sohois
18d ago
Death Valley is sparsely populated: by your logic, we can assume it's a good place to live.
Plus, I daresay that many Indians would in fact like to live in Mumbai, more than are currently there
sohois
18d ago
The examples we have of liberalised planning, both historical and current, are far superior to the examples we have of drug legalisation/decriminalisation, so it seems unlikely
sohois
19d ago
Same, I've got nothing against the occasional pop banger, k or otherwise, but didn't land with me at all
sohois
21d ago
Your first two paragraphs just appear to be quibbling over definitions. I don't really care what measurement scheme you use, abandon percentages if you find them useless. The point of the comparison is to show that the advancement in AI capabilities is on a completely different planet to AVs.
As for the comparison of investment, it seems trivial to point out that the difference in magnitude is due to the potential markets. If a company invented Level 5 self driving cars tomorrow, what would they get? You could take away human taxi drivers and truck drivers and some other logistics, and start taking a big chunk of the consumer car market. For a time at least, since other companies would be able to copy you pretty quickly. I'm assuming a lot of companies in that market plan to licence the technology for their revenues, rather than trying to take direct control. Certainly a big market, which likely explains a lot of the valuation for your Teslas and Ubers, but not unlimited.
The impact of a company announcing AGI tomorrow would be unimaginable, even if we assume a slow takeoff with limited recursive self-improvement.
sohois
21d ago
AVs seem like an incomparable category. I couldn't pinpoint the beginning of AV hype the same way you can point to the Transformer architecture for LLMs, but the early examples of AVs 10-15 years ago I recall were pretty impressive. It was like 80% of the way to human parity right from the get-go; it made sense that people were predicting a rapid replacement of human drivers, because they'd made such an impressive start. (I appreciate that AV efforts probably existed long before this but I think it's a fair starting point)
And then over the next decade AV capabilities crept up to human levels at like 1% per year. There were no significant breakthroughs, no evidence of rapid progress, and as you state it is only now that we're getting commercially available taxis in specific locations. Even when Waymo started rolling out proper AV taxis in some cities, it did not signal a sudden leap forward in capabilities as you might expect.
Contrast to LLMs. GPT-1 came out in 2018, a year after the Transformer paper, with GPT-2 following a year later. GPT-2 was impressive compared to previous language generators, but still only perhaps at 33% of the level of an average human. with 3 it jumped up to 50%, 3.5 went further, while 4 was perhaps at the 80% level that AVs started at. Every few months since then has since more and more large leaps, such that current models are winning mathematical competitions and are measured at PhD level in a huge variety of domains.
Chart the progress of both technologies, and they'll look completely different. It's fair to think at some point natural limits will stop the endless scaling of LLM capabilities, but thus far extrapolating a straight line has worked pretty well. AVs never even had a line to extrapolate from.
sohois
29d ago
Do people pick these up and read forever though? A lot of these webfics are serialized, people reach the end and then just read chapter by chapter.
One of the big draws for me with webfiction is that I am a very fast reader, and if I was buying everything it would bankrupt me. A million word story can give me a nice week of reading, but I wouldn't be spending more than a few hours of leisure a day, and most of the time keeping up with ongoing web releases is ~1hour a week
It took Uber 15 years to record a profit and zero years to completely change the taxi market
More options
Context Copy link