Progress does not seem like a fast exponential trend, faster than Moore’s law and laying the groundwork for an intelligence explosion. Progress seems actually pretty slow and incremental, with a moderate improvement from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4, and another moderate improvement from GPT-4 to o3-mini. The decline in the costs of running the models or the increase in the compute used to be train models is probably happening faster than Moore’s law, but not the actual intelligence of the models.
To remove the confusing part about Moore’s law, I could re-word it like this:
Progress toward AGI does not seem very fast, not fast enough to lay the groundwork for an intelligence explosion within anything like 5 years. Progress seems actually pretty slow and incremental, with a moderate improvement from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4, and another moderate improvement from GPT-4 to o3-mini. The decline in the costs of running the models or the increase in the compute used to be train models is probably very large, but the actual intelligence of the models seems to be increasing only a bit with each new major version.
I think this conveys my meaning better than what I wrote originally, and it avoids getting into the Moore’s law topic.
The Moore’s law topic is a bit of an unnecessary rabbit hole. A lot of things increase faster than Moore’s law during a short window of time, but few increase at a CAGR of 41% (or whatever Moore’s law’s CAGR is) for decades. There’s all kinds of ways to mis-apply the analogy of Moore’s law.
People have made jokes about this kind of thing before, like The Economist sarcastically forecasting in 2006 based on then-recent trends that a 14-blade razor would be released by 2010.
I also think of David Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity, in which he rails against the practice of uncritically extrapolating past trends forward, and his TED Talk where he does a bit of the same.
So, what I originally wrote is:
To remove the confusing part about Moore’s law, I could re-word it like this:
I think this conveys my meaning better than what I wrote originally, and it avoids getting into the Moore’s law topic.
The Moore’s law topic is a bit of an unnecessary rabbit hole. A lot of things increase faster than Moore’s law during a short window of time, but few increase at a CAGR of 41% (or whatever Moore’s law’s CAGR is) for decades. There’s all kinds of ways to mis-apply the analogy of Moore’s law.
People have made jokes about this kind of thing before, like The Economist sarcastically forecasting in 2006 based on then-recent trends that a 14-blade razor would be released by 2010.
I also think of David Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity, in which he rails against the practice of uncritically extrapolating past trends forward, and his TED Talk where he does a bit of the same.