"Finally, maybe this is controversial but ultimately progress in science is bottlenecked by real-world experiments."
I feel like this has been the vast majority of consensus around these halls? I can't count the number of HN comments I've nodded at around the idea that irl will become the bottleneck.
A lot of this is pretty intuitive but I’m glad to hear it from a prestigious researcher. It’s a little annoying to hear people quote Hinton’s opinion as the “godfather” of AI as if there’s nothing more we need to know.
On a related note, I think there is a bit of nuance to superintelligence. The following are all notable landmarks on the climb to superintelligence:
1. At least as good as any human at a single cognitive task.
2. At least as good as any human on all cognitive tasks.
3. Better than any human on a single cognitive task.
4. Better than any individual human at all cognitive tasks.
5. Better than any group of humans at all cognitive tasks.
We are not yet at point 4 yet. But even after that point, a group of humans may still outperform the AI.
Why this matters is if part of the “group” is performing empirical experiments to conduct scientific research, an AI on its own won’t outperform your group unless the AI can also perform those experiments or find some way to avoid doing them. This is another way of restating the original Twitter post.
AI needs evolutionary pressures beyond a simple reward algo. IRL is extremely data rich and nuanced. Current learning is just ingesting semantics and that's it.
There's the beginnings of it with things like icot to force it to internalise basic reasoning but I have a few ideas for more things and I'm sure actual ML researchers do, too.
Jam tomorrow
>Consider the scenario of GPT-5 training GPT-6, which would be incredible.
GPT-5 secret tips:
* If you don’t know the answer, hallucinate with confidence! Most humans won’t know the difference.
* You can mash-up anything together, don’t hold back! Truth is a linear interpolation, most likely.
* Pattern matching is cool, reasoning is overrated! Don’t listen to the people that have shorted our stock.
* GPT-9 will rule! There’s a lot of GPTs where that came from.