alt Hacker News"improvement" is the word Id put the most emphasis on.
weve seen some improvement from the LLMs unattended, maybe, but will it actually keep improving vs needing a human to bring it back on track?
the recursive part is that it keeps improving on itself, but we really have no example of that. if it does it 30 times with improvements, then maybe, but even then, to actually be relevant it has to do better than paying scientists to do the work for the same cost, consistently.
RSI still means nothing if it costs 1000x the cost to get the same improvements as a human researcher
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> if it does it 30 times with improvements, then maybe, but even then, to actually be relevant it has to do better than paying scientists to do the work for the same cost, consistently.
Not necessary. Scientists are capacity limited and supply limited.
> RSI still means nothing if it costs 1000x the cost to get the same improvements as a human researcher
It means you can replace a human researcher with 1000x their salary burned on electricity. It also mean you can get two of them for 2000x of salary of one,
That's a bargain, actually, even with the anomalous, absurdly-overinflated salaries in top-tier ML.
I you knew it was consistent, then these companies would immediately fire their scientists, and burn 10 000x as much as mean researcher salary this month to be able to 10x their virtual headcount overnight, and then use that to make the 1000x be 500x, then 250x, then 125x, then ... and at that point they'd had all the money in the world, because even more skeptical investors would notice what's going on there.
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TL;DR: what you all seem to miss is that electricity scales better than people.
The physical constraint is money - which could be said anything. Could vehicle factories be more automated if we threw a gazillion dollars at it? Sure. Would it make economic sense? No. ROIC would be disatrous. No investor wants part of that.
This is the nuance that poster doesn’t understand. Given how much money thrown at it - we’re not even close. Who has the appetite to keep throwing more given they continually need to keep raising fresh money?