[ACCount36]

That's about right. And this kind of performance wouldn't be concerning - if only AI performance didn't go up over time.

Today's AI systems are the worst they'll ever be. If AI is already capable of doing something, you should expect it to become more capable of it in the future.

[binary132]

why is “the worst they’ll ever be” such a popular meme with the AI inevitabilist crowd and how do we make their brains able to work again?

[insignificntape]

It's a self-evident truth. Even if today, at this very moment AI hits a hard plateau and there's nothing we can do to make AI better, ever, then this still holds true. It simply means we'll keep what we have right now. Any new model will be a step back and thus be discarded. So what we have today is the worst, and the best it will ever be. But barring that extremely unlikely scenario, like GPT-3 to GPT-4 and Claude 3 to Claude 4, we will see improvements (either incremental or abrupt) over the coming weeks/months/years. Any failed experiments will never see the light of day and the successful experiments will become Claude X or GPT X, etc.

[ACCount36]

It's popular because it's true.

By now, the main reason people expect AI progress to halt is cope. People say "AI progress is going to stop, any minute now, just you wait" because the alternative makes them very, very uncomfortable.

[IsTom]

We're somewhere on an S-curve and you can't really determine on which part by just looking at the past progress.

[croes]

That’s not how it works. There are already cases where the fix of one problem made a previous existing capability worse.

[ACCount36]

That's exactly how it works. Every input of AI performance improves over time, and so do the outcomes.

Can you damage existing capabilities by overly specializing an AI in something? Yes. Would you expect that damage to stick around forever? No.

OpenAI damaged o3's truthfulness by frying it with too much careless RL. But Anthropic's Opus 4 proves that you can get similar task performance gains without sacrificing truthfulness. And then OpenAI comes back swinging with an algorithmic approach to train their AIs for better truthfulness specifically.