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Comment by aurareturn

4 hours ago

More importantly, this is the early steps of a model self improving itself.

Do we still think we'll have soft take off?

> Do we still think we'll have soft take off?

There's still no evidence we'll have any take off. At least in the "Foom!" sense of LLMs independently improving themselves iteratively to substantial new levels being reliably sustained over many generations.

To be clear, I think LLMs are valuable and will continue to significantly improve. But self-sustaining runaway positive feedback loops delivering exponential improvements resulting in leaps of tangible, real-world utility is a substantially different hypothesis. All the impressive and rapid achievements in LLMs to date can still be true while major elements required for Foom-ish exponential take-off are still missing.

  • Yes, but also you'll never have any early evidence of the Foom until the Foom itself happens.

    • If only General Relativity had such an ironclad defense of being as unfalsifiable as Foom Hypothesis is. We could’ve avoided all of the quantum physics nonsense.

Exponential growth may look like a very slow increase at first, but it's still exponential growth.

  • Sigmoids may look like exponential growth at first, until they saturate. Early growth alone cannot distinguish between them.

  • If it's exponential growth. It may just as well be some slow growth and continue to be so.

I'm only saying no to keep optimistic tbh

It feels crazy to just say we might see a fundamental shift in 5 years.

But the current addition to compute and research etc. def goes in this direction I think.

I think the limiting factor is capital, not code. And I doubt GPTX is anymore competent at raising funds than the other, fleshy, snake oilers...

making the specifications is still hard, and checking how well results match against specifications is still hard.

i dont think the model will figure that out on its own, because the human in the loop is the verification method for saying if its doing better or not, and more importantly, defining better

This has already been going on for years. It's just that they were using GPT 4.5 to work on GPT 5. All this announcement mean is that they're confident enough in early GPT 5.3 model output to further refine GPT 5.3 based on initial 5.3. But yes, takeoff will still happen because of this recursive self improvement works, it's just that we're already past the inception point.