I really don’t think we know enough about what „intelligence“ is or how LLMs actually work to confidently say that this is the end of the road for LLM.

You aren't contradicting the person.

They definitely are - the OP claimed that we are reaching "the end of the road for LLMs", based on absolutely no data and some handwaving on pareto distribution.

We absolutely don't know enough about LLMs and intelligence to make such a bold (and ridiculous) claim. If anything, all evidence point to the contrary, with new scientific breakthrough achieved across a variety of fields via LLMs.

I've been really struggling to understand how the HN community can so boldly claim that LLMs are going to stop improving or not really smart. I just read it as the "denial" stage of the stages of grief that a good portion of this community is in right now (which is understandable).

I'm sorry, we know exactly how LLMs work, this myth that we "dont know how they work" was perpetuated by executives that dont know how they work.

We know exactly how attention layers work and how they produce the next word as well as draw them from larger feature spaces.

Right, but we have no clue why, and how the emergent behavior they show works.

If we would know that, there would be no need for interpretability research.

If you know all this, can you explain how these models produce advanced mathematical proofs? (as recently done by OpenAI, for example)

I tried to generate the next word to the best of my ability, starting with a mathematical problem, but I did not create a valid proof. How do these LLMs work when they create math proofs to problems not yet solved?

Yes, it turns out that matrix math over a feature space of math works pretty well because unlike poetry or real world work, maths are internally coherent and entirely theoretical.

This not understanding "understanding".

> maths are internally coherent and entirely theoretical

Nope. This kind of wish-washy thinking is not what we mean by understanding.

https://iep.utm.edu/math-inc/

stop with reductionist absurdum.

Funny how you said "it turns out" when the whole point is that we don't understand LLMs - we just empirically see what they are good at.

Claiming that you understand LLMs is similar to saying that you understand how our biology work because you understand evolution. No - you understand the mechanism behind evolution, but not the complexity it produces.

stop it. This is such reductionist bullshit. By your infinite reductionism definition no one knows how anything works

You can see how an LLM works here https://bbycroft.net/llm they are not magic.

How did you generate the next word? Did you first read pretty much every written work ever published, including blog posts, forum posts, books, etc? Learn how to imagine everything as a point in a gigantic abstract space where similar meanings cluster together? How did you manage training with gradient descent? And then did you do a lifetime of matrix multiplication for each token you predicted?

You don’t have the computational ability to process as many calculations as a datacenter. You can hardly transpose a 5×5 matrix in your mind, so you won’t be able to do what datacenters do.

This is like saying we don‘t know how a car works because a car can beat the best human athletes in 100 meter dash.

It turns out being orders of magnitude faster at searching with the aid of a strong verifier is a great way to generate proofs

I agree these are central components, but to avoid oversimplification and the mistaken belief that modern LLMs do a lot of search during inference: If it was so simple, the traditional computer algebra systems would have reached similar breakthroughs when deployed at large supercomputer centers. This didnt happen because the search space is huge. You definitely also need a fancy learning algorithm. Although these ingredients would suffice (depending on what the learning algorithm is), you probably also want to learn in the absense of a strong verifier at every step, to allow building a fuzzy/erratic sense of the search space that can lead to planning/intuition and allow distant jumps in a targetted direction.

The search space is far too large for a mere order of magnitude to make any difference at all.

> We know exactly how attention layers work and how they produce the next word as well as draw them from larger feature spaces.

This is not what's meant by the statements that we don't know how LLMs work. Explain why LLMs are so good at programming, finding bugs, and developing mathematical proofs. Like, way better than all prior tools specifically designed to be bug finding tools, despite being merely "language models".

We know plenty about human cognition, and we know everything about how LLMs work. True we don’t know anything about intelligence but that is because “intelligence” is it self a fraught and vague term, and we haven’t (and perhaps never will) settled on what it means exactly.

