Comment by smlacy
17 hours ago
Even if "AI Research" is sped up by O(10x) aren't we still primarily bottlenecked on training speed? Inputting ~10T+ tokens takes time no matter how much smarter the final output model is? If your output model has O(10-100 Billion) parameters there are just some fundamental limits on how quickly you can converge your weights, right?
That is, unless this is saying that automated AI research is going to get us to "smarter models with fewer parameters" and of course, these are faster to train, then I can see how the exponential loop really gets going, but there's certainly an information theoretical limit here?
> automated AI research is going to get us to "smarter models with fewer parameters"
That is indeed what we have seen over the last 5 years or so. Algorithmic improvements have made a massive difference to every dimension of efficiency and performance.
AI researchers can do things like discover new attention algorithms to optimize inference efficiency (likely part of why Anthropic and OpenAI are slashing inference costs in their frontier models and no longer capacity crunched).
I think we're bottlenecked on custom harnesses and well engineered context. Models can get smarter and smarter and smarter about math and software, and there's no reason to expect that those narrowly-godlike models will be any smarter about other things if taken out of their comfort zones. No such thing as general intelligence.
Getting past this bottleneck is gonna mean training our models not in datacenters, but in places that more closely resemble the ones where we want them to act. A factory, a wet lab, outer space... imagine a million robots spending all day finding every way to fall off the monkey bars so that the next version doesn't.
I assume this is indeed talking of those "smarter models with fewer parameters". Whether that's really happening is another question.