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FrojoStoday at 9:01 AM10 repliesview on HN

> there's no reason to believe the progress of LLMs [...] will stop anytime soon

Wrong. Every advancement has followed a s curve. Where we are on that curve is anyones guess. Or maybe "this time its different".


Replies

gdhkgdhkvfftoday at 12:07 PM

Great. You see a shape in graphs. And that shape tells you that _at some unknown point in the future_ progress will slow (but likely not stop).

Now back to the point, what reason do you have to believe progress will stop soon? If you have no reason, then it sounds like you agree with OP.

Which makes the patronizing sarcasm all that much more nauseating.

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vessenestoday at 11:50 AM

There are advancements that do not follow s curves - consider for instance total data transmitted over all networks, or financial derivatives volumes.

I think a better question for AI is “is it more like a network effect, liquidity effect, or a biological/physical effect”?

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aspenmartintoday at 11:41 AM

It’s more of a guess if you don’t know about things like scaling laws and RL with verification. The onus of “we’re going to saturate” anytime soon is on that claim because every measurement points to that not being true.

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CuriouslyCtoday at 1:48 PM

What people miss is that AI isn't one S curve, each capability we try to bake into a model has its own S curve. Model progress might not impact some capabilities at all, but other capabilities might get totally overhauled.

gchamonlivetoday at 11:27 AM

This could be right for the current architecture of LLMs, but you can come up with specialized large language models that can more efficiently use tokens for a specific subset of problems by encoding the information differently (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03214-7).

So if instead of text we come up with a different representation for mathematical or physical problems, that could both improve the quality of the output while reducing the amount of transformers needed for decoding and encoding IO and for internal reasoning.

There are also difference inference methods, like autoregressive and diffusion, and maybe others we haven't discovered yet.

You combine those variables, along with the internal disposition of layers, parameter size and the actual dataset, and you have such a large search space for different models that no one can reliably tell if LLM performance is going to flatline or continue to improve exponentially.

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aurareturntoday at 9:21 AM

He said "will stop anytime soon". He didn't say forever.

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scotty79today at 12:23 PM

It can be S curve (and it almost surely is), but on every chart you can plot, you don't see even of an inkling of the bend yet.

holoduketoday at 12:29 PM

Software and hardware have no limits. Theoretically would could bozons for computations and have the same amount of computation available on one cm3 of the current total computation in the entire world. Same with software. Never there was a stop on new algorithms. With LLMs there are so many parts that will get better and are not very far fetched.

jeremyjhtoday at 1:16 PM

What the fuck does that have to do with “soon”?

Der_Einzigetoday at 1:16 PM

This is FUD and extremely wrong. None of the advancements have followed an S curve. This time IS different and it should be obvious to you at this point.