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Would any hypothetical advancement cause you to rethink your position?
by dwohnitmok 4y ago
Would any hypothetical advancement cause you to rethink your position?
- idlewords 4y agoWell yeah, of course. One big one would be if the pathway to improving AI was not data limited (as it is now) but cleverness limited. Like say there was a cleverness function K at the heart of an AI system that was devilishly complex to reason about but we knew could improve with tweaking. Then the recursive self-improvement scenario that keeps AI catastrophists up at night would look a lot more realizable, the first person to rig K to optimize itself into a slightly better K' really might be playing with fire. That's not the pattern I see right now with large language model systems, which seem to be capped by how much material they can train on, a bound that is not easy to raise. But that's the kind of development that would make me change my view a lot. Otherwise what's even the purpose of thinking about this stuff, if nothing can change your mind about it?
- dwohnitmok 4y agoWould you be worried if the amount of data required to train LLMs went down significantly, but scaling benefits continue to hold? I.e. if it turns out that by more efficiently using data there are 2-3 more orders of magnitude's worth of training possible. What if LLMs can be used to train themselves on how to collect data from more diverse and plentiful sources?