Comment by ubixar
9 days ago
The most interesting finding isn't that hyperbolic growth appears in "emergent capabilities" papers - it's that actual capability metrics (MMLU, tokens/$) remain stubbornly linear.
The singularity isn't in the machines. It's in human attention.
This is Kuhnian paradigm shift at digital speed. The papers aren't documenting new capabilities - they're documenting a community's gestalt switch. Once enough people believe the curve has bent, funding, talent, and compute follow. The belief becomes self-fulfilling.
Linear capability growth is the reality. Hyperbolic attention growth is the story.
Though this is still compatible with exponential or at least superlinear capability growth if you model benchmarks as measuring a segment of the line, or a polynomial factor.