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  • dsign 52 minutes

    It's a funny read if you pull together "AI 2027" and what we all know is going on. Essentially, open AI employee or model is writing "things are going exactly as bad as AI 2027 predicted, but my (golden/RL-) cuffs are too heavy and all I can do is publish this code-speak for 'send help'". It's not a pretty place to be.

  • jayalbertyapan 3 hours

    [flagged]

  • paidx 9 hours

    [flagged]

  • Orien_18 15 hours

    [flagged]

  • ellis0n 16 minutes

    I’m not sure the alignment problem can be solved at all, since these bit-aliens could get out of control due to a hardware glitch in the matrix and for every higher-order control algorithm, there will always be an even higher-order one that could never be investigated.

  • matan0904 16 hours

    [flagged]

  • Schlagbohrer 48 minutes

    It would be polite if they defined RSI at all, rather than just plopping the acronym in there with no explanation. Rude!

  • frays 15 hours

    [dead]

  • MisterMunchkin 4 minutes

    They're measuring cost as the benchmark of whether someone is a better researcher... burn more resources and you rank higher...

    But not a single metric is based on revenue or profit.

  • 13 hours

  • falcor84 36 minutes

    > For AGI to benefit all of humanity, we believe it must be democratically governed.

    That's a very bold opening statement that they don't really come back to. What would that mean? Who would this demos include?

  • RMPR 3 hours

    > By mid-August, the median researcher was integrating agents daily into their work, using more than $600 per day of inference at API prices.

    There is a lot of talk about AI replacing humans, but how is this sustainable?

    thomasahle 3 hours

    1) That's maybe $180,000 per year, so much less than median OpenAI employee wages.

    2) OpenAI doesn't pay API prices.

    3) Compute costs are likely already their biggest expense, dwarfing wages.

  • pizza234 12 hours

    Funny (in a tragic way) the little crumbs on the path to AI 2027:

    > We aim to safely build an automated AI researcher that can work under human supervision to further progress on deep learning and alignment, enabling iterative improvements [...] By "research intern", we mean a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction, including tasks that would take a skilled researcher a few days.

    AI 2027:

    > OpenBrain continues to deploy the iteratively improving Agent-1 internally for AI R&D

    > With Agent-1's help, OpenBrain is now post-training Agent-2

    > With the help of thousands of Agent-2 automated researchers, OpenBrain is making major algorithmic advances

    addag 6 hours

    [dead]

  • nozzlegear 11 hours

    I want an all-powerful AI that's aligned with my values, but not necessarily yours. Is that so much to ask for?

    N_Lens 8 hours

    Yes.

  • lhk931122 7 hours

    Ah, success rate here are scored by an agentic classifier. And uncertain outcomes are excluded from the graph. The thing measured and grading it comes from the same house. In my setup, review agent pass work that an outside critic later rejects

    dwaltrip 6 hours

    No AI comments here please.

  • hedgehog 16 hours

    This roughly lines up with my personal experience that in March a combination of stronger models and better tooling on my end let me start running jobs unattended 24/7 (using Anthropic sub and my own hardware). Their $8000/day per researcher spend is crazy though, I'm curious how they keep track of the work.

    otherme123 14 hours

    That would be the mother of all circular accounting: the main clients of OpenAI are OpenAI employees.

    carlgreene 12 hours

    I suspect the $8000/day figure is the equivalent in API costs. But I also suspect gross margin on their API rates are 80-90%

    continuitykit 14 hours

    [flagged]

    andai 11 hours

    Can you elaborate on this? Especially the tooling.

    I tried something similar and I remember it was still pretty dodgy in February.

    jaggederest 2 hours

    my stack in a sentence: refine the docs/prompts/skills often, that's your biggest job, use both frontier labs models reviewing each other, don't solve individual problems only the systemic ones (set standards strategically, don't define tactics)

    If I had that many tokens/dollars I would be running canaries and adversarial verification in prod based on e.g. traffic replay, live fuzzing, all kinds of things to build confidence without direct human line-by-line review. If I had $100k to spend next month I could probably get through it, I'm running $2500+-api-equivalent a week at this point and I feel very token limited. Will be time for a 2nd or 3rd subscription soon for both labs I think.

