MACHINE LEARNING

We don’t have AI self-improves yet, and when we do it will be a game-changer. With more wisdom now compared to the GPT-4 days, it's obvious that it will not be a “fast takeoff”, but rather extremely gradual across many years, probably a decade. The first thing to know is that self-improvement, i.e., models training themselves, is not binary. Consider the scenario of GPT-5 training GPT-6, which would be incredible. Would GPT-5 suddenly go from not being able to train GPT-6 at all to training it extremely proficiently? Definitely not. The first GPT-6 training runs would probably be extremely inefficient in time and compute compared to human researchers. And only after many trials, would GPT-5 actually be able to train GPT-6 better than humans. Second, even if a model could train itself, it would not suddenly get better at all domains. There is a gradient of difficulty in how hard it is to improve oneself in various domains. For example, maybe self-improvement only works at first on domains that we already know how to easily fix in post-training, like basic hallucinations or style. Next would be math and coding, which takes more work but has established methods for improving models. And then at the extreme, you can imagine that there are some tasks that are very hard for self-improvement. For example, the ability to speak Tlingit, a native american language spoken by ~500 people. It will be very hard for the model to self-improve on speaking Tlingit as we don’t have ways of solving low resource languages like this yet except collecting more data which would take time. So because of the gradient of difficulty-of-self-improvement, it will not all happen at once. Finally, maybe this is controversial but ultimately progress in science is bottlenecked by real-world experiments. Some may believe that reading all biology papers would tell us the cure for cancer, or that reading all ML papers and mastering all of math would allow you to train GPT-10 perfectly. If this were the case, then the people who read the most papers and studied the most theory would be the best AI researchers. But what really happened is that AI (and many other fields) became dominated by ruthlessly empirical researchers, which reflects how much progress is based on real-world experiments rather than raw intelligence. So my point is, although a super smart agent might design 2x or even 5x better experiments than our best human researchers, at the end of the day they still have to wait for experiments to run, which would be an acceleration but not a fast takeoff. In summary there are many bottlenecks for progress, not just raw intelligence or a self-improvement system. AI will solve many domains but each domain has its own rate of progress. And even the highest intelligence will still require experiments in the real world. So it will be an acceleration and not a fast takeoff, thank you for reading my rant

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