Its an apt comparison. The criticisms in the cnn article are already out date in many instances.
Humans are. We have tools to measure exponential growth empirically. It was done for COVID (i.e. epidemiologists do that usually) and is done for economy and other aspects of our life. If there's to be exponential growth, we should be able to put it in numbers. "True me bro" is not a good measure.
Edit: typo
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."
What does this mean? What do you apply to populace at large? Do you mean a populace doesn’t model the exponential change right?
We can have a constructive discussion instead. My problem was not actually parsing what you said. I’m questioning the assumption if populace collectively modeling exponential change is really meaningful. You can, for example, describe how does it look like when populace can model change exponentially. Is there any relevant literature on this subject that I can look into? Does this phenomenon have a name?
Which ones, specifically? I’m genuinely curious. The ones about “[an] unfalsifiable disease-free utopia”? The one from a labor economist basically equating Amodei’s high-unemployment/strong economy claims to pure fantasy? The fact that nothing Amodei said was cited or is substantiated in any meaningful way? Maybe the one where she points out that Amodei is fundamentally a sales guy, and that Anthropic is making the rounds saying scary stuff just after they released a new model - a techbro marketing push?
I like anthropic. They make a great product. Shame about their CEO - just another techbro pumping his scheme.
In my experience, for practical usage LLMs aren't even improving linearly at this point as I personally see Claude 3.7 and 4.0 as regressions from 3.5. They might score better on artificial benchmarks but I find them less likely to produce useful work.
2 years ago it was cool but unreliable.
Today I just did an entire “photo shoot” in Midjourney.
Yeah. Imagine if COVID had actually killed 10% of the world population. Killing millions sucks, but mosquitos regularly do that too, and so does tuberculosis, and we don't shut down everything. Could've been close to a billion. Or more. Could've been so much worse.
We are still dealing with the aftereffects, which led to the elimination of any working class representation in politics and suppression of real protests like Occupy Wall Street.
When this bubble bursts, the IT industry will collapse for some years like in 2000.
Besides the labor economist bit, it also makes the correct point that tech people regularly exaggerate and lie. A great example of this is biotech, a field I work in.
It's not CNN exlusive. Newsmedia that did not evolve towards clicks, riling up people, hatewatching and paid propaganda to the highest bidder went extinct a decade ago. This is what did evolve.
Not just this topic.
We will wake up in 5 yrs to find we replaced people for a dependence on a handful of companies that serve llms and make inference chips. Its beyond dystopian.
This isn't very informative. Indeed, engaging in this argument-by-analoguy betrays a lack of actual analysis, credible evidence and justification for a position. Arguing "by analogy" in this way, which picks and chooses an analogy, just restates your position -- it doesnt give anyone reasons to believe it.
Uh, not to be petty, but the growth was not exponential — neither in retrospect, nor given what was knowable at any point in time. About the most aggressive, correct thing you could’ve said at the time was “sigmoid growth”, but even that was basically wrong.
If that’s your example, it’s inadvertently an argument for the other side of the debate: people say lots of silly, unfounded things at Peak Hype that sound superficially correct and/or “smart”, but fail to survive a round of critical reasoning. I have no doubt we’ll look back on this period of time and find something similar.
Compare: "Whenever I think of skeptics dismissing completely novel and unprecedented outcomes occurring by mechanisms we can't clearly identify or prove (will) exist... I think of skeptics who dismissed an outcome that had literally hundreds of well-studied historical precedents using proven processes."
You're right that humans don't have a good intuition for non-linear growth, but that common thread doesn't heal over those other differences.
We can also look at the tools, which have improved relatively quickly but don't appear to be improving exponentially. GPT-4 and GPT-4o came out about a year after their predecessors. Is GPT-4o a bigger leap that GPT-4 was? Are GPT-4.5 or 4.1 a bigger leap than GPT-4 was? I honestly don't know, but the general reception suggests otherwise. The biggest leaps recently seem to be making models that perform roughly as well as past ones but are much smaller. That has advantages from the standpoint of democratization and energy consumption, but those kinds of improvements seems to favor a situation where AI augments workers rather than replaces them.
But that didn’t happen. All of the people like pg who drew these accelerating graphs were wrong.
In fact, I think just about every commenter on COVID was wrong about what would happen in the early months regardless of political angle.
Try revisiting their content from spring of 2020 (flatten the curve, wild death predictions, etc).
> I guess the key is to not even have a political angle
It’s a fantasy to imagine technical knowledge allows you to transcend the political and 2020 only reinforced that.
This moment feels exactly to me like that moment when we were going to “shut down for two weeks” and the majority of people seemed to think that would be the end of it.
It was clear where the trend was going, but exponentials always seem ridiculous on an intuitive level.
Putting that aside, how is this article called an analysis and not an opinion piece? The only analysis done here is asking a labor economist what conditions would allow this claim to hold, and giving an alternative, already circulated theory that AI companies CEOs are creating a false hype. The author even uses everyday language like "Yeaaahhh. So, this is kind of Anthropic’s whole ~thing.~ ".
Is this really the level of analysis CNN has to offer on this topic?
They could have sketched the growth in foundation model capabilities vs. finite resources such as data, compute and hardware. They could have wrote about the current VC market and the need for companies to show results and not promises. They could have even wrote about the giant biotech industry, and its struggle with incorporating novel exciting drug discovery tools with slow moving FDA approvals. None of this was done here.