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Welcome to the Era of Experience [pdf]

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Re: Welcome to the Era of Experience [pdf]

#41

Post by trollbridge »

kubb wrote: post #15

Wowzers, it’s happening imminently. Great to know that we can expect agents that learn from experience very very soon! When they’re here I’ll make an upvote farming bot that learns from experience how not to get caught and unleash it on HM. After that I’ll make an agent that runs a SaaS company that learns from experience how to make money and I’ll finally be able to chill out and play video games. That last thing I’…

There are days when I feel like I’m a not-so-advanced LLM, just spewing forth text in documents nobody is going to read.

Re: Welcome to the Era of Experience [pdf]

#42

Post by gwern »

quantumHazer wrote: post #18

Is it me or this is yet another PR stunt masked as a serious article with LaTeX and all the fancy things? The graph doesn’t even make sense. I’m burning out from all this hypester type of thing, it’s really really tiring.

What fancy things? There's not a single equation in the whole thing. (I don't think this is even using Computer Modern, is it? It looks like a considerably thicker serif, and some of the characters like the lower-case 'g' look different.) Or are you referring to 'having 4 short, simple footnotes' as 'fancy' now? And also the graph makes perfect sense and tracks my own impression of RL history, what are you talking about?

Re: Welcome to the Era of Experience [pdf]

#43

Post by [deleted] »

baq wrote: post #38

Any such article or book must be read with https://ai-2027.com/ in the back of the mind. Exponential processes are… exponentially… dependent on starting conditions, but if takeoff really happens this decade, we’ll be at the destination before Winds of Winter.

[deleted]

Re: Welcome to the Era of Experience [pdf]

#44

Post by shiandow »

kubb wrote: post #15

Wowzers, it’s happening imminently. Great to know that we can expect agents that learn from experience very very soon! When they’re here I’ll make an upvote farming bot that learns from experience how not to get caught and unleash it on HM. After that I’ll make an agent that runs a SaaS company that learns from experience how to make money and I’ll finally be able to chill out and play video games. That last thing I’…

We don't need an agent to do all that.

We just need it to get better at building agents.

Re: Welcome to the Era of Experience [pdf]

#45

Post by simianwords »

I want to clarify whether the "learn from experience" is still done through RL offline and not autonomously and continuously?

I think the core idea from the paper is that while we have already hit the ceiling of normal kind of data; there's a new kind of data from agents acting in the real world and users (or some one else?) providing rewards based on some ground truth.

Somehow I misinterpreted from this paper that this kind of learning would be autonomous and continuous.

Re: Welcome to the Era of Experience [pdf]

#46

Post by daseiner1 »

apwell23 wrote: post #24
jgbmlg wrote: post #4

It's ironic that machine intelligence is advancing during an era when human intelligence is declining.

> era when human intelligence is declining is it ? i am listening to most beautiful music that was ever created. it was created in 2024.

what music??

Re: Welcome to the Era of Experience [pdf]

#47

Post by kkfx »

Honestly? Well, we entering an era (beside possible global war, famine, ... etc) where knowledge application will be more and more automated, while knowledge creation will be human.

Meaning we need less strong arms and more strong brains. Not something that new anyway, the "information age" already makes clear intelligent people could do pretty anything they want to do, while less intelligent are constrained in what they can actually do even if they want.

Experience means essentially automation in the chapter terms, something we have already "solved" could be automated by some machine. To solve new things we need humans. That's is.

Small potatoes new knowledge, meaning knowledge emerging merely crossing per-existing knowledge like from a literature review paper could be a machine game, it's not really creation of new knowledge in the end.

BUT the real point is another: who own the model? LLMs state a clear thing, we need open knowledge just to train them, copyright can't be sustained anymore. But once a model is created who own it? Because the current model is dramatically dangerous since training is expensive and not much exiting, so while it could be a community procedure in practice is a giant-led process, and the giant own the result while harvesting anything from anyone. The effect implied by such evolution are much more startling then the mere automation risk in Lisanne Bainbridge terms https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica... or short/mid term job losses.

Re: Welcome to the Era of Experience [pdf]

#48

Post by quantumHazer »

gwern wrote: post #42
quantumHazer wrote: post #18

Is it me or this is yet another PR stunt masked as a serious article with LaTeX and all the fancy things? The graph doesn’t even make sense. I’m burning out from all this hypester type of thing, it’s really really tiring.