I’m certainly no expert in the field but to my knowledge a lot of the LLM science is empirical. I’m not aware of a theory that lets us predict what architecture and what number of parameters is needed to solve a particular set of problems.

I wish we knew everything about how LLMs work! We only know very basic elements related to their construction and traning dynamics, and pretty much every major question we would like to address still has unknown or vague heuristic answers. This is expected for such a young field of study. In physics, we know the Schrodinger equation, but we dont know everything about how the world works or how to create new materials even though we know that these materials are composed by atoms and we can simulate small collections of them. In cell biology, we know the sequences that make up the DNA of a cell and we approach the time we can build minimal synthetic cells with pieces we understand, but we only scratch the surface of our level of understanding of how the cells actually work and new discoveries are added every day. In biology at large we still keep finding new types of tubes inside human brains—not sure what you mean by plenty, but we certainly have an extremely limited understanding of human cognition compared to what we might have in 50 years from now. It is not just anout LLMs and intelligence—I would like us to be able to answer practical questions about how LLMs work in order to improve general or specialized LLMs even faster than today. We “know” about scaling in an empirical sense, and it certainly has a long way to go, but it does not feel close to a complete understanding.

Both you and your sibling are approaching LLMs like it is some sort of science. If you do that there is no wonder you have a lot of unanswered questions. LLMs are not a science, they are applied statistics. Making predictions to evaluate hypothesis and constructing theories around the hyperparameters of LLMs is no different then making predictions to evaluate hypothesis and constructing theories around the configurations of Nuclear Power Plants, the latter of course being applied physics.

My point is exactly that we cannot even begin to start the process that will lead to “know everything” there is to know unless we make it a science first. Ad hoc statistical models are different than understanding or complete knowledge of a subject.

> we know everything about how LLMs work

No we don't. That we understand the low level mechanics of a system doesn't mean we understand how any high level phenomena emerge from those low level mechanics.

This is as true for quantum mechanics as it is for LLMs.

But we do, and by your logic we can pick any applied statistics, say a Bayesian inference model, and claim we don‘t understand its emergent properties. Heck, we can take any sort of applied mathematics or science, say linguistics, and claim we don‘t understand the emergent properties of language (legal analysis) even though we understand its syntax and phonology.

Yes. That's why law is a different discipline from linguistics requiring its own rules of analysis, pedagogy, etc.

>This seems to be the end of the road for LLM's

This is an amazingly ignorant thing to say given the current pace of progress.

Can you quantify this rate of progress? Because someone always comes around and says there's been exponential progress in the past <short timeline> every time someone complains that models just aren't very good. Both can't be true

Both can be true, because the experience depends on the skill of the user. The article the other day here on HN that LLMs reward skill is my exact experience. If you are are good at what you are trying to use it for they can be a skill amplifier, and they are definitely getting much better rapidly for the work I do with them. At the same time people are complaining that they are getting dumber. Saying that both can't be true ignores the skill requirement to use them and the completely different perspectives of people using them.

Even if both aren't true, your evidence was people saying two opposing things. The truth (if there is a single objective truth on a giving thing) has little bearing on whether or not different people agree on it.

"Skill" with an LLM is nonsense. It's non-deterministic, so any equal efforts are not to be given equal outcome.

You could say the same when applied to games with high RNG and chance, such as Slay the Spire 2, and yet those with real skill do perform far better than those without. Those with skill can clear the highest difficulties more often than those with lower skill.

Something being "non-deterministic" is orthogonal to whether or not skill plays a role.

not equal, but probabisticly better. Best example: give the agent a tight spec and it will perform better compared with a spec that leaves room for interpretation. This is true for all models, more or less. (purely anecdotal of course)

"Skill" at poker is nonsense. It's non-deterministic, so any equal efforts are not to be given equal outcome.

Baseball is also non-deterministic, and yet some players are apparently worth a lot more than others.

Soccer is nondeterministic. Are you as good as Messi?

> At the same time people are complaining that they are getting dumber.