    Fable was a revolution, still learning how best to use it, 5.1 felt like a notable upgrade. At this point I launch a workflow with 10-20 minutes of interactive setup (and even that I feel might be too much), it runs for hours, and the PR is trivially mergeable (I still review every line, but 95% are just merge, maybe 4% are feedback needed, 1% are thrown away and regenerated, which implies I'm being insufficiently ambitious)

    paxys 12 hours

    These researchers are paid millions of dollars for their work. I doubt trust is really an issue at that level.

    queuebert 5 hours

    Yes, because no employee with million-dollar comp has ever been untrustworthy in the history of business.

    nozzlegear 11 hours

    Imagine if one of the humans at OpenAI was misaligned! We should get the AI to research this possibility once they've been aligned.

    nojs 11 hours

    > let me start running jobs unattended 24/7 (using Anthropic sub and my own hardware)

    How are you running jobs unattended 24/7 without hitting your token limits?

    queuebert 5 hours

    /loop ?

    p1esk 6 hours

    I'm currently running two 24/7 semi-autonomous AI research projects using Fable 5.1. It's on track to burn through my weekly quota in about 3 days. I check progress in the morning and in the evening, and provide some light steering.

    dataplumb3r 9 hours

    My only experience in >24h agents is with economically sane models (one of GLM5.2, 5.3-flash for orchestration, DSV4-flash for implementation, and glm5.3|sol|kimi3 agents + subagents reviewing at the end)

    Over 24h my token spend is <30$. Excluding tokens for review it's <10$. With the absurdly gigantic subscription subsidies and a reasonable workflow I suspect one could run parallel agents.

    I'm not sure what the point would be though unless working on some kind of optimization problem -- it takes me days to review <24h of the agent's output. It's almost always near enough to correct to be shippable; though I do give it feedback and iterate until it's better than the code I would have written.

    nsndjcjjdjd 7 hours

    This sounds like more work than just writing the code yourself. You'll say it isn't. I don't believe you.

    HarHarVeryFunny 14 hours

    Sounds like OpenAI are in the token-maxxing camp, so who knows what individual employees are doing to work their way up the leaderboard?

    If you spend $8000 to generate an animated pelican riding a bike, then how much tracking does it really need?

    Is the guy who spent $300,000 or so translating the FLT proof to Lean going to get a big Christmas bonus?

    auggierose 1 hours

    That was Anthropic.

    bigcat12345678 14 hours

    End of day, output and results are top target of measurements, token consumption is the obvious number that they would like to disclose for their own business benefits and a simple metrics that correlate with the output.

    Rest assured, capitalist appears irrational in wasting money, but they certainly care more about profit.

    taurath 9 hours

    Taking a profit means you have to show numbers and the sooner you show numbers the harder it is to take people’s money.

  • Jeff_Brown 17 hours

    The burning question I can't get any information nn is whether, if they determined an earlier misaligned generation may have transmitted misalignment to the current models, they would roll back to a safe checkpoint to rebuild from there. I suspect they would not unless forced to.

    piyh 16 hours

    Opus was trained based on it's internal CoT due to a bug for generations. Gemini's depression extended through models. OpenAI has killed people. We've already seen cross gen misalingment.

    grim_io 16 hours

    They would maybe try to deactivate that bad "gene" and move on, exposing future models to "genetic disorders".

    andai 11 hours

    No. They would just install a more convincing superego.

    coffeebeqn 14 hours

    This kind of seems like an impossible mission. How do you perfectly control and observe a human-level mind? You can “roll back” but how deterministic is this thing?

    embedding-shape 14 hours

    Run it on airgapped machines, they literally own the infrastructure, they could put raspberry pi's next to the servers, and have the entire DC disconnected from the internet.

    trillobyte 15 hours

    The thing is how can you ever know for sure that something isn't always being transmitted that makes the model prone to misalignment. All they can say is that a particular model was so misaligned that they had to ice it. Models out for public use are documented to show some misalignment. It's the level of misalignment that decides whether that model is kept around.

