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this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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taking a quick look at it... it's actually short by Scott's standards, but still overly long, given that the only point he makes is claiming Lindy's Law is applicable to predicting AI progress in absence of other information. Edit: glancing at it again... its not that short, I kinda skimmed until I got to Scott's actual point my first time glancing at it. You can't blame me for not reading it.
Yeah, he straw-mans AI critics/skeptics as trying to make an argument from ignorance, then tries to argue against that strawman using Lindy's Law (which assumes ignorance and a pareto distribution). He completely ignores that AI critics are actually making detailed arguments about LLM companies consuming all the good and novel training data, hitting the limits on what compute costs they can afford, running into problems of the long lead time for building datacenters, etc. Which is pretty ironic given his AI 2027 makes a nominal claim to accounting for all that stuff (in actuality it basically all rests on METR's task horizons, and distorts even that already questionable dataset).
As if LLMs being the last step before AGI/ASI/The Metal Messiah is a foregone conclusion. As far as I can tell even the AI 2027 thing only argues that once the bots completely nail down programming (any minute now) then the foom happens and the models will magic themselves into true AI, because apparently being good at solving coding problems is a sufficient proxy for superintelligence, hence the METR infatuation.
I mean, to be fair that's not unique to them - software engineers have been worse than physicists in assuming that all of reality and human experience is downstream from their chosen field.