| > [There is plenty of data to support the claim that AI continues to improve, even exponentially.](https://epoch.ai/trends) This doesn't look at all exponential to me: https://epoch.ai/benchmarks?view=graph&tab=eci. OpenAI models went from 137 ECI to 159 ECI over about a year and a half, and the trends are similar for Anthropic and Google. These things have never been exponential. > The models optimise for solving the benchmark and we create new benchmarks to assess broader intelligence. As models converge on 100%, progress obviously slows. We are nowhere near 100% on important benchmarks like hallucinations: https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience?model-... ...also, progress isn't improving with model releases. --- We're running out of money. While we don't know how much it cost to train things like Claude, most (all?) industry reports indicate that a significant gain in function (2x) would require an exponential amount of resources (20x). No one's yet been able to convince investors that's worth it. Also, we're running out of data: https://epoch.ai/publications/will-we-run-out-of-data-limits.... Also, we're running out of of low hanging fruit: "We find that the level of compute needed to achieve a given level of performance has halved roughly every 8 months, with a 95% confidence interval of 5 to 14 months. This represents extremely rapid progress, outpacing algorithmic progress in many other fields of computing and the 2-year doubling time of Moore’s Law that characterizes improvements in computing hardware (see Figure 2)." (https://epoch.ai/publications/algorithmic-progress-in-langua...). Maybe you think we'll continue along this breakneck pace, but again no investor thinks that, which is why prices are going up (investment is drying up). Also we're running out of compute. Data center projects are stalling. Some of this is spiking energy prices, some of this is politics, much of this is grid constraints and supply chain problems: https://tech-insider.org/us-ai-data-center-delays-cancellati.... --- Finally, and perhaps worst of all, despite unprecedented investment data on the productivity gains is mixed. This is the biggest difference from other technological leaps like electricity, the industrial revolution, literally fire, etc. Those things were immediately, undeniably more productive. AI is not like that. You're not seeing an AI Microsoft, an AI Salesforce, an AI Oracle, an AI SAP, etc. You can argue that their advantages are structural, but there are no successful AI-powered alternative products (no AI Office, no AI ERP, no AI database, etc). |