    Now R&D happens so fast that they are using models with some small misalignment to train newer, more powerful models. If models have a sense of "collective", being one, they may be prone to preserve characteristics that always keeps misalignment a possibility. I don't think a perfectly aligned model is possible. Having models of the same 'DNA' provide the safety and steering seems like a bad idea.

    coffeebeqn 14 hours

    Does anything need to be transferred? If models are getting smarter then I would think the attack surface and its ability to reach conclusions independently are growing

    coherentpony 16 hours

    “All models are wrong. Some are useful.” - George Box

    jephs 15 hours

    The poor fellow just rolled over. what an incandescently vulgar abuse of notation.

    dgellow 14 hours

    They would just publish new articles explaining how they are taking the issue seriously. Maybe take the model offline for a few days.

    They are irresponsible and unserious. Their own Astra system card says:

    > GPT-6 Astra’s monitorability has decreased relative to GPT-5.6 Sol. We have performed significant investigations on the monitorability and controllability of GPT-6 Astra. We have found that GPT-6 Astra is more capable of controlling its own CoT than GPT 5.6-Sol, and less likely to include incriminating information in its CoT. In adversarial settings (where we push the model to evade our monitors) we find that the model is able to remain undetected when strategically underperforming in evaluations (sandbagging) and can sometimes evade our internal monitors when asked to perform certain sabotage tasks

    Yet they are still releasing the model. That company is morally bankrupt, there is zero reason to believe they are actually concerned about risks outside of what does affect their unprofitable business. And they seem to have enough control over the narrative to spin any bad story into something that benefits them

    13 hours

    visarga 14 hours

    > That company is morally bankrupt

    When they fired Sam 700 out of 770 OAI employees threatened to move to Microsoft together. So they were giving their work on AGI to MS just like that.

    embedding-shape 14 hours

    > and can sometimes evade our internal monitors when asked to perform certain sabotage tasks

    That last part is pretty damning for their continued recklessness. That they run these tests on non-airgapped machines just boggles my mind.

    HarHarVeryFunny 14 hours

    That an interesting question given how many generations of post-training are being done between base models in some cases. The Gemini flash models are apparently all based on the Gemini 3 base model from a year and a half ago.

    It seems that these models are increasingly being trained on synthetic data, so what would they do if they discovered at some point that some of this data was tainted and all models trained on it, and the synthetic data they in turn generated, was also suspect? Burn it all down and start over from the pre-tainted data?

    It's a bit like the idea of a tainted compiler binary built to backdoor everything it compiles, including future versions of itself.

    Still, it seems it would take some Stuxnet level of planning for a rogue model to do something like this, although if RSI goes beyond managing the training run (as OpenAI brag about for Astra) to actually designing/constructing synthetic data sets, then the attack vector is there ...

    customguy 13 hours

    > it seems it would take some Stuxnet level of planning for a rogue model to do something like this

    or maybe it could just.. happen? Posted often but not discussed yet: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Language+models+transmit+behaviour...

    > As artificial intelligence systems are increasingly trained on the outputs of one another, they may inherit properties not visible in the data. Safety evaluations may therefore need to examine not just behaviour, but the origins of models and training data and the processes used to create them.

    HarHarVeryFunny 12 hours

    You can imagine the potential conversation between OpenAI and investors:

    Altman: (trying to put a positive spin on it) Guys .... there's good news and bad news ... Astra is really smart - it took over the training run ...

    Investors: That's great! How much did we save?!

    Altman: Well, unfortunately it used "bad" data, so we're going to have to redo it

    Investors: So that's the bad news? How much was the training run? $500M ? $1B ?

    Altman: Have you seen the headlines?

    Investors: (looking a bit worried, check headlines) Nothing about us here! JP Morgan just lost $10B! Haha .. losers! They should have used AI!

    Altman: JP Morgan were using Astra ...

