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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33681 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Kurzweil, as one of the original singularitarians, is likely banking on ASI to bail us out here.

Yeah about that...

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training - the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled data to understand language patterns and structures - have plateaued.

Sutskever is widely credited as an early advocate of achieving massive leaps in generative AI advancement through the use of more data and computing power in pre-training, which eventually created ChatGPT. Sutskever left OpenAI earlier this year to found SSI.

“The 2010s were the age of scaling, now we're back in the age of wonder and discovery once again. Everyone is looking for the next thing,” Sutskever said. “Scaling the right thing matters more now than ever.”

Sutskever declined to share more details on how his team is addressing the issue, other than saying SSI is working on an alternative approach to scaling up pre-training.

On the other hand, we have both Dario Amodei from Anthropic and Altman from OAI extolling the virtues of test-time compute in the vein of o1 (as the article acknowledges).

Personally, while I find the recent relative stagnation in LLMs to be annoying, it's only been what, two years since GPT-4? There are open source models that beat the OG GPT-4 while being much smaller (Llama 405B versus likely a trillion for 4), and models like Sonnet 3.5 are a small but appreciable improvement. I'm not going to call scaling out until we've spent either another year or a hundred billion USD on it, and we'll have to see how test time compute pans out.

Besides, even Ilya says they're working on their own secret sauce solution. We'll see when we see, it's far far too early to call AGI out of the cards.

Sure, I agree with all of that. It would be silly for skeptics of LLMs to “declare victory” now. I say give it another 5 years at least. The main reason I brought it up is because Ilya’s the one who’s saying it, which lends quite a bit more authority to the claim.

He's saying that we'll have to scale up something else - inference time is the most obvious choice. Synthetic data is also widely used. Ilya wouldn't be founding his own 'making superintelligence' company if he thought it wasn't possible.

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