I think this is due to rapidly rising expectations.

When LLMs first show they can do some new thing, we're excited at first. Then, we quickly start taking it for granted, and get upset whenever the LLM fails.

Just three years ago, LLMs could barely hold a conversation. Now, they're writing entire code bases and solving famous mathematical conjectures, but we still focus on whatever they can't do.

In research we are still seeing massive jumps. Subjects that LLMs were completely useless for half a year ago are now definitely in scope.

And there are benchmarks that cleanly separate the SOTA models:

https://epoch.ai/MirrorCode

Saturation of benchmarks is a property of benchmarks just as much as of the models.

one of these claimed is backed by data, one is backed by anecdotes, you can decide which you trust more

So far, neither is backed by data.

I don’t think that’s fair to say, there are two principle sources of data that paint a fairly consistent picture

- one is scaling laws, where we found years ago that pretraining validation loss scales in an almost miraculously predictable way with data volume and compute. There are apparently theoretical bases for this that I don’t quite understand but this property alone is holding at every scale we’ve ever tested. There is not just “one” scaling law but the point is there are scaling laws and they continue to faithfully predict the performance gains we see

- one is benchmarks, which I always point to epoch capability index as a good summary of them in aggregate which makes it nice to plot on one curve the capability improvement over time

To me either one without the other is substantially weaker, the fact that theory and empirical measurements give you a very good scaling law on a more unintuitive quantity (pretraining validation loss) that’s only indirectly related to the downstream performance you care about, benchmarks (in aggregate) are more direct measures of downstream performance but are harder to nail down clean and well motivated “laws” from theory (as far as I can tell). Nevertheless we do in fact see a clear trend that is not slowing.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t a whole host of benchmark problems that don’t impact the numbers involved here (leakage from training data, fundamental flaws in the design, benchmaxxing) but they don’t change the larger story. These problems don’t plausibly explain the clean trends we see.

There is high rate of progress in specific domains, not high rate of progress in generalness. The models haven't gotten generally smarter, for things they didn't focus on the models are just as bad as a year ago.

I don't think that's correct. Increasing parameter count increases capabilities in all domains per the scaling laws. Models are larger than they were years ago, so capabilities in all domains must necessarily be better. This doesn't even account for better training data, which has also much improved.

unless you assume endless progress, fast pace of progress will get you quicker to the plateau.

And sales of disco records were up 400% for the year ending 1976. If these trends continue...

Shallow dismissals like this one are against HN guidelines.

Shallow dismissals like this one are against HN guidelines because they make for very poor discourse.

We all learned more from the prior comment than we did from this one.

What is the current pace of progress?

I'm very bullish on AI, but I still feel that we pretty much plateaued at Opus 4.6 and everything since then has been in the domain of "extremely verifiable and loopable tasks" (math), benchmarkmaxxing, and harness improvements. Which are fine to good things, but I think its very reasonable at this point to start asking questions about when we'll see progress in more general domains. The readability of AI output, for example, has nosedived as they've gotten more intelligent, which makes the frontier models difficult to use even for things like writing emails.

In that sense, the frontier models are going to quickly blaze past any semblance of usefulness to humans, while every once in a while we get a news drop like "GPT-7 solved some crazy math problem" or "it invented some new awesome drug"; meanwhile what most people will use will be smaller, more human-specialized models, maybe distilled from those frontier models, that take much longer to iterate on because they rely on large amounts of human feedback in the domain they're specialized for. In other words, useful progress will probably slow down and become more linear starting in Q4, bounded by the rate at which the humans paying for it say "yes this is a good react website".

(By the way: I earnestly do categorize "inventing a new drug" as non-useful AI progress, counter-intuitively. The drug industry has more ideas for drugs than they know what to do with; "useful progress" is, after the idea is made, validating that it works in humans and doesn't kill the human, and productionizing it. AI will help with this and does, but I have substantial doubt that we'll ever see the drug pipeline speed up to, like, a year from idea to prescription. That would be useful progress, which unfortunately many AI pilled hypermaxers conveniently forget. The invention of a promising new drug, or the solution to an arcane set theory problem, are cherries that, through the diligent labor of humans and AI, may become useful, but progress is rarely made by the lone intellect having an a-ha moment.)

