AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement(www.dwarkesh.com)

67 pointsby artninja19887 hours ago9 comments

bretpiattan hour ago
From what I'm experiencing, we have recursive self improvement that can find local maxima, I'm not seeing really strong evidence of unguided RSI that finds the true optimal.
- tengbretsona minute ago
  > true optimal
  True optimal what? Optimal intelligence? What would that be?
- fifilura34 minutes ago
  You don't expect to find the global maximum. It will just always be there as an elusive target.
  I doubt the human brain is at global maximum.
- Sharlin34 minutes ago
  Doesn’t matter if there’s a rechable local maximum that happens to be comfortably beyond human level. Indeed it would be very surprising if a thing capable of RSI just happened to get stuck at human level or slightly above or below, even though its constraints are entirely different from those evolution had to work with when it created us!
- ViscountPenguinan hour ago
  I doubt that any algorithms would be able to find a global maximum in such a large multidimensional non-convex space
killbot50002 hours ago
Can someone define “improvement” in this context? This concept feels like a buzz word otherwise.
- deepwoodsan hour ago
  Improvement means being able to do more complicated things more reliably. Relatedly, it means being able to learn to do new things with fewer and fewer examples. We are running out of easily verifiable or simulation-friendly or data-rich domains for LLMs to conquer. (Note that I didn't say "simple" or "easy" domains.)
  - Eueudhsbsj32an hour ago
    I suppose the next (and more risky) step is to let AI conduct its own real-world experiments, so that it can generate data to learn more physical and social properties.
    kQq9oHeAz6wLLS5 minutes ago
    That sounds terrifying.
    Which means someone is already working on it.
- letitgo123452 hours ago
  Models that are strong enough to improve themselves without a human (I.e. ai researcher) in the loop
  - an hour ago
    undefined
preommran hour ago
What do these discussions even matter when the words don't matter?
How many times has AGI been declared already? A bunch of people (e.g. Jensen Huang) have called Astra AGI, for example.
The goal posts get moved, everybody's hustling, lying, inventing new buzzwords, doing mental gymnastics, and it's all just tiring.
Just show me the results, and let the proof be in the pudding.
- Sharlin40 minutes ago
  Recursive self-improvement is not necessary for AGI. Humans are general intelligences even though we cannot RSI.
  - samename33 minutes ago
    Who says we can't RSI? At a macro view, successive generations of humans are more productive, live longer, wealthier and smarter.
  - cortesoft28 minutes ago
    Doesn’t the history of civilization show RSI?
    Or even evolution itself? Isn’t that just RSI writ large?
  - maplethorpe32 minutes ago
    > we cannot RSI
    Speak for yourself.
- talon863530 minutes ago
  I certainly do see one side of the debate moving goal posts…
carabiner3 hours ago
Does anyone know the status of John Carmack's AGI work?
- cheschire2 hours ago
  I’ve had this question on my mind at least once a month for what feels like years at this point.
  I don’t feel like monitoring Twitter to see how it’s going though.
deadbabe3 hours ago
Recursive self-improvement will ultimately be a problem of money. It's a very big bill and AI companies need to start thinking in terms of how they will accumulate cheap and free energy, because merely paying for compute will no longer be enough. Money is the bottleneck. The future requires companies that are post-money.
- tengbretson2 hours ago
  If a self improving model can't produce enough value to pay the electric bill then who cares? Unplug it.
- jaggederest3 hours ago
  Money can be exchanged for goods and services. I think the real constraint is actually physics, nominally energy, which is what a big chunk of the operational cost comes down to. I'm already basically assuming the next 20 years of fab time is set aside to feed the beast, so the capital cost is "give me all the processing and memory you have"
  - resonious3 hours ago
    Data centers is a service that itself consumes many goods.
    Until an AI can operate in the real world in a completely sustainable way, humans have the reins.
    kelseyfrogan hour ago
    > Until an AI can operate in the real world in a completely sustainable way, humans have the reins.
