zlacker

>>simonw+(OP)
Indeed. I don't understand why Hacker News is so dismissive about the coming of LLMs, maybe HN readers are going through 5 stages of grief?

But LLM is certainly a game changer, I can see it delivering impact bigger than the internet itself. Both require a lot of investments.

>>didip+Th
> I don't understand why Hacker News is so dismissive about the coming of LLMs

I find LLMs incredibly useful, but if you were following along the last few years the promise was for “exponential progress” with a teaser world destroying super intelligence.

We objectively are not on that path. There is no “coming of LLMs”. We might get some incremental improvement, but we’re very clearly seeing sigmoid progress.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m tired of hyperbolic rants that are unquestionably not justified (the nice thing about exponential progress is you don’t need to argue about it)

>>crysta+fn
We're very clearly seeing exponential progress - even above trend, on METR, whose slope keeps getting revised to a higher and higher estimate each time. Explain your perspective on the objective evidence against exponential progress?

>>aoeusn+Io
Pretty neat how this exponential progress hasn't resulted in exponential productivity. Perhaps you could explain your perspective on that?

>>llmsla+Ar
I think this is an open question still and very interesting. Ilya discussed this on the Dwarkesh podcast. But the capabilities of LLMs is clearly exponential and perhaps super exponential. We went from something that could string together incoherent text in 2022 to general models helping people like Terrance Tao and Scott Aaronson write new research papers. LLMs also beat IMO and the ICPC. We have entered the John Henry era for intellectual tasks...

>>HPMOR+Mt
> LLMs also beat IMO and the ICPC

Very spurious claims, given that there was no effort made to check whether the IMO or ICPC problems were in the training set or not, or to quantify how far problems in the training set were from the contest problems. IMO problems are supposed to be unique, but since it's not at the frontier of math research, there is no guarantee that the same problem, or something very similar, was not solved in some obscure manual.