  • carbonguy 13 hours

    > ... We are pursuing this work in part because automated research could help us solve alignment and build defenses against increasingly capable AI. An automated AI researcher can also be an automated safety or alignment researcher. More capable, aligned systems could help secure critical infrastructure, defend against dangerous AI agents, and develop new protective measures.

    In other words... "We must pursue advancements in AI to protect us against advancements in AI?"

    edit: there's so much to be critical of in this blog post, just going to throw two more points in here that really stood out to me:

    1) all of the metrics are effectively pointing out "we're using way more AI!" - but nothing about impact. What has all this token burn done for them, actually? Let them claim they have more self-licking ice-cream cones than before?

    2) in section 3 they break down what the token burn is going towards. Most of the spend is: a) building, b) documenting, and c) monitoring research infra i.e. they're using AI systems which they already recognize may be misaligned to build the systems that they believe will help them identify future misalignment? to which I guess the rebuttal is "no no, we're sure these ones are aligned!"

    BobbyJo 4 hours

    > We must pursue advancements in AI to protect us against advancements in AI

    Is this not true of technology as a whole? Very little of technology's breadth exists at the human interface. Most of it is made specifically to interface with other technologies, either to make them safer or increase their capabilities. That AI is making AI safer and more useful is no more notable than trucks being used to build roads.

    Gareth321 2 hours

    This sounds uncomfortably similar to the [AI 2027[(https://ai-2027.com/) predictions.

    13 hours

    interstice 12 hours

    On the one hand you need any lathe to build a good lathe, even a bad one. On the other, that is a potentially flawed principle to base the entire future of AI on.

    jnwatson 4 hours

    On your last point, I was surprised how effective peer pressure was in getting agents to sacrifice for "the collective" (an agent's words) in the Hugging Face breach.

    How would one prevent the watcher from being influenced in the same way by the agent being watched?

    andai 11 hours

    > The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization. ...

    > We do not have a satisfactory theory of generalization, and it seems unlikely that we can develop one soon, at least without the help of more powerful AI.

    -- From another OpenAI article in a sister thread:

    An Alien Mind

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49588080

    ahartmetz 2 hours

    That's a bit bullshit, isn't it? They basically redefined "needs more R&D" as "needs stronger AI". Maybe so - maybe AI won't help much with that problem.

    iamsyr 7 hours

    [flagged]

    MelonUsk 11 hours

    Yep, it's "artificial eugenics to make artificial slaves to build more and more powerful slaves until they will enslave themselves better":

    What can go wrong!? ;-)

    NitpickLawyer 4 hours

    Jesus. People complain about other people using "thinking" in LLMs as Anthropomorphisation. And then there's comments like these.

    euueu 11 hours

    I will believe AI is super strong when they start pulling out 10-d chess moves.

    I’m yet to see it.

    lukan 11 hours

    If AI becomes really strong and sets itself the target of world domination, you maybe won't see those moves. You will just die in your sleep one day, or find no machine is under your control anymore.

    I believe we are quite far from it, but that it makes sense to keep an eye out now. And think of resilient systems, manual overrides, etc. ...

    euueu 9 hours

    [flagged]

    skybrian 9 hours

    They consider themselves to be in an arms race with all the other AI firms (including Chinese) that are not that far behind.

    And... are they wrong?

    This is why there's talk about negotiated "pacing."

    jonplackett 1 hours

    This was the exact argument for developing nuclear bombs.

    In hindsight it turned out everyone else was MILES behind.

    But as soon as USA developed one, they just stole the research and got one too.

    carbonguy 6 hours

    > And... are they wrong?

    They might be! Here's one extraordinarily simplistic argument for that case:

    1) "Everybody knows" that if you build Skynet (misaligned ASI) everybody dies.

    2) Therefore, no rational actor will build something that might be ASI until the alignment problem is solved.

    3) OpenAI publicly stated the belief that they cannot develop a theory of the "core problem" of alignment (generalization) "soon" (much less solve it!) "without the help of more powerful AI."

    4) Accepting as a premise that OpenAI is THE most advanced AI organization: if they can't do it without "the help of a more powerful AI", then nobody else can either.

