> the foundation of civilization is standing on the shoulders of giants. Progress in large part is figuring out better way of doing that
It's so much easier to imitate than to invent something truly novel and useful. Let's do a bit of napkin math. A human lifetime is about 500M words. GPT-4 used up about 30,000 human lifetimes of language. But cultural evolution took 200K years and 120B people to get here, about 4 million times the size of GPT-4's training set.
That is of course hand wavy, but it shows progress is a million times harder than imitation. We really are standing on the shoulders of giants, or a very long chain of people. If we forgot all the knowledge preserved by language it would take us the same effort to recover as the first time around.
I think all progress comes from search - search for experience (data), and search for understanding (data compression). This feeds on itself, but is coupled with the search space - the real world. And the world is not eager to tell us all its secrets. AI will only advance as fast as it can search, it's not a matter of pure scaling of computation, we need to scale interaction and validation as well.
> AI will only advance as fast as it can search, it's not a matter of pure scaling of computation, we need to scale interaction and validation as well.
I think Kevin Kelly made a similar point in explaining his skepticism around intelligence explosions; even if we build something much much smarter than us, the thing will still need to do experiments to fine-tune it's (super-human nuanced) understanding of physics/biology/whatever - and the clock-cycle of external reality isn't speeding up like our computation is.
I think something smarter than us could design better/more informative experiments than we could to gather information about the world. That being said, I think his/your point is insightful.
It's so much easier to imitate than to invent something truly novel and useful. Let's do a bit of napkin math. A human lifetime is about 500M words. GPT-4 used up about 30,000 human lifetimes of language. But cultural evolution took 200K years and 120B people to get here, about 4 million times the size of GPT-4's training set.
That is of course hand wavy, but it shows progress is a million times harder than imitation. We really are standing on the shoulders of giants, or a very long chain of people. If we forgot all the knowledge preserved by language it would take us the same effort to recover as the first time around.
I think all progress comes from search - search for experience (data), and search for understanding (data compression). This feeds on itself, but is coupled with the search space - the real world. And the world is not eager to tell us all its secrets. AI will only advance as fast as it can search, it's not a matter of pure scaling of computation, we need to scale interaction and validation as well.