You must have different use cases than me.

I find even Deepseek Flash v4 0731 even outperforms Opus for me (at 10x the speed two).

Using Sol, Fable, Kimi 3 and other recent models has been unbelievable for me. I didn’t think we’d get to this level for years.

I’m using them for Ruby, TypeScript and Python. In large existing codebases but also lots of tiny tools.

Coding is an extremely verifiable and loopable task, like math (in fact, all of the math that these models has done has been through the lens of Lean, which is itself just coding). I am talking about their capabilities in tasks that are more general, the execution of which represent the vast majority of economic value generation in the world.

I agree on Opus. I’ve had more luck with other models. In particular, Opus’s writing style makes one want to… blow their brains out. While it’s not hallucinating too much, and can troubleshoot certain issues extremely well, the comments it leaves are silky smooth and chock full of inscrutable phrases. And it’s a lot slower than it used to be.

Point being: it’s overall a worse experience even if the model is technically better at a lot of things.

At some point it started using a lot of jargon instead of just laying it down clearly. Reads a little bit like LinkedInspeak.

"become more linear starting in Q4"

We are not even close to what AI slowdown looks like.

The whole business side of things are now building Agentic Layer for Business applications. All of this Agentic Layer needs to be build and its happening right now and still needs a little bit of time.

Anthropic and co have the biggest and centralized reinforcement loop on the planet: Millions of people telling them what is good and what not due to thumbs up/down.

And for sure when the businesses are building the agentic layer they might give direct feedback to them.

While in parallel LLMs get better, more generic and a LOT cheaper too.

Cheaper? For whom? As a solo practitioner, I can no longer afford the workloads I was getting for $20/mo in January. Now the same plan being utilized at the same level for the same work hits its limits within a few hours, and runs out of tokens in less than two days.

Yes this is unfortunate and not what I meant.

I mean the token prices in general as certain services were never really using a subscription.

I do run a claude subscripton right now though and since there capacity change, i hit the limit rarely in comparision to the past, but I don't think this will stay as it is.

Your issue, I believe, is that you seem to believe capabilities are measured along one axis. This is natural to believe because it is representative of how the models have evolved up to this point, and thus it is also what many AGI-pilled people believe.

Critically, you did not quote the most important part of my sentence: "useful progress will probably slow down and become more linear starting in Q4"; your omission of those words is why I believe you don't understand what I'm saying; you didn't find it important to make your point, so you omitted it, when actually it is critical to the entire assertion. You can read my third paragraph, if you wish, to understand why it is important, instead of just stopping at the first word you disagree with and hitting the "Submit Comment" button.

No clue why you have to respond like this.

Feel free to be a dick to someone else.

I am wondering whether the reason he needed to say it was because he was arguing with those who did out their trust in the writings of the ancients.

Idk about end of the road, I’m sure they can squeeze out some more performance by curating even more data and doing even more RL.

But I would bet that pretty much all of the improvement we’ve seen over the last year with coding has come from RL, not from the models becoming particularly stronger. And this makes sense, if models grow sublinearly with compute. And it seems like they do.

It seems pretty obvious from the steep 'intelligence' drop-off on out-of-distribution tasks that the performance improvement is from throwing untold tens of billions at RL. There are legions of highly skilled people employed solely to feed the RL loop. Evidently effective, but there's an unmistakable feeling this won't ultimately be the way forward.

Well, why not? Won’t it get “good enough” at every task eventually?

Why would that be the default assumption?

Because they’ve gotten good enough at lots of other things, and the RL keeps improving them, so enough RL should make them good enough at the focus areas.

