[steve_adams_86]

It strikes me as unprecedented that a technology which takes arbitrary language-based commands can actually surface and synthesize useful information, and it gets better at doing it (even according to extensive impartial benchmarking) at a fairly rapid pace. It’s technology we haven’t really seen before recently, improving quite quickly. It’s also being adopted very rapidly.

I’m not saying it’s certainly the fastest growth of all time, but I think there’s a decent case for it being a contender. If we see this growth proceeding at a similar rate for years, it seems like it would be a clear winner.

[krainboltgreene]

> unprecedented that a technology [...] It’s technology we haven’t really seen before recently

This is what frustrates me: First that it's not unprecedented, but second that you follow up with "haven't really" and "recently".

> fairly rapid pace ... decent case for it being a contender

Any evidence for this?

> extensive impartial benchmarking

Or this? The last two "benchmarks" I've seen that were heralded both contained an incredible gap between what was claimed and what was even proven (4 more required you to run the benchmarks even get the results!)

[steve_adams_86]

What is the precedent for this? The examples I’m aware of were fairly bad at what GPTs are now quite good at. To me that signals growth of the technology.

By “haven’t really seen until recently” I mean that similar technologies have existed, so we’ve seen something like it, but they haven’t actually functioned well enough to be comparable. So we can say there’s a precedent, but arguably there isn’t in terms of LLMs that can reliably do useful things for us. If I’m mistaken, I’m open to being corrected.

In terms of benchmarks, I agree that there are gaps but I also see a clear progression in capability as well.

Then in terms of evidence for there being a decent case here, I don’t need to provide it. I clearly indicated that’s my opinion, not a fact. I also said conditionally it would seem like a clear winner, and that condition is years of a similar growth trajectory. I don’t claim to know which technology has advanced the fastest, I only claim to believe LLMs seem like they have the potential to fit that description. The first ones I used were novel toys. A couple years later, I can use them reliably for a broad array of tasks and evidence suggests this will only improve in the near future.

[harryp_peng]

But humans aren't 'original' ourselves. How do you do 3*9? You memorized it. It's striking how humans could reason at all.

[oarsinsync]

> How do you do 3*9? You memorized it

I put my hands out, count to the third finger from the left, and put that finger down. I then count the fingers to the left (2) and count the fingers to the right (2 + hand aka 5) and conclude 27.

I have memorised the technique, but I definitely never memorised my nine times table. If you’d said ‘6’, then the answer would be different, as I’d actually have to sing a song to get to the answer.