Comment by rmunn
1 day ago
Short version of the article: no, not even close.
Practically every paragraph is negative, with sentences like "Agents made misleading claims about their work," and "A natural question is whether the agents could have improved with larger GPU budgets. Although both improved across their runs, in the case of Fable the improvements were almost entirely due to attempted cheating." and "For Sol, the answer is less clear-cut; it did make some progress, although its method was fairly incremental and had limited applicability to the coding task. This suggests that we should be pessimistic about further GPU spending," all reinforcing the fact that LLMs aren't currently capable of this.
My own view is "No, of course not, in fact they will never be capable of achieving good results with that technique." Because that technique will end up training the LLMs on their own output and lead to the inability to distinguish reality from hallucination. If you think I'm wrong about that, I'd be interested in hearing why.
Hallucinate -> do an experiment -> see it fails, try again. Hallucinate -> do an experiment -> it works, model innovated.
Agentic models brush up against reality, this gives a way around the hallucination problem.
Here is a recent talk showing that hallucination and discovery are actually positively coupled. https://www.youtube.com/live/ZNlZsI9kBm4?si=nhn4ancXu7s6qtom...
Ground breaking thought (ML Researchers Will Hate Me For): (some) hallucinations are actually creativity.
Creativity unbound by reference is not even dada (which was reactionary) it is noise
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In practice, hallucinations have only mitigated within verifiable domains. The vast, vast majority of human activity is unverifiable, or at least significantly less verifiable than mathematics.
We don't have to prove you wrong, you have to make a case for your position. Your statement was vague and handwavy and could be countered with another vague statement such as "They will add a feature that allows the LLM to better detect hallucinations".
I phrased it that way because I couldn't remember the term "model collapse" at the time. But that's what I meant: that making the LLMs self-train will lead to model collapse.
There; now the statement is far less vague and handwavy, because I'm making a specific claim that is, AFAIK, well-understood.
Also, you seem to have misunderstood me a little. I didn't mean "prove me wrong", I meant "If I'm missing something, please tell me about it." More of a conversational request than staking a claim in an argument. Many people at HN seem to like to take argumentative, debate-competition stances — but I usually prefer more "Hey, let's discuss this interesting idea, point out mistakes each other is making, and learn together" kind of interactions. That's what I was asking for.
You couldn’t remember the term model collapse because people quit saying it shortly after it was invented in 2023, because it was just cope by people praying for that outcome. Internet will have LLM output, therefore models will train on that output, then kaput. And what happenend next? Models trained on model output on purpose and just keep getting better.
Fair enough.
Well, I guess the answer isn't too different. I believe model collapse is a limitation of the current AI tech but maybe not the future ones. You can see humanity as a huge model that trains itself. What is novel about AI is that we built a machine with some intelligence traits that is free of biological constraints. If we can emulate the aggregate intelligence of a civilization inside a machine, it could improve itself forever but at a much faster pace.
A bit too pessimistic imo. I agree that AI can’t automate things end to end, but a good deal of R&D involves kicking off a training run and babysitting it.
If your training run dies at 1 am and you’re sleeping, you won’t find out about it until the next day. You can lose up to 18 hours of work depending on when it happens. Based on the error it might be as simple as tweaking a single hyperparameter and rebooting, which is something LLMs are usually capable of.
Even just that task means I can kick off multiple runs over the weekend and have confidence they’ll finish. It’s a game changer.
I'd classify that as an entirely different category than AI self-training. What you're describing could have been done with a short script, though which parameter to tweak and how to tweak it would be difficult to automate with a non-LLM script, so the LLM's being able to parse the error message and base the tweak on the content of the error is a definite improvement to the process there.
But I'd classify this as LLM being used to automate a sysadmin task, rather than calling that self-training.
Yeah I’m not trying to argue it is AGI, but it’s not as simple as a short script. There’s some amount of debugging involved, and no amount of if-statements could cover all possible ways a script could break.
In a way, “recursive self improvement” just means tools helping us to create better tools. At least that’s what the words mean.
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This was an interesting post on the subject that more or less agrees: 'self-improvement' is happening with things like this but there's a lot of headwind on any 'hard take-off' where capabilities grow exponentially all on their own:
https://www.rameznaam.com/p/471bbae4-1163-4048-944b-18f8b0bf...
What will never be capable? Neural networks? Neural networks that utilize next token prediction in their training recipe?