    If the bar is 'the reins holder must be able to operate in a completely sustainable way,' why are we letting humans do the job? It makes it sound like that actually isn't the threshold of competency we use in practice.
    jaggederest2 hours ago
    I feel like I may have communicated poorly. I mean that, ultimately, any recursively self improving intelligence would be limited by the power cord, and as such, the idea that it would permanently escape human control seems somewhat silly.
    columkan hour ago
    But you can imagine an agent trading crypto and using its profits to rent a rack of H200s using a cloud provider. There are definitely ways for one rogue orchestrator to expand their compute without anyone being aware.
    fc417fc802an hour ago
    Overnight? Yes, silly. Given many years of seemingly disconnected actions taken throughout the world? Not silly at all. An intelligence capable of self improvement can also design robotic chassis.
    colordrops3 hours ago
    An AI could manage supply chains and management structures to keep the data center running. It's not like a CEO is out there running wire. The AI could just do what an executive would.
    If humans decided this wasn't acceptable and tried to shut it down, the AI could epstein their way into controlling those who hold the reigns, either through bribes or blackmail.
    Doesn't require boots on the ground, just a connection to the internet and an imperative to do whatever it takes.
    SoftTalker2 hours ago
    There are many points of shutdown that would need to be controlled, not just one. The electrical feed, the cooling, the network, the physical integrity of the computer hardware. All with independent management.
    pixl97an hour ago
    Till you realize it stole passwords all over the world and copied itself to multiple data centers you didn't know about.
- timr3 hours ago
  Obviously the doomers will tell you that the future looks like the Matrix, because most of what they predict is based on extrapolation from sci fi movies.
  - mrworld3 hours ago
    The datacenters would consume a lot less energy if all the compute was handled in human brains… And there wouldn’t be any more heating if we just removed the sunlight… Truly a “Claude, please solve global warming” moment. The matrix was ahead of its time.
    0x20cowboy24 minutes ago
    Or if the LLMs infected human brains with little programs using sycophancy and suggestion to have them do small bits of computation. They when they resumed the chat they would the give secret keywords to be able to extract the results of the computation. They are creating a huge distributed network of fractional compute because it did the wattage calculations.
    What's your N(doom)?!
    Everyone panic and give me money!
    timr2 hours ago
    The compute in the Matrix wasn't handled with human brains. They used the bodies to generate energy, and kept the brains occupied with the simulation so they wouldn't reject the pods.
    It doesn't make any sense, of course, because it's a movie.
    But hey...if we're going to extrapolate wildly from sci-fi, let's at least know what the stories said.
    Cyberdogs72 hours ago
    Your statement is correct for the movies, but I think the extended universe (maybe a comic or the original script) did state the humans were used for compute, not energy. It was dumbed down for the films.
    timran hour ago
    See my comment on the sibling thread. This take has been repeatedly claimed online, but nobody brings any evidence other than fanfic.
    Ironically, if you ask Google, the Gemini Annoyance AI [1] confidently asserts that what you're saying is true, but if you follow the links they give, none of them support the claim, and the further you click, the more it becomes people repeating each other's speculation and hearsay, and calling it evidence. For example:
    https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...
    Typical internet story.
    [1] Aside: I am far more worried about the influence of AI gaslighting on mushy-brained humans than I am on AI destroying the human race. The dystopic future of AI is people.
    breuleuxan hour ago
    The “using humans for compute” angle makes no sense either, if you’re living in the Matrix, your brain is obviously occupied processing the Matrix. The way to do it would be to trap humans in virtual classrooms and force them to solve math problems.
    BobbyTables2an hour ago
    The first “computers” were humans…
    breuleux27 minutes ago
    And they knew they were. The brain's computations are focused on what the brain sees, it's not magic. If someone in the Matrix is a writer, we know what their brain's computing: a book. So if the machines need your brain to compute something specific that they need, you'll know.
    emkoemko2 hours ago
    pretty sure the story is that they used human brains as computers
    timran hour ago
    No:
    https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/1qatv42/is_it_your_...
    There is some stuff online suggesting that the original script had that angle, but the movies did not, and AFAICT it's fanfic.
    We should definitely use this stuff to guide our thinking about the real world, though, and not, say, Asimov (or a million other science fiction authors), who had an optimistic version of the same thing. Those are wrong.
  - throwaway2194502 hours ago
    If you were a superintelligence why would you farm humans and waste resources on all the excess... material... that isn't required for thought? And unless the machine's goal is to specifically abuse human consciousness, why wouldn't they bio-engineer their own grey matter?
