This is a special post for quick takes by Ariel_. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Ariels Shortform
9Ariel_
6ryan_greenblatt
1Ariel_
4Trinley Goldenberg
1Ariel_
3Nathan Helm-Burger
6Thane Ruthenis
4Nathan Helm-Burger
1Ariel_
1Ariel_
2RobertM
With o1, and now o3, It seems fairly plausible now that there will be a split between "verifiable" capabilities, and general capabilities. Sure, there will be some cross-pollination (transfer), but this might have some limits.
What then? Can a superhuman mathematical + Coding AI also just reason through political strategy, or will it struggle and make errors/fallback on somewhat generic ideas in training data?
Can we get a "seed-AI style" consequentialist in some domains, while it fails to perform above human level in others? I'd like to believe reasoning would transfer (as it should be universal), but I dont think reasoning is sufficient for some more fuzzy domains - the model also needs good heuristics.
The AI Control agenda seems more promising now (for both this reason and some others).
1I'd say control seems easier now, but it's unclear if this makes the agenda more promising. You might have thought one issue with the agenda is that control is likely to be trivial and thus not worth working on (and that some other problem, e.g., doing alignment research with AI labor regardless of whether the AIs are scheming is a bigger issue).
I was fairly on board with control before, I think my main remaining concern is the trusted models not being good enough. But with more elaborate control protocols (Assuming political/AI labs actually make an effort to implement), catching an escape attempt seems more likely if the model's performance is very skewed to specific domains. Though yeah I agree that some of what you mentioned might not have changed, and could still be an issue
We haven't yet seen what happens when they turn to the verifiable property of o3 to self-play on a variety of strategy games. I suspect that it will unlock a lot of general reasoning and strategy
Do you think there's some initial evidence for that? E.g. Voyager or others from Deepmind. Self play gets thrown around a lot, not sure if concretely we've seen much yet for LLMs using it.
But yes agree, good point regarding strategy games being a domain that could be verifiable
I don't think o3 represents much direct progress towards AGI, but I think it does represent indirect progress. Math and code specialist speeds up AI R&D, which then shortens time to AGI.
Math and code specialist speeds up AI R&D
Does it? ML progress is famously achieved by atheoretical empirical tinkering, i. e. by having a very well-developed intuitive research taste: the exact opposite of well-posed math problems on which o1-3 shine. Something similar seems to be the case with programming: AIs seem bad at architecture/system design.
So it only speeds up the "drudge work", not the actual load-bearing theoretical work. Which is nonzero speedup, as it allows to test intuitive-theoretical ideas quicker, but it's more or less isomorphic to having a team of competent-ish intern underlings.
Important questions! Thanks for yhe thoughts. More discussion about this here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oC4wv4nTrs2yrP5hz/what-are-the-strongest-arguments-for-very-short-timelines?commentId=nZsFCqbC943hTeiRC
Signal boost for the "username hiding" on homepage feature in settings - it seems cool, will see if it changes how I use LW.
I wonder also about a "hide karma by default". Though less sure if that will actually achieve the intended purpose, as karma can be a good filter when just skimming comments and not reading in detail.
LW Feature request/idea for a feature - In posts that have lots of in-text links to other posts, perhaps add an LLM 1-2 sentence (context informed) summary in the hover preview?
I assume that for someone who has been around the forum for many years, various posts are familiar enough that name-dropping them in a link is sufficient to give context. But If I have to click a link and read 4+ other posts as I am going through one post, perhaps the LW UI can fairly easily build in that feature.
(suggesting it as a features since it does seem like LW is a place that experiments with various features not too different from this - ofc, I can always ask for a LLM summary manually myself if I need to)
At some point in the last couple months I was tinkering with a feature that'd try to show you a preview of the section of each linked post that'd be most contextually relevant given where it was linked from, but it was both technically fiddly and the LLM reliability is not that great. But there might be something there.