alt Hacker NewsThe sigmoids won't save you
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AI has scaled well according to convenient measures. It (neural networks) have the property that whatever you define, they can rapidly be trained master it. We’re able to show that various tasks of increasing complication do not require intelligence and can be framed as autoregressive RL problems. I personally don’t think AI is any closer to sentient intelligence than LeNet; it’s almost trivially clear, we know how it works. So we’re measuring something orthogonal, basically how well a universal function approximator can fit to a function we define, given arbitrary computing power, and calling that progress. What will be really interesting is if we’re able to find a way to properly measure what they can’t do and what’s different about real intelligence.
Edit: in particular I don’t agree with
But if someone claims that the trend toward increasing AI capabilities will never reach some particular scary level...
Lindy’s Law is an absolute gem, that I'm keeping.
If we don't understand the fundamental limits to any particular kind of trend, our default assumption should be that it will continue for about as long as it has gone on already.
We can, in fact, easily put a confidence interval on this. With 90% odds we're not in the first 5% of the trend, or the last 5% of the trend. Therefore it will probably go on between 1/19th longer, and 19 times longer. With a median of as long as it has gone on so far.
This is deeply counterintuitive. When we expect something to last a finite time, every year it goes on, brings us a year closer to when it stops. But every year that it goes on properly brings the expectation that it will go on for a year longer still.
We're looking at a trend. We believe that it will be finite. Our intuition for that is that every year spent, is a year closer to the end. But our expectation becomes that every year spent, means that it will last yet another year more!
How can we apply that? A simple way is stocks. How long should we expect a rapidly growing company, to continue growing rapidly?
This article answers the question in the second paragraph then completely ignores the answer for the rest of it.
>My understanding is that this represents 3-4 “generations” of different technology (propellers, turbojets, etc). Each technology went through normal iterative improvement, then, when it reached its fundamental limits, got replaced by a better technology. The last technology, ramjets, reached its limit at about 3500 km/h, and there wasn’t the economic/regulatory will to develop anything better, so the record stands.
You don't have one sigmoid, you have multiple each stacked on top of each other. Airplanes aren't just one technology they are multiple technologies that happen to do the same thing.
Each one is following a sigmoid perfectly. It only looks exponential(ish) because of unpredictable discoveries that let you switch to another sigmoid that has a higher maximum potential.
The same is true in AI. If you used the same architecture as GPT2 today you're in for a bad time training a new frontier model. It's only because we have dozens of breakthroughs that the capabilities of models have improved as much as they have.
That said exponential and sigmoids are the wrong model to use for growth. Growth is a differential equation. It has independent inputs, it has outputs and some of those outputs are dependent inputs again through causal chains of arbitrary complexity. What happens depends entirely on what the specific DE that governs the given technology is. We can easily have a chaotic system with completely random booms and busts which have no deep fundamental rhyme or reason. We currently call that the economy.
I think an interesting thing about recent AI developments is that its all happening right as we hit the diminishing returns side of another "exponential that's actually a sigmoid" which is Moore's law.
The naive expectation is that AI will slow down b/c Moore's law is coming to an end, but if you really think about the models and how they are currently implemented in silicon, they are still inefficient as hell.
At some point someone will build a tensor processing chip that replaces all the digital matmuls with analogue logamp matmuls, or some breakthrough in memristors will start breaking down the barrier between memory and compute.
With the right level of research funding in hardware, the ceiling for AI can be very high.
I don't know when the sigmoid is going to kick in, but Nvidia's Quaterly datacenters revenues have been grown 15 folds over the past 3 years[1], and nobody including Scott believes this is sustainable for 3 more years otherwise Nvidia's market cap would conservatively be at least an order of magnitude higher than it is.
All exponential eventually becomes a sigmoid because exponential growth always expose limiting factors that weren't limiting at the beginning. Silicon manufacturing had lots of room for high-margin customers like Nvidia even a year ago (by the mere virtue of outbidding lower-margin customers), but now it is mostly gone, and no amount of money will make fabs build themselves overnight.
