Revisited this, and while it was tongue-in-cheek, it feels a bit ungrateful.
A lot of tech roles are intellectually stimulating and have a wage in the upper distribution of salaries. I think we have a very nice situation going for us.
While those are good reasons to keep the weights static from a business perspective, they are not the only reasons, especially when serving SOTA models at the scale of some of the major shops today.
Continual/online learning is still an area of active research.
I get where you are coming from, and it is definitely an interesting thought!
I do think it is an extremely inefficient way to have a swarm (e.g. across time through training data) and it would make more sense to solve the pretraining problem (to connect them to the external world as you pointed out) and actually have multiple LLMs in a swarm at the same time.
I was responding to the idea that an LLM would believe (regurgitate) untrue things if you pretrained them on untrue things. I wasn't making a claim about SOTA models with gigantic training corpora.
> If you pretrained an LLM with data saying Moscow is the capital of Connecticut it would think that is true.
> Well so would a human!
But humans aren't static weights, we update continuously, and we arrive at consensus via communication as we all experience different perspectives. You can fool an entire group through propaganda, but there are boundless historical examples of information making its way in through human communication to overcome said propaganda.
Humans are not isolated nodes, we are more like a swarm, understanding reality via consensus.
The situation you described is possible, but would require something like a subverting effort of propaganda by the state.
Inferring truth about a social event in a social situation, for example, requires a nuanced set of thought processes and attention mechanisms.
If we had a swarm of LLMs collecting a variety of data from a variety of disparate sources, where the swarm communicates for consensus, it would be very hard to convince them that Moscow is in Connecticut.
Unfortunately we are still stuck in monolithic training run land.
They have a dark pattern around annual subscriptions, i.e. I had a monthly subscription I wanted to downgrade, and with no confirmation they charged me for the entire year after I selected the lower tier and hit next.
I'm not really familiar with that technology space, but if you take that as true, is your argument something like:
- We don't have limitless CPU cycles
- Thus we need to split things into sub-problems
If so that might still be amenable to the bitter lesson, where Sutton is saying human heuristics will always lose out to computational methods at scale.
Meaning something like:
- We split up the thought to vision problem into N sub-problems based on some heuristic.
- We develop a method which works with our CPU cycle constraint (it isn't some probe -> CPU interface). Perhaps it uses our voice or something as a proxy for our thoughts, and some composition of models.
Sutton would say:
Yeah that's fine, but if we had the limitless CPU cycles/adequate technology, the solution of probe -> CPU would be better than what we develop.
I think the bitter lesson implies that if we could study/implement "how a machine with limitless cpu cycles would make our eyes see something we are currently thinking of" then it would likely lead to a better result than us using hominid heuristics to split things into sub-problems that we hand over to the machine.
I didn't mention it but I fully agree, I imagine ASI would have be to embodied.
My reasoning is simple, there are a whole class of problems that require embodiment, and I assume ASI would be able to solve those problems.
Regarding
> Point 1 is a big assumption. I am also not you, and although it's true that I have different goals, I share most of your human moral values and wish you no specific harm.
Yeah I also agree this a huge assumption. Why do I make that assumption? Well, to achieve cognition far beyond ours, they would have to be different from us by definition.
Maybe morals/virtues emerge as you become smarter, but I feel like that shouldn't be the null hypothesis here. This is entirely vibes based, I don't have a syllogism for it.
But if you assume that we have created something that is agentic and can reason much faster and more effectively than us, then us dying out seems very likely.
It will have goals different from ours, since it isn't us, and the idea that they will all be congruent with our homeostasis needs evidence.
If you simply assume:
1. it will have different goals (because it's not us)
2. it can achieve said goals despite our protests (it's smarter by assumption)
3. some goals will be in conflict with our homeostasis (we would share resources due to our shared location, Earth)
then we all die.
I just think this is silly because of the assumption that we can create some sort of ASI, not because of the syllogism that follows.
(As an intuition pump, we can hold on the order of ones of things in our working memory. Imagine facing a foe who can hold on the order of thousands of things when deciding in real time, or even millions.)
- regurgitate entire passages word for word, until that behavior is publicized and quickly RLHF'd away
- rip github repos almost entirely (some new Sonnet 3.5 demos Anthropic employees were bragging about on Twitter were basically 1:1 to a person's public repo)
It seems clear to me that not only can copyrighted work be retained and returned in near entirety by the architectures that undergird current frontier models, but the engineers working on these models will readily confuse a model regurgitating work to be "creating novel work".
Language is the medium through which raw perspective refined itself.
Language birthed social games and the sense of self.
Yes, language evolved for communication.
But without communication, thought would still be stuck in the land of instinct, never forged by the tribal dances of love, art, deceit, debate and organization.
Given your initial assumptions, that self-moderating end state makes sense.
I feel like we still have a disconnect on our definition of a super intelligence.
From my perspective this thing is insanely smart. We can hold ~4 things in our working memory (maybe Von Neumann could hold like 6-8); I'm thinking this thing can hold on the order of millions of things within its working memory for tasks requiring fluid intelligence.
With that sort of gap, I feel like at minimum the ASI would be able to trick the cleverest human to do anything, but more reasonably, humans might appear to be entirely close formed to it, where getting a human to do anything is more of a mechanistic thing rather than a social game.
Like the reason my early example was concrete pillars with weird wires is that with an intelligence gap so big the ASI will be doing things quickly that don't make sense, having a strong command over the world around it.