What fancy things? There's not a single equation in the whole thing. (I don't think this is even using Computer Modern, is it? It looks like a considerably thicker serif, and some of the characters like the lower-case 'g' look different.) Or are you referring to 'having 4 short, simple footnotes' as 'fancy' now? And also the graph makes perfect sense and tracks my own impression of RL history, what are you talking ab…

Why not use a blog dot google dot com domain or whatever? Why choose a format that resembles a published article instead?

As for the graph, it’s too generic, it doesn’t provide any real value, other than a certain pseudo-appeal reminiscent of paper-style visuals. In my humble opinion, it’s designed to mislead people who fall for hype, much like some of Google’s recent pseudo-scientific blog posts on machine learning.

I have deep respect for Sutton and his work, but this kind of things are a hard pass for me.

Re: Welcome to the Era of Experience [pdf]

#49

Post by gwern »

quantumHazer wrote: post #48
gwern wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What fancy things? There's not a single equation in the whole thing. (I don't think this is even using Computer Modern, is it? It looks like a considerably thicker serif, and some of the characters like the lower-case 'g' look different.) Or are you referring to 'having 4 short, simple footnotes' as 'fancy' now? And also the graph makes perfect sense and tracks my own impression of RL history, what are you talking ab…

Why not use a blog dot google dot com domain or whatever? Why choose a format that resembles a published article instead? As for the graph, it’s too generic, it doesn’t provide any real value, other than a certain pseudo-appeal reminiscent of paper-style visuals. In my humble opinion, it’s designed to mislead people who fall for hype, much like some of Google’s recent pseudo-scientific blog posts on machine learning.…

> Why choose a format that resembles a published article instead?

...It is in a format that resembles a published article because it is going to be a published article? "This is a preprint of a chapter that will appear in the book Designing an Intelligence, published by MIT Press." on the first page.

> As for the graph, it’s too generic

A history of RL from DQN to AlphaProof/LLM computer use in Gemini is not 'generic', and could not be.

> it doesn’t provide any real value

It provides value to people who were not around then and not familiar with how RL attention peaks and crests, and a similar chart about TD-Gammon and Deep Blue, say, would likewise be useful for the many people who did not actually live through those eras, and helps contextualize material from back then. (I did, and maybe you did, and so it's not useful to us, but there exist other, younger people in the world, who are not us{{citation needed}}.) And the fact that these cycles exist is something worth reflecting on - Karpathy and others have reflected on how there were expectations of DRL leading to AGI in the 2015-2020 period, which wound up being swamped by self-supervised learning and DRL relegated to a backwater (and contributed very directly to many major events like how OA and DM became like they are now - and why Sutton is at Keen rather than DM with Silver), but now suddenly becoming super-relevant again.

Re: Welcome to the Era of Experience [pdf]

#50

Post by quantumHazer »

gwern wrote: post #49
quantumHazer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use a blog dot google dot com domain or whatever? Why choose a format that resembles a published article instead? As for the graph, it’s too generic, it doesn’t provide any real value, other than a certain pseudo-appeal reminiscent of paper-style visuals. In my humble opinion, it’s designed to mislead people who fall for hype, much like some of Google’s recent pseudo-scientific blog posts on machine learning.…

> Why choose a format that resembles a published article instead? ...It is in a format that resembles a published article because it is going to be a published article? "This is a preprint of a chapter that will appear in the book Designing an Intelligence, published by MIT Press." on the first page. > As for the graph, it’s too generic A history of RL from DQN to AlphaProof/LLM computer use in Gemini is not 'generic…

> ...It is in a format that resembles a published article because it is going to be a published article? "This is a preprint of a chapter that will appear in the book Designing an Intelligence, published by MIT Press." on the first page.

It doesn't make any difference and doesn't invalidate my critique. It appears to be a science communication book, so it could easily be a web page. Even if it was a LaTeXish PDF there were multiple ways to not making it a PDF that resembles a scientific article, there's a precise choice being made about how to communicate. The medium is the message.

> A history of RL from DQN to AlphaProof/LLM computer use in Gemini is not 'generic', and could not be.

History of RL is not 'generic' and is indeed really interesting, I look forward to reading Sutton's book! But the graph in the PDF is. The y-axis is ill-defined because

1. it combines different technologies (DQN, AlphaGo, GPT models) on a single continuum implying direct comparison.

2. the evergreen hypester future trajectory toward "superhuman intelligence"

I will not comment further on the graph, it's not a interesting visualization in my opinion and only serves the author's purpose for the narrative of "feeling the AGI (through RL)” There would be more interesting way of plotting this information for a general public. I agree that is harsh from me that it doesn’t provide value. Maybe it provides value to people who want to explore RL now, but again, the medium is the message, and this format is clearly saying out loud “look at me, I’m a paper, trust me.”

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