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Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

openai.com

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Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#21

Post by 0x63_Problems »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #17
password54321 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using tools to build tools is recursive.

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?

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.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#22

Post by jephs »

coherentpony wrote: post #5
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #3

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.

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

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

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#23

Post by red75prime »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #15
simonw wrote: post #2

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.

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/iterati…

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?

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#24

Post by itishappy »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #17
password54321 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using tools to build tools is recursive.

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?

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.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#25

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

red75prime wrote: post #23
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/iterati…

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?

> 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.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#26

Post by fuzzfactor »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #16
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/iterati…

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)

>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.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#27

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

itishappy wrote: post #24
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#28

Post by itishappy »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #27
itishappy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

#29

Post by topaz0 »

lokar wrote: post #8
vatsachak wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you sure that was not iterative improvement?

Iteration and recursion are famously equivalent
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