A bunch of people responded to this (in my uncharitable interpretation) by denying that emergent abilities were ever about predictability, and it was always merely about non-linearity. They responded to this paper by saying that the result was trivial, because you can always reparametrize some metric to make it look linear, but what we really care about is whether the ability is non-linear in the regime we care about.
I was one of those people. Can you point to where they predict anything, as opposed to retrodict it?
I’m confused. You say that you were “one of those people” but I was talking about people who “responded… by denying that emergent abilities were ever about predictability, and it was always merely about non-linearity”. By asking me for examples of the original authors predicting anything, it sounds like you aren’t one of the people I’m talking about.
Rather, it sounds like you’re one of the people who hasn’t moved the goalposts, and agrees with me that predictability is the important part. If that’s true, then I’m not replying to you. And perhaps we disagree about less than you think, since the comment you replied to did not make any strong claims that the paper showed that abilities are predictable (though I did make a rather weak claim about that).
Regardless, I still think we do disagree about the significance of this paper. I don’t think the authors made any concrete predictions about the future, but it’s not clear they tried to make any. I suspect, however, that most important, general abilities in LLMs will be quite predictable with scale, for pretty much the reasons given in the paper, although I fully admit that I do not have much hard data yet to support this presumption.
I was one of those people. Can you point to where they predict anything, as opposed to retrodict it?
I’m confused. You say that you were “one of those people” but I was talking about people who “responded… by denying that emergent abilities were ever about predictability, and it was always merely about non-linearity”. By asking me for examples of the original authors predicting anything, it sounds like you aren’t one of the people I’m talking about.
Rather, it sounds like you’re one of the people who hasn’t moved the goalposts, and agrees with me that predictability is the important part. If that’s true, then I’m not replying to you. And perhaps we disagree about less than you think, since the comment you replied to did not make any strong claims that the paper showed that abilities are predictable (though I did make a rather weak claim about that).
Regardless, I still think we do disagree about the significance of this paper. I don’t think the authors made any concrete predictions about the future, but it’s not clear they tried to make any. I suspect, however, that most important, general abilities in LLMs will be quite predictable with scale, for pretty much the reasons given in the paper, although I fully admit that I do not have much hard data yet to support this presumption.