How can people look at
- clear generalizability
- insane growth rates (go back and look at where we were maybe 2 years ago and then consider the already signed compute infrastructure deals coming online)
And still say with a straight face that this is some kind of parlor trick or monkeys with typewriters.
we don’t need to run LLMs for years. The point is look at where we are today and consider performance gets 10x cheaper every year.
LLMs and agentic systems are clearly not monkeys with typewriters regurgitating training data. And they have and continue to grow in capabilities at extremely fast rates.
I was talking about highest difficulty problems only, in the scope of that comment. Sure at mundane tasks they are useful and we optimizing that constantly.
But for super hard tasks, there is no situation when you just dump a few papers for context add a prompt and LLM will spit out correct answer. It's likely that a lead on such project would need to additionally train LLM on their local dataset, then parse through a lot of experimental data, then likely run multiple LLMs for for many iterations homing on the solution, verifying intermediate results, then repeating cycle again and again. And in parallel the same would do other team members. All in all, for such a huge hard task a year of cumulative machine-hours is not something outlandish.