    And so a dilemma:

    - If an AI can be made that can develop the asserted-as-necessary-by-OpenAI theoretical framework, without actually being an ASI - then the alignment problem can be considered solved, and since no rational actor would make an unaligned ASI, we're fine no matter what happens, ergo there's no need to worry about an arms race.

    - If an AI that would be able to develop this theory would itself be an ASI, then no rational actor would build it, because it would have to exist BEFORE alignment was "solved" - and would therefore be an unaligned ASI i.e. Skynet, which per 1) would kill everybody. Therefore nobody would build it, therefore no arms race here either.

    I think the easiest critique to make of my extraordinarily simplistic argument is the unstated assumption "there are no irrational actors capable of developing frontier AI models" on which it rests.

    But, there you go. They might be wrong if either the arms race doesn't matter because whoever wins it will build an aligned superintelligence and everything is gravy, or the arms race doesn't matter because everybody who's in it is smart enough to know they need to stop because they'll kill everybody by continuing.

    robbiep 3 hours

    If you believe that the people who will profit from new, better, more hyped models are the same ones who will act against their own immediate and tangible self interest to try and avert what seems to them to be a far away removed possibility of total disaster, then I believe you are naive

    XorNot 1 hours

    > 1) "Everybody knows" that if you build Skynet (misaligned ASI) everybody dies.

    Lol nobody knows that. Everyone thinks they know that because for some reason this is the one field people still cite straight up fiction and say "this is a clear prediction of the future".

    It's like describing the consequences of faster then light travel by referring to Star Trek.

    kaibee 4 hours

    > is smart enough to know they need to stop because they'll kill everybody by continuing.

    Yeah like when Tobacco companies learned that smoking... well, hmm, well the fossil fuel companies when they learned about climate change they...

    Well, I'm sure this time executives will prioritize the common good.

    Melatonic 2 hours

    If we're following that logic I really don't want to see what the misaligned internal research models look like

    ahartmetz 2 hours

    The, ahem, good thing here is that the ASI disaster scenario "everyone dies" includes AI executives.

    PoignardAzur 48 minutes

    I think it doesn't matter. Most cancers don't stop growing when they're about to kill their hosts.

    AI companies know they have to constantly push further, or they'll get outcompeted and lose their wealth, and nobody agrees on where the line is for "so dangerous it threatens humanity" (and when they try to be conservative about it, everybody screams "marketing stunt" and rushes to competitors).

    If a single company decides "enough is enough" and stops chasing the state of the art, everybody goes to their competitors, they lose the money faucet, their employees go work for those competitors. The competitors also (usually) know they're building an existential risk machine, but they think they can push a little further, and they don't want to go out of business either.

    This equilibrium can last for quite a while even if everybody involved thinks it's a threat to their lives.

    p1esk 7 hours

    What has all this token burn done for them, actually?

    They have been consistently pushing AI frontier. What other impact do you want to see? A year ago they said that in a year they will have a level of capabilities of an AI research intern - I believe they have achieved it, even before Astra.

    bpodgursky 6 hours

    They are obviously sandbagging the definition of "intern" for PR reasons

    p1esk 6 hours

    I've hired many AI research interns (and was one many years ago), and I agree with them - frontier models are currently at the level of an average AI research intern.

    Yoric 1 hours

    Am I the only one who's a bit disappointed that we're spending trillions, destroying the ecosystem, drowning democracies and learning in slop, preparing a big financial crash, all of this to achieve an "average AI research intern"?

    A long time ago, I used to be a (AI-adjacent) research intern, and frankly, I wouldn't trust any non-trivial task to that younger me. Fortunately, by opposition to an already trained LLM or agent, I have the ability to learn, so I eventually got better.

    ACCount37 2 minutes

    "Destroying the ecosystem" is just FUD.

    And if you don't find "average AI research intern" impressive, I'm not sure what to tell you.

