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Why would reasoning have plateau’d? I think reasoning ability is not the largest bottleneck for improvement in usefulness right now. Cost is a bigger one IMO.

Why would reasoning have plateau’d? I think reasoning ability is not the largest bottleneck for improvement in usefulness right now. Cost is a bigger one IMO. Running these models as agents is hella expensive, and agents or agent-like recurrent reasoning (like humans do) is the key to improved performance if you look at any type of human intelligence. Single-shot performance only gets you so far. For example- If it can write code 90% of the way, and then debug in a loop, it’d be much more performant than any single shot algorithm. And OpenAI has these huge models in their basement probably. But they might not be much more useful than GPT-4 when used as single-shot. I mean, what could it do what we can’t do today with gpt-4? It’s agents and recurrent reasoning we need for more usefulness. At least- That’s my humble opinion as an amateur neuroscientist that plays around with these models.

Jensson 2y ago
> Running these models as agents is hella expensive Because they are dumb so you need to over compute so many things to get anything useful. Smarter models would solve this problem. Making the current model cheaper is like trying to solve Go by scaling up Deep Blue, it doesn't work to just hardcode dumb pieces together, the model needs to get smarter.
- cchance 2y ago
  You mean like our dumb ass brains? Theirs a reason "saying the first thing out of your mind" is a bad fucking idea, thats what AI's currently do, they don't take a moment think about the answer and then formulate a response, they spit out their first "thought" thats why multi-shot works so much better, just like our own dumb brains.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    My brain can navigate a computer interface without using word tokens, since I have tokens for navigating OS and browsers and tabs etc. That way I don't have to read a million tokens of text to figure out where buttons are or how to navigate to places, since my brain is smart enough to not use words for it. ChatGPT doesn't have that sort of thing currently, and until it does it will always be really bad at that sort of thing. You are using a hand to hammer a nail, that will never go well, the solution isn't to use more hands the solution is to wield a hammer.
    - cchance 2y ago
      WTF are you even talking about, we're talking about understanding and communication not taking actions, navigating an OS and browser, tabs etc are actions, not thoughts or communication. This model isn't taking actions there is no nail to hammer lol, and if their was you'd be smashing a brain into a nail for some reason.
      - Jensson 2y ago
        The topic is agents, the AI acting on your behalf, that needs more than text. What are you talking about?
    - KoolKat23 2y ago
      Your brain is doing this without you realising, just because you aren't verbalising it doesn't mean it's not iterating through its own output and selecting the best answer. Some of our thinking is purely illusion. Models can also do this, some models like Gemini allow you to see this in action where you get to select the best answer, there's also behind the scene methods such as q-learning. When your muscle memory is instinctively clicking that start button, it's more akin to a very strong weighting after many sessions of reinforcement learning. Our brains may still be dumb but we can quickly say things like 1+1=...2 because we used reinforcement learning to strengthen the weighting back in primary school. We're not sitting visualising an abacus moving in our minds.
  - ianbicking 2y ago
    It's good in any prompt to give the AI a chance to think without impact (without executing anything, maybe without making anything specifically appropriate for the user to read). That works somewhat similarly to "taking a moment to think." At that point they'll still have a tendency to use a stereotyped response and stick with it, instead of a thoughtful response, but you can try to address that in prompting too by asking for multiple proposals before choosing one.
- hackerlight 2y ago
  Disagree. Even going by your example, AlphaGo uses many iterations of a "dumb" model in order to achieve incredible performance. If it had to single shot the solution with a model 100x bigger, it would perform worse. All that matters is the frontier of intelligence vs cost, and larger foundation models aren't necessarily going to push that frontier forward. AlphaCode hints at that.
Aeolun 2y ago
I’d be pretty happy if they could just make ChatGPT4 10x faster and cheaper. It’d be fine for basically all of my use cases.
meet_zaveri 2y ago
> For example- If it can write code 90% of the way, and then debug in a loop, it’d be much more performant than any single shot algorithm. OOC, Would this make the academics including algorithms as more or less important in their curriculum? That's a bad win for soceity if it's true.

Jensson 2y ago

> Running these models as agents is hella expensive Because they are dumb so you need to over compute so many things to get anything useful. Smarter models would solve this problem. Making the current model cheaper is like trying to solve Go by scaling up Deep Blue, it doesn't work to just hardcode dumb pieces together, the model needs to get smarter.

cchance 2y ago
You mean like our dumb ass brains? Theirs a reason "saying the first thing out of your mind" is a bad fucking idea, thats what AI's currently do, they don't take a moment think about the answer and then formulate a response, they spit out their first "thought" thats why multi-shot works so much better, just like our own dumb brains.
- Jensson 2y ago
  My brain can navigate a computer interface without using word tokens, since I have tokens for navigating OS and browsers and tabs etc. That way I don't have to read a million tokens of text to figure out where buttons are or how to navigate to places, since my brain is smart enough to not use words for it. ChatGPT doesn't have that sort of thing currently, and until it does it will always be really bad at that sort of thing. You are using a hand to hammer a nail, that will never go well, the solution isn't to use more hands the solution is to wield a hammer.
  - cchance 2y ago
    WTF are you even talking about, we're talking about understanding and communication not taking actions, navigating an OS and browser, tabs etc are actions, not thoughts or communication. This model isn't taking actions there is no nail to hammer lol, and if their was you'd be smashing a brain into a nail for some reason.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      The topic is agents, the AI acting on your behalf, that needs more than text. What are you talking about?
  - KoolKat23 2y ago
    Your brain is doing this without you realising, just because you aren't verbalising it doesn't mean it's not iterating through its own output and selecting the best answer. Some of our thinking is purely illusion. Models can also do this, some models like Gemini allow you to see this in action where you get to select the best answer, there's also behind the scene methods such as q-learning. When your muscle memory is instinctively clicking that start button, it's more akin to a very strong weighting after many sessions of reinforcement learning. Our brains may still be dumb but we can quickly say things like 1+1=...2 because we used reinforcement learning to strengthen the weighting back in primary school. We're not sitting visualising an abacus moving in our minds.
- ianbicking 2y ago
  It's good in any prompt to give the AI a chance to think without impact (without executing anything, maybe without making anything specifically appropriate for the user to read). That works somewhat similarly to "taking a moment to think." At that point they'll still have a tendency to use a stereotyped response and stick with it, instead of a thoughtful response, but you can try to address that in prompting too by asking for multiple proposals before choosing one.
hackerlight 2y ago
Disagree. Even going by your example, AlphaGo uses many iterations of a "dumb" model in order to achieve incredible performance. If it had to single shot the solution with a model 100x bigger, it would perform worse. All that matters is the frontier of intelligence vs cost, and larger foundation models aren't necessarily going to push that frontier forward. AlphaCode hints at that.

Aeolun 2y ago

I’d be pretty happy if they could just make ChatGPT4 10x faster and cheaper. It’d be fine for basically all of my use cases.

meet_zaveri 2y ago

> For example- If it can write code 90% of the way, and then debug in a loop, it’d be much more performant than any single shot algorithm. OOC, Would this make the academics including algorithms as more or less important in their curriculum? That's a bad win for soceity if it's true.