LLMs have seen huge improvements over the last 3 years. Are you going to make the bet that they will continue to make similarly huge improvements, taking them well past human ability, or do you think they'll plateau?
The former is the boring, linear prediction.
right, because if there is one thing that history shows us again and again is that things that have a period of huge improvements never plateau but instead continue improving to infinity.
Improvement to infinity, that is the sober and wise bet!
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Battery tech is too boring, but seems more likely to manage long-term effectiveness.
Sure yeah why not
> taking them well past human ability,
At what? They're already better than me at reciting historical facts. You'd need some actual prediction here for me to give you "prescience".
A lot of the press likes to paint “AI” as a uniform field that continues to improve together. But really it’s a bunch of related subfields. Once in a blue moon a technique from one subfield crosses over into another.
“AI” can play chess at superhuman skill. “AI” can also drive a car. That doesn’t mean Waymo gets safer when we increase Stockfish’s elo by 10 points.
Failures aren't just a ratio, they're a multi-dimensional shape.
They're already better than you at reciting historical facts. I'd guess they're probably better at composing poems (they're not great but far better than the average person).
Or you agree with me? I'm not looking for prescience marks, I'm just less convinced that people really make the more boring and obvious predictions.
I'll make one prediction that I think will hold up. No LLM-based system will be able to take a generic ask like "hack the nytimes website and retrieve emails and password hashes of all user accounts" and do better than the best hackers and penetration testers in the world, despite having plenty of training data to go off of. It requires out-of-band thinking that they just don't possess.
so is a textbook, but no-one argues that's intelligent
This is unlikely for the trivial reason that some tasks are roughly saturated. Modest improvements in chess playing ability are likely. Huge improvements probably not. Even more so for arithmetic. We pretty much have that handled.
But the more substantive issue is that intellectual tasks are not all interconnected. Getting significantly better at drawing hands doesn’t usually translate to executive planning or information retrieval.
They're better at regurgitating historical facts than me because they were trained on historical facts written by many humans other than me who knew a lot more historical facts. None of those facts came from an LLM. Every historical fact that isn't entirely LLM generated nonsense came from a human. It's the humans that were intelligent, not the fancy autocomplete.
Now that LLMs have consumed the bulk of humanity's written knowledge on history what's left for it to suck up will be mainly its own slop. Exactly because LLMs are not even a little bit intelligent they will regurgitate that slop with exactly as much ignorance as to what any of it means as when it was human generated facts, and they'll still spew it back out with all the confidence they've been programed to emulate. I predict that the resulting output will increasingly shatter the illusion of intelligence you've so thoroughly fallen for so far.
I wonder what happens if you ask deepseek about Tiananmen Square…
Edit: my “subtle” point was, we already know LLMs censor history. Trusting them to honestly recite historical facts is how history dies. “The victor writes history” has never been more true. Terrifying.
I mean, that's true but not very relevant. You can't trust a human to honestly recite historical facts either. Or a book.
> “The victor writes history” has never been more true.
I don't see how.
Surely you meant the latter? The boring option follows previous experience. No technology has ever not reached a plateau, except for evolution itself I suppose, till we nuke the planet.
