[300bps]

imagine what better, faster, more “intelligent” systems to follow in the wake of what exists today would be capable of doing

Is this a given? Sure it will continue to improve but by how much? 200% or 2%?

That’s the question. Anyone could’ve measured my height when I was 14 and predicted that I would be 35 feet tall today. But human bodies have limits.

What are the limits of LLMs? It’s somewhere between ChatGPT-4 and the “digital god” that I’ve heard some proclaim is right around the corner.

The boring but very possible answer is ChatGPT-4 might be near the pinnacle.

[ilaksh]

Even if you (obviously falsely, in my opinion) believe that nothing gets qualitatively better than GPT-4, we know that the speed will increase by AT LEAST one order of magnitude. PaLM 2 seems marginally less intelligent than GPT-4 but is probably 10 or 20 times faster already.

Given that we have increased computing performance by more than a dozen orders of magnitude already and we are now optimizing for a very specific application, it is almost a given that we will get at least one more order of magnitude performance improvement in the near term.

There are also new approaches like crossbar arrays of memristors that, if we can make them work, promises at least two more orders of magnitude performance increases. Quite possibly more.

Claude can read a whole book and answer a question about it in 20 seconds. Not quite at GPT-4 level but no reason to believe that isn't possible in the near future.

Computing performance and efficiency have consistently increased by orders of magnitude as we leverage previous generations of systems to make improvements and when necessary invent new paradigms.

[cubefox]

We are talking about AI here. LLMs are obviously just an intermediate technology. For example, the next "big" model, Google's Gemini, will be multimodal, it will be able to handle other data types besides text. The next step is probably robotics.

[cyber_kinetist]

I’m a bit more skeptical about robotics though, the human body is a complex marvel of nature and no software will replace the fact that it’s hard to build hardware with the capability of a living musculoskeletal system.

[cubefox]

If a Boston Dynamics robot had human level intelligence, it could already do a lot. Their limbs are probably not capable of the agility of humans, but humans also don't have the agility of many animals, which hasn't stopped us.

[olddustytrail]

Sure, it might, but considering recent improvements and zero evidence of those improvements slowing, it's a rather bizarre article of faith.