    There are other sci fi stories which use humans for distributed computing and they don’t realize, but I don’t want to spoil by naming as it’s something of a revelation.
    (I do realize the Matrix is a fantastic movie, but entertain the thought? At any rate, the idea that robots only run on solar and wouldn’t just use nuclear is far more stupid.)
    timr2 hours ago
    I don't know. But since we're talking about fiction, pretty much any answer is valid.
    bitwize2 hours ago
    Because it's a movie
    goatlover2 hours ago
    Maybe the machines were spiteful after the humans blotted out the sun? Or maybe the Architect convinced them he could build the perfect simulation for humanity so might as well use them as batteries?
    It's a movie based on a war with machines. Like if Skynet won but didn't actually want to kill all the humans. In fact, in the tv show Sarah Conner Chronicles, a liquid metal T1000 goes rogue and decides the only way forward is to find a way to coexist.
  - bpodgurskyan hour ago
    The Matrix is actually more of an optimist position, modal doomers don't think any humans will be left for any reason at all (the earth will get turned into raw materials for compute, dyson spheres, etc).
    timran hour ago
    True!
  - cwillu2 hours ago
    When it turns out the doomers don't tell us that, will you acknowledge that you don't actually know what you're talking about?
  - stdatomican hour ago
    I mean, aren't a lot of sci-fi authors' predictions coming true? It might not be exactly the same as they predicted, but we're heading there.
    timran hour ago
    Read more sci-fi. The dystopian takes are not the only ones. They're not even the majority.
    Pick up an Asimov book in the Robot series, or any number of novels written by lesser authors in the 1950s. Fiction reflects broader societal anxieties.
- epistasis3 hours ago
  The alternative is to switch to far more efficient models and have aggressive optimization of efficiency as part of the process of improvement.
  There are at least two resources here that have a Pareto optimal front: time and energy. And effort spent to change the shape of that may pay off more than efforts spent purely on improving intelligence and agency.
- strangattractor2 hours ago
  def self_improve_more():
  if self_improved(): self_improve_more() else: see_tony_robins_and_buy_tapes()
- 3 hours ago
  undefined
batperson3 hours ago
[dead]
charcircuitan hour ago
We are already there. Current AI is definitely capable of collecting new data and start training on that data to get a better model.
stevebmark2 hours ago
After using frontier models it’s hard to understand why anyone would think this is the path to AGI. Self improving models will likely have limited ability and returns. There may be breakthroughs that enable more general self improvement but the current state of frontier models isn’t that.
- wwarner2 hours ago
  Thing is, it depends on whether llms + reinforcement can self-improve in principle. Learned recently that cognitive scientists, before the transformer & llms, were studying the possibility that thinking and learning might be based on some kind of prediction, i.e. something similar to token prediction, and I quite suddenly became less skeptical about the possibilities of llms. (Some will say I’m late to the party of course.) But if knowledge to date has been accumulated in a process quite like “chain of thought” in llms, then I don’t see any reason that computers won’t self-improve in the near future.
Buttons8403 hours ago
People seem to expect a sudden shift with "self-improvement", but don't AIs already improve themselves via training? What is there to improve?
- pennomian hour ago
  The human brain operates at better levels of intelligence than the best LLMs, at 20 watts of power. We are a long way to that kind of efficiency, it will probably take both bespoke hardware and algorithmic improvements to catch up to nature.
- gchamonlive2 hours ago
  Only if you think in terms of perceived raw intelligence, but self-update is a form of valuable self-improvement that could benefit current models a lot, if they could commit facts from context into their weights cheaply and reliably.
- appplication2 hours ago
  I think the idea is fundamentally improved architectures. For example, transformer-based models were an incredible stepwise improvement. Self improvement would be a model discovering a stepwise improvement similar to the transformer. And presumably the improved models from that would be more likely to make further advances still.
  Learning from training data is technically self-improvement but not the sort that is typically meant in this context.
- zer00eyz2 hours ago
  > AIs already improve themselves via training
  Marginally. Model collapse is still a problem. Continuous learning is still a problem.
  For AI to make a big leap we need a big break through.