of sorts, but many won't get to be middle man and will find no job.
Also, if you could replace your senator today by an untainted version of a frontier model (of today), would you do it? Would it be a better ruler? What are the odds of you not wanting to push that button in the next twenty years, after a few more batches of incompetent and self-serving politicians?
Going to need a big citation for that claim
Yeah well my prophet says he can beat up your prophet in a fight.
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Here in reality, I'm not accustomed to taking random predictions without backing evidence as if they were truth.
Lol
In Scott's mind, dangers from AI are not a known fact, but are somewhere between highly probable and a near-certainty. In his mind, there are well-grounded justifications for believing that AI poses substantial future dangers to the public. Therefore he also believes he should inform people about this, and strives to convince skeptics, so that we might steer clear.
It's easy to understand why someone who believes what you believe about AI would of course not warn people about AI. It's also easy to understand why someone who believes what Scott believes about AI would want to warn people about AI. Your contention is with his confidence for being worried about AI, not his reason for wanting to warn people.
Neither can any specific discussion of what the dangers are and how we can steer clear. It all comes preplanted in your head. The only thing that Scott is playing on (as far as we can see) is your ingrained fear, by using an ominous headline, and a vague reference to something "scary" in the conclusion.
Of course there was no reason to "warn" you, you already believed in the scary future. Scott is just giving you fuel, which you seem to appreciate.
If only there were a way to see more of Scott's thoughts on the subject of AI..
1. If you're not treating my claim as a black box, explain explicitly what is your model of what the article was about? Are you aware, for example of the last paragraph of the article? I think that WAS what the article was about. Do you have specific opinions on e.g. how I went wrong and where my model differs?
2. If you are treating it as a black box, what's your default expectation based on the law of Nothing Ever Happens?
This does *not* imply the inevitability of AGI. It does not imply AGI is necessarily bad.
It does mean that "the capabilities of AI will eventually plateau" offers no meaningful predictive power or relevance to the overall AI discussion.