Comment by im3w1l
5 days ago
Having studied control theory I think it makes perfect sense. When trying to make a system target a new level it's quite natural for there to be overshoot that needs to be reigned in. It's also natural for the correction to go too far and need to be corrected in turn. This is not indicative of stupidity it's completely normal.
It would only be laughable if they waited way too long to reverse course, but I don't think that's the case.
Suppose I'm driving at 20 kph, and I set my cruise control to 40 kph. My car then goes WOT, overshoots my target speed and hits 120 kph, at which point it slams on the brakes[0], dropping my speed to 15 kph. It repeats until it finally settles at my target speed. (Rhetorical question) would that be considered "completely normal"?
Over/undershoots and corrections are of course unavoidable and normal; the absurdity is at the magnitude and rate of change. Furthermore, this is giving it the benefit of the doubt, that measuring AI spend is a good indicator; that's arguably also in dispute. To stretch my car analogy a bit more: it would be like the cruse control system has to hit the target speed, but it only has data from the O2 sensors.
[0] I know that the "classic" cruise control system cannot apply the brakes, but hey no analogy's perfect.
It's not like they accidentally overshot, they were telling people to tokenmax, they didn't even know you could overshoot they thought it was exponential gains all the way. Subtle ideas like balance were not on their minds.
Intentionally overshooting can be a legitimate strategy.