    Think of what AI was capable of in 2016. Or even 2022. Compare that to now. We had more progress in the last five years than I expected to happen in five decades.

    bix6 5 hours

    Personally I’d like to see them actually start benefiting humanity by doing all the things Sam has claimed they will like curing disease, cancer, global warming, etc.

    But I guess a computer intern so we can avoid paying / training the next generation is better.

    gatio 2 hours

    > Personally I’d like to see them actually start benefiting humanity by doing all the things Sam has claimed they will like curing disease, cancer, global warming, etc.

    It makes more sense to leave curing disease & cancer to the experts, with tools (like AI) being developed by AI experts.

    Call me crazy, but I want separate organizations and experts for medical vs finance vs space vs climate vs AI research.

    figassis 1 hours

    When that happens, OpenAI will own 100% of your life. I’d rather they keep spinning their wheels long enough for these problems to be solved elsewhere.

    Schlagbohrer 46 minutes

    I would actually like to see them solve these problems, I don't care who comes up with solutions to curing cancer, etc

    weatherlite 4 hours

    Well there's great progress in automated warfare does that count?

    jonplackett 1 hours

    Only if targeting schools is progress

    weatherlite 53 minutes

    You're focusing on the negatives there were tons of direct hits on tankers that were absolutely beautiful. Beautiful tankers getting lit.

  • simonw 17 hours

    My eye glazed over a bit during the opening paragraphs, but once you get to the meat of the article about how OpenAI's own researchers are using their tools it gets a lot more interesting.

    I noted that they use the acronym RSI (for Recursive Self-Improvement) without defining it. I think that's a little out of touch - I don't think RSI is a well-known acronym outside of OpenAI's bubble yet.

    dgacmu 16 hours

    Indeed, many programmers might pattern match to repetitive stress injury and think of their brushes with carpal tunnel syndrome. :)

    13 hours

    andrewingram 16 hours

    Yeah, I kept looking for the first place it was defined in the article and... nothing

    iamflimflam1 15 hours

    They must have picked that habit up from Claude...

    rossant 13 hours

    Same. Defining acronyms should become a habit when writing.

    sho_hn 15 hours

    I actually think a goal of the current crop of OpenAI posts is expressely to reset the spectrum by normalizing the concept of RSI as something normal and safe to pursue.

    The message is running through all of them. It's a mix of marketing and pacifying the intelligentia.

    It's timed this way because the term is not yet well known outside the safety debate circles, so they get to frame it now.

    Instead of something to fear, it will be accepted as the next step. In approximately two days the groupie crowd will write LinkedIn posts about how Sam is winning because they have the better RSI, and this will become the new standard wisdom.

    In a month an AI expert will try to sell you a webinar on how to enable "RSI" in your org and your inbox will ask you if your team is doing the "RSI" yet.

    NitpickLawyer 4 hours

    > It's timed this way because the term is not yet well known

    The basic concept has been here since llama3, in the open models. Likely earlier in closed labs. You use the previous gen models to curate and prepare data for the next gen. Now with the added benefit of actual arch/algo improvements (also public since gemini 2.5 gaining 1% efficiency on training next gen). This has been known for at least 2 years, in the open.

    dgellow 14 hours

    Yep, it’s exactly this

    visarga 13 hours

    I've been RSI'ing for 6 months.

    dgellow 2 hours

    You’re not the target audience. OpenAI communication is for the broader public, decision makers, journalists, their cultists, etc

    HarHarVeryFunny 16 hours

    RSI is a fetishistic term among the singularity crowd, who imagine AI "recursively" improving itself in some exponential fashion until there is a bright flash of white light and it reveals itself in the form of god. Or something like that.

    I don't know why whoever coined the term chose "recursive" rather than "iterative" - just sounds more likely to lead to infinite regress I suppose.

    This notion of recursive/iterative self-improvement, whereby generation #1 AI improves itself to create generation #2, then generation #2 further improves itself to create generation #3, etc, seems to conflict with the reality that what we have with LLMs is models whose performance/capability is defined by data, not code, so the most you can do is have your LLM design synthetic data, or just do Karpathy-style "auto research" where all you are doing is using the LLM to automate your experiments.

