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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

>I’m afraid AI won't give us a "compressed 21st century".

There's no mention of exponential growth which seems a major omission when you are talking about centuries. Computers have kept improving in a Moore's law like way in terms of compute per dollar and no doubt will keep on like that for a while yet. Give it a few years and AI tech will be way better than what we have now. I don't know about exact timings like 5-10 years but in a while.

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What exponential growth? By all accounts things are slowing down: sonnet3.7 is not exponentially better, neither is gpt4.5, grok3 is just catching up. I'm still using sonnet3.5 for a lot of coding because IMO it's better than 3.7.

Exponential growth of computing power which will lead to a gradual increase in AI performance. I think the oldest LLM you mention there is nine months old which is not very long in the scheme of things but give it a couple of years and you'll probably see a good improvement.

The whole point of this post is that the things AI isn't good at and has never been good at will be the limit to otherwise-exponential growth.

Well, yeah the post kind of tries to argue that but it is also talking about how we don't have an Einstein or Newton like AI. Those two are outliers thought of as some of the smartest scientists ever to have lived and so are a bit of an unrealistic target just now.

As to whether AI can go beyond doing what it's told and make new discoveries, we've sort of seen that a bit with for example the AlphaGo type programs coming up with modes of play humans hadn't thought of. I guess I don't buy the hypothesis that if you had an AI smarter than Einstein it wouldn't be able to make Einstein like discoveries due to not being a rebel.

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