I've gotten pretty strong in the gym, my bench has improved to two plates. I see no reason why it won't continue to improve until I can bench my house.

I think it’s a bit closer than that. You can bench two plates, and “good enough” is two plates on the bench and a three plate squat. LLMs haven’t started leg day.

It's also important not to put too much faith into ancient sayings and aphorisms.

As a civilization, we are currently brushing up against the physics of efficiency. In many areas we have achieved close to what is theoretically possible, based on physics.

Such was not the case for the majority of human existence.

The body of research a.k.a. "writings of the ancients" is now insurmountably higher than it would have been during the time of ibn al-Haytham, when any kind of writing at all was scarce and literacy was low.

>This seems to be the end of the road for LLM's. There's only so much accuracy on a highly non-linear space you can get from a regression.

It's just inadequate benchmarks. Anyone who has used Fable for anything particularly difficult will have seen that it's miles ahead of Opus 5.0, yet the majority of benchmarks are completely unable to capture this.

> Anyone who has used Fable for anything particularly difficult will have seen that it's miles ahead of Opus 5.0, yet the majority of benchmarks are completely unable to capture this.

I have seen people claim the exact opposite. If there was so much progress, then you wouldn't have endless disagreements with people championing their own favourite model as the strongest.

Yes, and good senior software engineer is ahead of fable, but benchmarks can't capture that either.

We already know from testing humans that test scores don't correlate that well with how effective a person is at work. Same applies here, we just aren't that great at making good tests.

If most models were getting 100% on the test it would be an inadequate benchmarks.

What were seeing is all models failing to ace these tests.

"Benchmark Saturation" is term that promotes lowering the bar.

The two times I tried to use fable I had it attempt something I had already had Opus 4.6 do with no issues. It blasted through 10% of my weekly allowance on a 100$ a month sub and produced something broken and nonsensical.

The seeker of truth must also hold his breath.

Do you draw that conclusion from the fact that AI surprisingly quickly reaches the end of each ruler we try to measure it with?

Its not really that surprising when models are trained on the exams

I work in AI evaluation, lots of problems and leakage is an issue as is ecological validity, but they definitely do not explain the progress we see.

I think Epoch has the best analysis I’ve seen on evaluation trends; they use IRT to basically model a variety of benchmark difficulties, and then model a capability parameter for each model. This is as robust a sort of “meta-study” of evaluations as I’ve seen and the trend in capabilities show no sign of slowing down.

So I think people’s feelings clash with reality, and that’s because releases are more frequent and the jumps between releases are smaller, but the growth in capabilities _over time_ has not changed for the better or worse over a very very long period of time.

Benchmarks saturate around 80-90%?

This is not "Acing" a test, this is hitting a wall.

Even on very small tests a fraction of questions might have wrong answers in the key.

If models can't get more than 90% of the benchmark right I think it's a strong indication that they were not trained on the answers and that benchmark itself is messy enough that <10% desired answers might be wrong or misleading.

Yea this may explain part of it or all of it, it’s likely a case by case kind of thing.

Also to respond to the parent comment: benchmarks have a variety of difficulty levels. Humanity’s Last Exam, though now hitting the beginning of a saturation phase with Fable, was long unsaturated while other benchmarks saturated awhile ago. So that’s what I meant by Epoch capability index: using IRT models this effect so that you gather robust signals from variety of benchmark difficulties and can track progress over time as model capabilities have evolved (and so benchmarks have had to evolve to keep up).

But yes like I was saying: all benchmarks are problematic, some are useful. Benchmark quality problems abound, so 90% being the true ceiling is not surprising. There may be other factors at play here too, I haven’t studied this problem that deeply to have a good thorough answer to this. But keep in mind there are probably 50,000 benchmarks in the literature and that is not a joke number. A crapload of noise in that signal but it’s not all noise.

Saturation is mostly just selection effects in play. Throw out the "90% easiest" of tasks, and what remains is a jagged ladder of high difficulty outliers.

