[bryanrasmussen]

>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!

[p-e-w]

The prediction that a new technology that is being heavily researched plateaus after just 5 years of development is certainly a daring one. I can’t think of an example from history where that happened.

[gitremote]

Neural network research and development existed since the 1980s at least, so at least 40 years. One of the bottlenecks before was not enough compute.

[OccamsMirror]

Perhaps the fact that you think this field is only 5 years old means you're probably not enough of an authority to comment confidently on it?

[p-e-w]

Claiming that AI in anything resembling its current form is older than 5 years is like claiming the history of the combustion engine started when an ape picked up a burning stick.

[OccamsMirror]

Your analogy fails because picking up a burning stick isn’t a combustion engine, whereas decades of neural-net and sequence-model work directly enabled modern LLMs. LLMs aren’t “five years old”; the scaling-transformer regime is. The components are old, the emergent-capability configuration is new.

Treating the age of the lineage as evidence of future growth is equivocation across paradigms. Technologies plateau when their governing paradigm saturates, not when the calendar says they should continue. Supersonic flight stalled immediately, fusion has stalled for seventy years, and neither cared about “time invested.”

Early exponential curves routinely flatten: solar cells, battery density, CPU clocks, hard-disk areal density. The only question that matters is whether this paradigm shows signs of saturation, not how long it has existed.

[bryanrasmussen]

I think this is the first time I have ever posted one of these but thank you for making the argument so well.

[pixl97]

Tiger: humans will never beat tigers because tigers are purpose built killing machines and they are just generalist --40,000BC

[OccamsMirror]

You don't think humans hunted tigers in 40,000BC?

[pxc]

I don't think it would make much sense to hunt large predators prior to the invention of agriculture, even though early humans were probably plenty smart enough to build traps capable of holding animals like tigers. But after that (less than 40k years ago, more than 10k years ago), I'd bet it was a common-ish thing for humans to try to hunt predators that preyed upon their livestock.

Tigers are terrifying, though. I think it takes extreme or perverse circumstances to make hunting a tiger make any sense at all. And even then, traps and poisons make more sense than stalking a tiger to kill it!