Comment by idlewords
6 days ago
An exponential curve looks locally the same at all points in time. For a very long period of time, computers were always vastly better than they were a year ago, and that wasn't because the computer you'd bought the year before was junk.
Consider that what you're reacting to is a symptom of genuine, rapid progress.
This is true for any curve...
If your curve is continuous, it is locally linear.
There's no use in talking about the curve being locally similar without the context of your window. Without the window you can't differentiate an exponential from a sigmoid from a linear function.
Let's be careful with naive approximations. We don't know which direction things are going and we definitely shouldn't assume "best case scenario"
A curve isn't necessarily locally linear if it's continuous. Take f(x) = |x|, for example.
There may have been a discontinuity at the beginning of time... but there was nobody there to observe it. More seriously, the parent is saying that it always looks continuous linear when you're observing the last short period of time, whereas the OP (and many others) are constantly implying that there are recent discontinuities.
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|x| is piece wise continuous, not absolutely continuous
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I don't think anyone's contesting that LLMs are better now than they were previously.
> It creates a never ending treadmill of boy-who-cried-LLM.
The crying wolf reference only makes sense as a soft claim that LLM’s better or not, are not getting better in important ways.
Not a view I hold.
The implicit claim is just that they're still not good enough (for whatever the use cases the claimant had in mind)
A flatline also looks locally the same at all points in time.
Nor does local flatness imply direction, the curve could be descending for all that "looks locally flat" matters. It also isn't on the skeptics to disprove that "AI" is a transformative, exponentially growing miracle, it's on the people selling it.