Hard to climb, and hard to measure the climb - because you have less effective data points and the datapoints themselves are less linear, while you're still being subject to the measurement noise.

Not having the mislabeled tasks would reduce the saturation, but it wouldn't drive it to zero. Even without the "infinite difficulty tasks", bell curve would do its thing.

You almost can't give a correct answer to a task with expected wrong answer unless you know it expects wrong answer. ... maybe on a yes/no question by chance. But as you become more knowledgeable, the probability that you give wrong but expected answer reduces.

If a benchmark saturates to 100% it's very likely that answers leaked into the training data.

In college I had a funny exam. It was on C++. One question I had to answer incorrectly because there was a mistake in the question. So I gave two answers for it, one that answered the question as it was and the other that answered the question as I inferred it was intended to be. It was appreciated. I got a honorary mark above the top possible (I gave correct answers to all other questions). I wouldn't be surprised if across so many, so huge benchmarks, there were tasks with wrong questions or answers in the key, that some LLM answered in and expected manner in the same fashion.

Can't call it AI like that without discrediting yourself. You mean LLMs?

Jumping in here, frankly I hate the trend of calling every type of automation intelligence.

Most "AI" is really an optimization algorithm in software tools, same as its always been. This really isnt anything new, aside from adding a chatbot / MCP interface to the same tools.

When a Big Killing Robot comes to murder you be sure to always call it BKR and don't discredit yourself by calling it AI.

That's a bit hyperbolic when we're all just posting on HN

Talk about moving the goalposts. Pray tell, exactly what must an LLM do before you're willing to consider it AI? Be specific, otherwise you're just woo-mongering.

Everyone here is talking about LLMs, why bother calling them something else

I feel like LLMs refers to a model that for a given message responds with its own message.

And I feel like AI agents (powered by some LLM) are qualitatively something else.

Weird moment for this take. We're seeing some of the fastest and most impressive progress ever right now.

Frontier labs have categorically different & better set ups for evaluation, they're fine. It's work but it's not a crisis.

I've heard that every week of every month for the past three years. And yet, ask an LLM about a seahorse emoji and see what happens.

The seahorse emoji thing appears to be fixed actually. (Sonnet 5)

And it held true every week of every month for the past three years. AI progress is screaming forward at a breakneck pace.

Assuming you are completely correct about the 80/20 rule, we have evidently not yet reached that 80%. Who can say when it will be achieved? The ceiling is glass, we have to touch it to know where it is.

Even without getting better trained models and only speed increase, the output would be dramatically better. An LLM or non llms that is a billion times faster than now would be so insanely strong in many areas.

I think LLMs will continue to improve in the capabilities which they are demonstrably good at, but there are many things which they are not good at which it is not cost effective or meaningful to improve, and in these areas we will not consider them “intelligent,” in the same way that we don’t consider computers “intelligent” but do find them very good at doing wrote calculations.

> but there are many things which they are not good at which it is not cost effective or meaningful to improve

Can you name a few such things so I can keep an eye on them in the coming years?

Not explicitly, no, but its pretty obvious if you work in the industry and aren't blinded by AGI hype

That's just vibes then. How is that supposed to be convincing?

Unless you are working for a competing firm or have a specific clause in your contract, you can literally just sign up for AI projects as a contractor and start contributing. You will see and understand everything after a few months. Nobody is hiding this knowledge really.

I use LLMs regularly for real work. I understand the current limitations, but you're talking about existing limitations that will never be overcome, because they cannot be overcome. I'm just asking for a couple of specific examples, and your evasions are increasingly suspicious.

If you are using them and you are aware of their limitations it’s very different from specifically testing them for training purposes. You’ll get a much clearer picture that way.

The continued vagueness suggests this isn't going anywhere, so I'll just conclude by saying that you've given nobody any real reason to believe this.

The paper suggests the opposite of your first statement. The benchmarks become useless because the successive models keep saturating them.