Mobile phones at that time were 800g and cost $4000. Using your logic you could say we are almost 20 years into the age of LLMs because Cleverbot was released in 2008.
The first prototype of a cellphone was functional in the early 70s. Before that you had walkie talkies and farther back wireless communications.
We're just shy of 10 years since attention is all you need and just a few years past the first commercially viable LLMs. So in cellphones we are something like early 90s.
What they're saying is that mobile phone tech didn't scale at the same rate as LLMs. How fast it takes a technology to unfold into full adoption varies depending on the industry and on what's blocking development at its inception.
Mobile phones were severely constrained by hardware that made them impractically expensive and unwieldy, and also by the time it took to set up wireless networks at a large enough scale. That's why it took mobile phones a few decades to really get going, and this is going to be different for every other technology.
LLMs, for instance, were not as hardware-constrained - we have a lot more compute now, but there wasn't a hardware paradigm shift or anything, things were already pretty good a few years ago - now it's just about scale. LLMs were also always relatively affordable - there wasn't a period where they cost $10/token, so we don't get the same kind of affordability scaling as with phones. They also utilize existing internet infrastructure and don't need to be rolled out in some new worldwide grid.
I think this is off. LLMs are severely constrained by hardware and we've seen at least an order of magnitude improvement in flops since ChatGPT launched. Over the next couple of decades we are likely to see that level of improvement in memory capacity. There's likely at least a few step changes left.
Regardless, the point of the GP that we saw revolutionary changes in society within a few years of technology introduction is off. It took decades for the full impact of the pc, internet, or mobile to be seen. We're still in a very early phase of figuring out how to use LLMs.
If you can’t program why pretend to be a programmer? What could possibly go wrong?
JavaScript is not assembly and life isn’t so hard to warrant the level of sympathy asinine comments like this expect. I am merely suggesting people should know how to do what they claim, and clearly they cannot. I have no sympathy for that.
"Doses are at the high end of those administered in clinical practice, reflecting typical doses in nonmedical settings, where use tends to be occasional rather than chronic."
I think the point is to highlight that using these drugs as a one-off is not effective. To the surprise of no-one, poorly dosed medications perform poorly.
There's going to be very little crossover between 1) people who need to see this paper, and 2) people who are the types to read papers on dosage efficacy.
Multiplying out the average time for the tasks, they spent about 25 minutes total. If their goal was to recreate the conditions where people take these drugs in non-medical settings, they failed. It is not when you have a half hour of puzzles, and someone sitting next to you and scoring your work. It's when you have 24 hours of work and 16 hours to do it. Or, a 15 minute task that feels like pulling off your own fingernails.
Then the authors should have lead with the purpose in their abstract and also highlight this fact in their discussion. They choose not to. Instead, their paper is titled "Not so smart?“Smart”drugs increase the level butdecrease the qualityof cognitive effort", with the abstract leading with "The efficacy of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancers in everyday complex tasks remains to be established."
Sorry, but that's just attention grabbing nonsense. Should have said "for people undiagnosed with cognitive impairments".
Maybe 'unfit', 'ill-suited' or 'irrelevant' would be more suitable.
I love Cal's writing, but I feel like it's really going against his mantra (of Deep Work) to be making posts like this that try to pluck meaning out of nothing for the sake of marketing.
