Comment by stratos123

15 hours ago

> Why do you think the world to date hasn't been taken over by evil genius mathematicians?

A "mathematician" is a human who decided to spend their lives studying mathematics. Mathematicians also tend to be smart, but intelligence is innate, not acquired, so studying mathematics doesn't make you smarter. This makes it obvious why they don't rule the world - if you want to rule the world you'd want to focus on that (for example, doing business or finance), and becoming a mathematician is just a waste of time.

LLMs don't work like that. Like in humans, all of their capabilities correlate, and unlike a human, their overall capabilities grow over time. Looking at LLM mathematical ability over time* therefore gives you info about the progress of their general capabilities, and ability to take over the world would be determined by the latter.

* In fact it'd be better to look at a mix of different capabilities, but that's growing too at about the same rate, see https://epoch.ai/eci

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stratos123

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ForHackernews  13 hours ago

> unlike a human, their overall capabilities grow over time

This is incorrect. Unless there is some new developments I'm unaware of (entirely possible) LLMs "learn" during the training phase, but after that they are static. They do not improve further or retain information when used for inference.

You might be confused because AI companies keep releasing new models and tinkering with the harnesses, sometimes under the same name such that "Zern 6" (or whatever) doesn't always mean the same thing.

  • stratos123  10 hours ago

    Nah, I just phrased it a bit confusingly - I meant the capabilities of LLMs as a technology (equivalently, the capabilities of whatever the frontier model is at each time) grow over time, even though any particular model is static.