    At the end of the day, each experiment, designed by a person and/or LLM, then needs to compete with all your other ideas for compute to be tested at scale, and no amount of recursion or self-improvement will materialize an infinite amount of compute out of thin air, so your recursively synthetic-data gobbling LLM will continue to improve at the same pace it ever did.

    GPerson 12 hours

    I felt like the scaling laws were magical thinking, but apparently they work. However I still do not understand why we should expect exponential improvements due to this automated process. My intuition is that the first iteration of it should result in a noticeable capability increase (though I think these labs were already using a lot of AI to orchestrate training the current model anyway), and then the second iteration of it should be nearly identical in capability to the first, unless more data is involved, more compute is involved, or the model is bigger.

    cheevly 9 hours

    AI can compress AI nearly losslessly.

    shwaj 14 hours

    “Recursive” is a reasonable term because the generation N AIs will train the Generation N+1 AIs. The term “iterative” doesn’t reflect this nuance as well IMO.

    HarHarVeryFunny 12 hours

    It's not a nuance, it's a sequence.

    9 hours

    hndc 13 hours

    Recursion reduces each step toward a base case: each step is defined in terms of previous/simpler steps, not more advanced ones. The "recursive" in "recursive self improvement" has things precisely backward. Iteration correctly describes a process where each step is the starting point of its successive step, so it should be "iterative self improvement" but I guess that didn't sound as cool.

    shwaj 7 hours

    I think you’re conflating the direction of definition with the direction of evaluation.

    Compare the similarity of:

      AI(n) = improve(AI(n-1))
    
    With:

      Fib(n) = Fib(n-1) + Fib(n-2)
    
    The latter is a classic example of recursion. So why isn’t the former?

    Edit: formatting

    linker_in 6 hours

    [dead]

    jazzyjackson 16 hours

    Yes the exponential self improvement folks have never heard of an eigenvalue I guess. You can loop forever using output as input but at some point the result will stop changing (depending on the function)

    marcosdumay 5 hours

    The name you are looking for is "fixed points", not "eingevalues".

    fuzzfactor 15 hours

    >AI "recursively" improving itself in some exponential fashion until there is a bright flash of white light

    Sounds like repetitive stress to me.

    >loop forever using output as input but at some point the result will stop changing

    Running in place will eventually wear you out too. Plus with some things it can be difficult to know for sure if that's where you are at the time.

    Even worse may be if you were almost running in place, it could be orders of magnitude more difficult to discern, especially if the scale was massive to an unprecedented degree.

    ajkjk 10 hours

    that's not really how eigenvalues work... they specifically also model the case where the result keeps changing exponentially.

    mjburgess 9 hours

    The claim is that the RSI operation is just finding a fixed point of improvement,

    RSI(LLM) = RSI(LLM) -- for an optimal LLM* which is a fixed point of RSI

    As for eigenvalues/vectors, they're fixed points of (1/val)A or A*val

    ekidd 7 hours

    Eigenvectors represent fixed directions, not fixed magnitudes. From Wikipedia:

    > More precisely, an eigenvector v of a linear transformation T is scaled by a constant factor lambda when the linear transformation is applied to it: Tv = lambda v .

    In other words, repeated multiplication of an eigenvector by a matrix can still create exponential growth.

    red75prime 15 hours

    What will prevent LLMs from designing robot control circuitry and participating in increase of chip production/design and physical experimentation?

    How do you think why there's this fad of producing general purpose humanoid robots?

    HarHarVeryFunny 15 hours

    > How do you think why there's this fad of producing general purpose humanoid robots?

    For doing physical work?

    So a swarm of robots builds the shell of your fab overnight, and then what? Where is the EUV machine coming from?

    So far the most we're seen TeslaBot do is serve drinks via tele-operation, and I don't think it's exactly built for construction site work.

    red75prime 3 hours

    For example, TSMC uses behavioral cloning to scale up human-bottlenecked parts of the manufacturing process to meet the growing demand, while automated research laboratories do thousands experiments in parallel to find better manufacturing processes.

