Thread

1. NichoPaolucci · 1789608442 · focus · HN ↗

   > OpenAI said it did not believe the industry “has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.”

   Baffling. To my knowledge, they didn't properly airgap their systems. Keeping the genie in the box seems like 101 to me, and to "miss" that seems awfully fishy. This, among all of the Anthropic news, is an odd convergence.

   Maybe they're being truthful and it really is the end times.

   Maybe they've hit a wall in improvements, but I don't know enough on the topic to speak to that.

   Which is more likely?

   Either way, trying to sift through this can of worms is tiresome. I'm hopeful that this all comes to a head soon, what an exhausting few years it's been...

   1. abixb · 1789609922 · focus · HN ↗

      I'd wager on the second scenario. Anyone who's been paying attention to the industry knows that most of the 'gains' have come from test-time compute and architecting harnesses in novel ways. In my estimation, capability increases from "pre-training" alone died early last year, and we're now probably seeing test-time and other benchmark hacks approaching their limit as well.

      If you zoomed back to late-2024, people in the industry were predicting how we'd have AGI by now and the economy would've already 'taken off' with massive productivity growth and ushering in of great prosperity ('deflationary spiral'). Where is it? Where is the productivity growth? Where is the deflationary spiral?

      To be fair, models have gotten better in jagged ways, but reliability is far from usable, especially in long duration tasks, and there has been no effort by the AI companies to address the human brain's bandwidth bottleneck -- they hit the gas like there's no tomorrow and we have enormously capable but jaggedly intelligent multi-modal models with agentic capabilities that are only as effective as the human using it. This whole thing has become a giant mess.

      1. huurtehoog · 1789669202 · focus · HN ↗

         I have been doing some research on the 'productivity paradox'. Fascinating stuff.

         Turns out productivity growth stalled after the 1960s and has been very low ever since. No one can properly explain why. One thing stands out: investment in compute drives economic growth, but crucially doesn't demonstrably increase productivity either of labor or capital, or total factor productivity.

         What I suspect is happening is: computers and software drive wealth concentration. 60 years on from the first general commercial computer, IBM 360, the entire industry has been driven by redistributing wealth towards an ever diminishing number of public companies.

         With that perspective, what is happening with LLMs seems to fall right into the 6 decade pattern. I'm still in the middle of reading the 2 dozen papers or so I found about it so far but it has been fascinating.

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