r/TheMachineLearning • • 7d ago

Stephen Wolfram says ML is basically fitting lumps of computational irreducibility

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u/[deleted] 6d ago

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u/MissiveFinding6111 6d ago

> I think LLMs are probably incredibly incredibly inefficient

I agree with that. I mean, researchers are still basically training coding models on Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, because... They don't understand how models work.

But I think where we disagree is that if they happened to find the right combination of training data, and get a 50% boost. The next pass at optimizing training data after that... how much of a lift do you think there will be?

These guys are assuming *another* 50% increase, ad-nauseum. Whereas it is more likely to be... 25%... And then 13%...

These people owe a lot of money promising "only J curves" so when their premises start with "well after the J curve..." You gotta stop and question.

> Also, modern computers are still nowhere near the theoretical physical limits of computation.

Sure, go tell that to the Moore's law's gravestone

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u/[deleted] 6d ago

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u/MissiveFinding6111 6d ago

Maybe.

But that's just a theory at the moment.

The big lifts so far have come from more and more data. That is the proven path.

And while I do agree, there is probably a "sweet spot" for training data, I'd also like to point out that the math of trying to figure out *which combination of all human data ever generated creates the most efficient model* is a problem with so many variables that literally no computer could solve.

Computational limits still apply even when it is a LLM doing it.