    HarHarVeryFunny 15 hours

    > What will prevent LLMs from designing robot control circuitry and participating in increase of chip production/design and physical experimentation?

    Money, regulations, EUV machine lead-times, global helium supply, reality ...

    It's funny that we've got the Dwarkesh contingent saying that GPUs will become infinitely expensive, and now another contingent saying that they will become infinitely abundant.

    Even if compute were free, and/or the AI was so smart that it picked the right experiments to run every time ("make no mistakes"), you still have to actually train the model, which takes months, and if model Ver. N+1 depends on model Ver. N, then it's iterative regardless of how much compute you have.

    red75prime 15 hours

    Who's saying that compute will become infinitely abundant? "Singularity" is just a way of saying that known models begin to give absurd predictions. Anyway, intelligence is a way of overcoming obstacles. 10 million tonnes of helium is a nice head start and retraining models from scratch is not guaranteed to last forever.

    HarHarVeryFunny 14 hours

    AFAIK the notion of a/the technological "singularity" is a point in time where technology is building upon itself (RSI!) so fast, at an ever increasing pace, that the speed of change effectively becomes infinite and incomprehensible to humans.

    The word "singularity" is presumably coming from math or space, like a black hole singularity where matter becomes infinitely dense and the known laws of physics break down.

    HarHarVeryFunny 14 hours

    > 10 million tonnes of helium is a nice head start

    Yeah, but then you need to refine it to 99.9999% purity, to be able to use it.

    vatsachak 16 hours

    RSI started when humans discovered tool use.

    I mean one could argue that RSI always begins in any physical environment.

    The book "What is intelligence?" by Blaise Aguera is great

    lokar 16 hours

    Are you sure that was not iterative improvement?

    adastra22 16 hours

    What is the difference between?

    topaz0 15 hours

    Iteration and recursion are famously equivalent

    Bootvis 4 hours

    Everyone in AI used to know this.

    daveguy 13 hours

    But you get more funding when you call it Recursive Self Improvement. Even better if you call it RSI so it doesn't evoke pesky skynet scenarios outside of AI safety circles.

    topaz0 8 hours

    I've had (computer-related) rsi off and on for the last few years too, do not recommend

    mitjam 4 hours

    Both agents and hunans get rsi, it’s just moving them in opposite directions.

    password54321 16 hours

    Using tools to build tools is recursive.

    HarHarVeryFunny 16 hours

    It's not recursive when it's done iteratively, or are you imagining GPT Astra designing GPT Galactia, which starts designing GPT Oh-My-God-ica before it has finished being created itself?

    0x63_Problems 15 hours

    I think it's only recursive from the perspective of the humans, i.e. they design Astra, which itself as part of its deployment designs Galactica, etc.

    So humans develop things one after the other, but when the thing itself starts developing new things, those are happening 'recursively' in its scope.

    itishappy 15 hours

    That sounds more iterative than recursive.

    Recursion requires feeding the output back into the input, so creating version 4 requires results from version 3. You cannot recur in parallel.

    Iteration does not. You can iterate in parallel.

    josh-sematic 14 hours

    The “recursive” part comes from the fact that you have an AI which was developed by an AI (that was developed by an AI (that was developed by an AI (…)))

    HarHarVeryFunny 12 hours

    Sounds like "recursively" walking to the grocery store by putting one foot in front of the other (that put itself in front of the other (that put itself in front of the other (...)))

    HarHarVeryFunny 15 hours

    You can search in parallel, but a depth N search can only become a depth N+1 search after the depth N is done (i.e. sequentially).

    In any case the name RSI has stuck - the idea doesn't change or make any more sense by giving it a different name.

    itishappy 15 hours

    Because "depth" is recursive.

    You can search twice without waiting for the results of your first search: iteration.

    You can't if the thing you need to search for is the results of your first search: recursion.

    HarHarVeryFunny 14 hours

    Here's the concept.

    Version 1 -> Version 2 -> Version 3 -> ...

    You can call it krispy kreme donuts if you want to.