in the absence of a stalling signal. it's better to assume exponential and work backwards than hope the next bottleneck is impossible.
replyEverything has limits, of course. But if you've not yet seen a deceleration, it's reasonable to expect that at the least you're in the middle of the sigmoid, not the top.
replythis gets more nuanced because "the sigmoids won't save you": https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you
replyIf the sigmoid is incorrect it's certainly more correct than the exponential.
reply> https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you
The conclusion of this article seems to be "you should give ai the benefit of the doubt against all reason". Barf
Isn’t the point more “it’s easy to fall into the trap to believe that predicting when the sigmoid is going to bend is possible and the right heuristic is to instead extrapolate locally”?
replyThat aside, I’d question whether applying the Lindy effect in particular to something that’s not really a life expectancy but more a growth rate is credible… or perhaps a bit circular since it “assumes away” the ceiling.
Nobody in this thread is trying to predict when the sigmoid is going to bend. Perhaps they should
replyPredicting when the sigmoid bends is difficult and predicting how long until it unbends is equally difficult.
replyThe simpler assumption is that over enough time, the S functions stack together for long enough that working backwards from exponential is a better predictor of reality.
These stacked S curves have continually been true with most technology.
The author of that post is a prominent Bay Area "rationalist," who have had a quasi-theistic relationship with the concept of all-powerful AIs for a couple decades now.
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