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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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None of the existing tools seem effective enough, given their inputs, to lead to runaway exponential increase in capability.

Sure but the inputs are growing rapidly. There's still plenty of space at the bottom, the fundamental limits for computing are very generous. All our chips are still basically 2D!

Maybe our current machines can only produce a few nice-to-haves like this. But the next generation will produce more and better. Parameters get cheaper as transistors get smaller, as architecture gets better and algorithms improve. The amount of money we put in continually grows. And then our training methods improve as well. We're already starting to reap interest on the 'architecture improvement' front. Compound interest starts really slow but it gets powerful very quickly.

The human brain shows you can do a hell of a lot with 20 watts, at 20 hertz, on a shoestring materials budget, fitting the whole thing through a woman's hips! We have every element on the periodic table, endless lasers, acids and refinement techniques, we have gigawatts and gigahertz, thousands of cubic meters to spend. Our methods are incredibly primitive compared to what's already proven possible, there's so much low-hanging fruit we're yet to find.

The question is not whether current technology will help you make better technology, or whether AGI is theoretically possible. The question is how quickly change happens, and to what extent advances make future advances faster: You have better tools but the problem has also become harder. So far, it seems to me like the latter effect is winning out. GPT 4 can write (allegedly) working code, use documentation, bug fix, etc. But is it good enough to make writing GPT 5 substantially easier or faster than making GPT 4 was?

But is it good enough to make writing GPT 5 substantially easier or faster than making GPT 4 was?

Well I doubt 'Open'AI would tell us, they like keeping things secret nowadays. Nevertheless, existing demonstrated capabilities seem to be accelerating progress. I'm not a subject matter technical expert but it seems this is happening: https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/04/18/nvidia-rd-chief-on-how-ai-is-improving-chip-design/

I can't judge how significant this is because I'm not an expert. But my intuition is that compound interest balloons outwards and there's plenty of physics/computing space for it to balloon outwards into. This is a fundamentally new kind of compound interest that is different to whatever input scaling we were already doing to keep up with Moore's law. In addition to increasing the amount of wealth and human intellect going in quantitatively, we get some qualitatively superior (albeit specialized) inhuman intellect too.

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