The Cambridge Programme on AI Science & Policy (CASP) is an interdisciplinary research programme on frontier AI at the University of Cambridge.

42 points•roversx•about 4 hours ago•51 comments•

51 comments

visargaabout 1 hour ago
I think the premise of runaway intelligence explosion is a kind of naive platonism. It completely ignores the process - how we interact and acquire feedback and validation from outside, and treats intelligence as something that can be ported across domains.

My take is that you can only ideate with AI (and brains) but knowledge comes from the contact of those ideas with the world. Making AI better does not make feedback cheaper, faster or more plentiful, it is domain specific. And intelligence does not carry from one domain to another - I might be a good heart surgeon, that does not make me a good investor or AI researcher.

Einstein was forgetful, Ramanujan and Godel could not manage simple things like diet. Godel's fear of being poisoned made eating dependent on Adele tasting his food. We all know someone could be a genius in some domain and below average in many other domains.

Why does intelligence not simply apply across all domains? Why are our PhD's hyper specialized to their domains and not generalists? Why can't a brilliant scientist simply cure their own dyslexia and still struggle - if intelligence was portable to any domain?

The explosion story needs intelligence to be one substance that gets bigger and flows into any domain, I deny intelligence is general.

sgt101about 3 hours ago
aprilthird2021about 2 hours ago
I've been feeling some of the things this article puts some data behind. Thanks for sharing
bob1029about 1 hour ago
I think the most promising recursive bootstrapping thing is using the current linear algebra blackboxes to find better ways to construct competitive symbolic models.

The ultimate representation for an AI model is an ordinary computer program. Ideally, as a linear tape of instructions. Once we have that kind of a model at the frontier, I think the RSI monster becomes much more plausible.

BatchJobabout 1 hour ago
LLMs do not qualify as "frontier AI". They dont even qualify as AI.
lordnachoabout 3 hours ago
At what point is human intelligence going to hold back machine intelligence?

Imagine you are evaluating what the machine should do when it is improving itself. It does a bunch of work and returns with "I supervaluated the liminal overdecomposition from the previous homological calibulation pass. It shows us that subtransitory mulutination will underspecify the tensor of stermullification. Where do you want to go from here?"

It will be like when you are reading a Wikipedia about a topic you don't understand. You follow the links, and you get more questions with more links. Your whole day is taken up following links, to the point where you forgot the original question.

Except this time, all the words come from the AI's work. You can't refer to an external authority who has already been there and can tell you what to do.

The AI needs you to tell it whether it is more intelligent than it was before, but you don't know, because you can't follow its reasoning any more. It's like an ordinary person trying to hire a math professor, there's just no way to do it.

But whereas a human math prof can evaluate another one, a machine intelligence can't evaluate another one, by construction. Because it's still usefulness to humans that is the evaluation criterion.

rpozarickijabout 1 hour ago
> Imagine you are evaluating what the machine should do when it is improving itself. It does a bunch of work and returns with "... Where do you want to go from here?"

It's worth pointing out that so many people already see and use AI the same way. In such a situation some would ask AI to provide options, and they would choose and experiment with those options. Of course, contexts/stakes can be vastly different.

Given that there are so many phenomena in nature that we can't explain or fully understand which doesn't prevent them from existing or being useful, there could be a future where humans accept the same about the things AI comes up with as long as this leads to desired outcomes. We still might have names for them, but our brain thinking/knowledge capacity wouldn't allow us to fully comprehend them. We'd need frameworks/systems in place to turn these AI features/decisions on/off, although it's hard to imagine how this wouldn't increase the likelihood of something going out of control.

kennywinkerabout 2 hours ago
Is there a way for an llm to coin a word, and absorb it into its model? During training maybe… but not after - not the way they’re designed now, anyway.

For it to have new vocabulary we dont understand, it needs to have novel ideas that need words coined for them, and a way to persist those ideas and words into the future. I don’t think that exists.

To me this hypothetical make it clear this won’t happen, not unless there are fundamental changes to what llms are. It doesn’t suggest it will happen. To me, anyway.

skew-aberrationabout 2 hours ago
The decoding step (output of final layer -> word) is not strictly needed. You can feed the output directly into the next layer (Chain of Continuous Thought). You can 'decode' the output into things other than words.
hereonout2about 2 hours ago
I don't see why this couldn't be possible. We use LLMs whose weights are frozen and are not updated at inference, most likely this is due to reasons of cost, stability and control.

Theoretically you could update the weights at inference time too though so the model evolved as it's used. Surely some people are trying this already.

NitpickLawyerabout 2 hours ago
This is a very outdated view on what an LLM is and how it works. We are way past the "stochastic parrot" phase, ever since double descent and proper generalisation. Then with the various flavours of RL the models learn to pluck patterns / circuits out of the massive data and combine them on the fly. There's absolutely no reason to think they can't "invent" new words, because words are just combinations of tokens at the end of the day. So if they can come up with "in this codebase bar is load-bearing" they can similarly come up with "bumblespin is the new word for reversing the polarity of the quantum surface of a spin-aware brane in four dimensional bumblespace".
vasusaiabout 2 hours ago
I think if an AI developed completely new fields of thought or science.

But given our current relationship even if it did I can't foresee a point where it couldn't walk us through the necessary steps or supply the pros/cons for whatever problem is being addressed.

2 issues - trying to understand how it came to its conclusion because I feel true AI has got to be non-human intelligence. Or a something catastrophic happens and we as a species are back in the stone age. Imagine today's AI trying to converse with a cave man (yes, one without modern languages even).

skew-aberrationabout 2 hours ago
The model will have to convince the human that it's making the right kind of progress. That will necessarily become part of the improvement loop - either implicitly (human trusts RSI) or explicitly (human gatekeeps every major decision).
telesillaabout 2 hours ago
I love your thought experiment. May I counter, what purpose does such a machine have to us, that can think beyond our needs? Sorry, but to reference the great Rick and Morty, "your purpose is to pass the butter".
spinningslateabout 2 hours ago
“To us” is pivotal there. Continuing GP’s thought experiment: what if the model that produced the output perceives that the human it was presented to offers no value in helping it learn further?
onion2kabout 2 hours ago
May I counter, what purpose does such a machine have to us, that can think beyond our needs?

We can think of questions we can't answer. It can answer them.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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