Is "the end of the exponential" an established expression? There's no singularity in an exponential so the expression doesn't make sense to me. To me, it sounds like "the end of the exponential part", meaning it's a sigmoid, but that's obviously not what he means.
I’m guessing that Amodei meant it as a humorous inside joke.
It’s also shorthand for “the end of massive R&D capex” and “the transition to market capture”. The final stage, what McKinsey types call “harvesting”, is probably not on Amodei’s radar. Based on what I’ve seen of his public personality, he would see it as too philistine and will hand it off to another custodial exec.
Cool insight!
Why should it be obvious that this is not what he means? I struggle to think how he could mean anything else.
Well, he says
>To me, it is absolutely wild that you have people — within the bubble and outside the bubble — talking about the same tired, old hot-button political issues, when we are near the end of the exponential.
My interpretation is "It's pointless to discuss the old political issues, because they're not going to be relevant once AGI is achieved". So if he does believe in a plateau, it either contradicts his other prediction (that AGI will be reached in a year or two), or he believes it will plateau after AGI is already reached, which means it's kind of a pointless statement. The important thing w.r.t. all our problems being solved would the advent of AGI, not the plateau.
I think he believe in a plateau on the y axis instead of the x axis… which is AGI.
I took the “end” to mean the part of the exponential where it quickly trends towards infinity. So let’s say the x axis is time (by which you get more training data and more compute) and the y axis is model ability. So far, if we think we are in the beginning of the exponential, adding data/compute looks almost linear to the untrained eye in terms of model capability. But once you hit a threshold, where he thinks the model will start to generalize, a small amount of data/compute will result in a massive increase in model ability.
Exactly. If you “plateau” on the y axis you increase model capability to infinity in no time.