> a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors.
Yes of course it’s not going to increase exponentially forever.
The point is, why predict that the growth rate is going to slow exactly now? What evidence are you going to look at?
It’s possible to make informed predictions (eg “Moore’s law can’t get you further than 1nm with silicon due to fundamental physical limits”). But most commenters aren’t basing their predictions in anything as rigorous as that.
And note, there are good reasons to predict a speedup, too; as models get more intelligent, they will be able to accelerate the R&D process. So quality per-researcher is now proportional to the exponential intelligence curve, AND quantity of researchers scales with number of GPUs (rather than population growth which is much slower).
Yes of course it’s not going to increase exponentially forever.
The point is, why predict that the growth rate is going to slow exactly now? What evidence are you going to look at?
It’s possible to make informed predictions (eg “Moore’s law can’t get you further than 1nm with silicon due to fundamental physical limits”). But most commenters aren’t basing their predictions in anything as rigorous as that.
And note, there are good reasons to predict a speedup, too; as models get more intelligent, they will be able to accelerate the R&D process. So quality per-researcher is now proportional to the exponential intelligence curve, AND quantity of researchers scales with number of GPUs (rather than population growth which is much slower).