[1]: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nvda/metrics/revenue-by-seg...
I don't know what the Y-axis is supposed to be on that Wharton AI capabilities graph, but I am not really convinced that Opus 4.6 has more than double the intelligence/capability/whatever of GPT 5.1 Max.
John D Cook gives more technical details here: "Trying to fit a logistic curve" https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/12/20/fit-logistic-curve...
> The moral of the story is that, even though all exponentials eventually become sigmoids, this doesn’t necessarily happen at the exact moment you’re doing your analysis. Sometimes they stay exponential for much longer than that!
All exponentials eventually become sigmoids? Don’t think this can be true without qualifiers.
> then what is their model?
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.
But they do explain the improvement of AI driving 2017-2021 vs 2022-2026.
> It’s true that birth rates must eventually flatten out and become sigmoid
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.
Well, curve shape aside, the high watermark might be lower than where it tapers off.
> What if you don’t fully understand the process? AI forecasters know some things (like how data centers work and how much it costs to build them). But they’re unsure about other things (researchers keep inventing new paradigms of data generation that get over data walls, but for how long?), and other things are entirely opaque (What is intelligence really? Why do scaling laws work? Might they just stop working at some point?) Is there anything you can do here?
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.
We did hit the sigmoid's plateau on airplane speed, but the applications of airplane speed are still coming (how fast can a Chinese company airship the PCB you ordered three minutes ago?). I expect the the same will happen with LLMs, though I also happen to believe things are just getting started on end capabilities.
The curve is a smoothed step curve (y=1 if x>1 otherwise 0). Nature doesn't allow any change to happen instantly at any degree of rate of change. The curveis just a manifestation a change with exponential smoothening of the sharp corners.
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.
Such a long article to say that neither side has a fucking idea about what will happen next.
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.
Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
If the scary AI is so inevitable, why do you feel such an overwhelming need to convince people about that? Surely you can just wait a bit, and they'll see for themselves.
I like this article about how we should assume, at any given point, that we are exactly halfway through a phenomenon which relies on a single data point on a graph —-that apparently doesn’t need its relevance or importance explained— to illustrate that this is obviously true for AI in particular
A lot of words to say "The initial part of a sigmoidal curve is not very informative about the parameters of the sigmoid function in question."
The other thing people don’t understand is exponential curves are self similar. The start of an exponential looks like an exponential. People always look at and think ‘well that’s it it’s exponential now, have missed it, can’t sustain’. Nope.
Good example of this is number of submissions to neurips/icml/iclr. In 2017 that curve was exponential.
> all exponentials eventually become sigmoids
Except innovation. When one sigmoid tapers off we keep finding new ones to keep the climb going.
Hmmm, this is quite an interesting take by Scott.
Lindy's Law is not actually a law and many exact minds will be provoked by the very name; it also fails spectacularly in certain contexts (e.g. lifetime of a single organism, though not necessarily existence of entire species).
But at the same time, I am willing to take its invocation in the context of AI somewhat seriously. There is an international arms race with China, which has less compute, but more engineers and scientists. This sort of intellectual arms race does not exhaust itself easily.
A similar space race in the 1950s and 1960s progressed from first unmanned spaceflight to a moonwalk in mere 12 years, which is probably less than what it takes to approve a bicycle lane in Chicago now.
"Exponentials all tend to become sigmoids but you can't predict exactly when" is a true statement, but I'm not sure it needed an article.
This doesn't say much, and the author fights their own points a couple times, suggesting that they maybe didn't think through what they wanted to write until they were in the middle of writing it and started realizing their assumptions didn't match what they expected the data to say.
I really don't get the point of what I just read.
If you use the log scale you'll see that the time horizon of opus 4.6 was as expected...
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Why is this author tolerated on Hacker News? He's not actually knowledgable about 99% of subjects he posts about.
FYI: The author has predicted that "AGI" will be here in 1-2 years and has staked his public reputation on it. He is personally invested in trendlines being lindy rather than sigmoid.
I don't think you can use lindy on trends as if trends are static objects, but that's another conversation.