[Nevermark]

I think the writing is on the wall.

There don't seem to be any arguments beyond the trivial observation that things could slow down. But they haven't slowed down.

New models keep surpassing us (in some cases the whole human race) dramatically in new areas of greater generality, while their "weaknesses" also improve dramatically.

It's hard to imagine where a fully multi-modal model, with long context, and a sense of information confidence, and ability to manage its own notes/whiteboard information, will not exceed us. On top of improving in all the areas it already outdoes us.

People are working on each of those improvements right now. (By fully multi-modal I mean text, audio, image, video, simulated and real physics, touch, motor control, team communication, software/internet access, and whatever other senses or decision forms are helpful.)

I don't see a general AI vastly smarter than any one of us, or all of us together, taking longer than 2030-2033 time frame.

[danaris]

> But they haven't slowed down.

But...they have.

How many stories have there been about how GPT-3 and GPT-4 have gotten worse over the period they've been out?

And it's not like we got GPT-3, and then GPT-4, and then, within the same time frame, GPT-5 with a similar increase in quality.

Sure, people are working on more improvements, but they're not here yet, and while that doesn't mean they will never come, it does mean that, compared to what appeared to be a rapid rush of "AI" progress, things have slowed down.

"Progress is still being made" and "progress has slowed down compared to the speed that generated all the hype" are not incompatible statements.

[Nevermark]

> But...they have. How many stories have there been about how GPT-3 and GPT-4 have gotten worse over the period they've been out?

They are experimenting with trade offs. In this case, things like appropriateness, less overconfidence, etc.

That isn’t indicative of any slowdown.

> Sure, people are working on more improvements, but they're not here yet, and while that doesn't mean they will never come, it does mean that, compared to what appeared to be a rapid rush of "AI" progress, things have slowed down.

I don’t follow.

People and teams keep publishing and releasing new techniques but big projects don’t release major updates as quickly.

How are your arguments more relevant to GPT4 than they would have been for GPT3? Earlier models?

[danaris]

You really seem to have missed the main point of my post.

Yes, people are still working on stuff. I never said they weren't. I never said they were working any less hard than they had been.

But progress has slowed down from the leaps that it took over the past couple of years to get us to GPT-3 and GPT-4. Whatever "new models" are doing in September 2023, they are absolutely not making the same clear advances that we saw previously. They are incremental improvements. Which is good! It's important! It's progress! But it's unquestionably slower than the breakthrough that led to this generation of LLMs.

Now, it may be that that wasn't what you were thinking of when you said things haven't slowed down, but that was absolutely not clear from your post. And there have been enough people trumpeting loudly that the pace of progress would continue exactly as fast as it was before—breakthrough after breakthrough, leading rapidly to GPT-5 and beyond, and causing millions of white-collar jobs to be automated—that to simply say, without qualification, "things haven't slowed down" is, at best, ignorant of the way it will be taken by many.

[Nevermark]

> But progress has slowed down from the leaps that it took over the past couple of years to get us to GPT-3 and GPT-4.

[emphasis mine]

GPT-4 was only released March 14, 2023 [0], so until March 14, 2025 you don’t have any data to support your claim.

Elsewhere models continue to update quickly. While we wait for GPT-5, much smaller models keep getting better.

There have been few times in history where for over a decade such a widely impactful tech has kept improving in stunning steps.

There is no evidence of any slow down.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-4