this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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Yep. AGI is still science fiction. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably just trying to fool investors. Ignore anyone who is less than three degrees of separation away from a marketing department.
The low-hanging fruit is quickly getting picked, so we're bound to see a slowdown in advancement. And that's a good thing. We don't really need better language models at this point; we need better applications that use them.
The limiting factor is not so much hardware as it is our knowledge and competence in software architecture. As a historical example, 10 short years ago, computers were nowhere near top-level at Go. Then DeepMind developed AlphaGo, which was a huge leap forward and could beat a top pro. It ran on a supercomputer cluster. Thanks to the research breakthroughs around AlphaGo, within a few years had similar AI that could run on any smartphone and could beat any human player. It's not because consumer hardware got that much faster; it's because we learned how to make better software. Modern Go engines are a fraction of the size of AlphaGo, and generate similar or better quality results with a tiny fraction of the operations. And it seems like we're pretty close to the limit now. A supercomputer can't play all that much better than my laptop.
Similarly, a few years ago something like ChatGPT 3 needed a supercomputer. Now you can run a model with similar performance on a high-end phone, or a low-end laptop. Again, it's not because hardware has improved; the difference is the software. My current laptop (2021 model) is older than ChatGPT 3 (publicly launched in 2022) and it can easily run superior models.
But the returns inevitably diminish. There's a limit somewhere. It's hard to say exactly where, but entropy's gonna getcha sooner or later. You simply cannot fit more than 16GB of information in a 16GB model; you can only inch closer to that theoretical limit, and specialize into smaller scopes. At some point the world will realize that trying to encode everything into a model is a dumb idea. We already have better tools for that.