Comment by chr15m
15 hours ago
Yes it will feel very different.
Yes, capabilities are correlated but an open question is how correlated, and how much negative transfer (where the model regresses on other benchmarks) will come into play.
Why are frontier models not chess geniuses (amateur club level elos), despite knowing the rules deeply, having a great deal of chess data in the training set, and having general reasoning training in other domains? Similarly, a beginner can beat a frontier model at Magic The Gathering. Why?
It is because chess and MTG are not priority targets in the (expensive) training pipeline. Chess is already solved by lesser neural networks so there is no wow factor, and nobody cares if they suck at MTG.
Mathematics on the other hand, has a huge wow factor, and a large and highly verifiable dataset.
Related: why did OpenAI give up on video?
I agree it's disorienting and scary but I'd phrase it like this: "the moment we come up with a systematic, objective way to verify a task, *and we can generate or find large datasets, and somebody has a reason to pay for the expensive training*, we become obsolete at it."
The economics side of it is an important constraint, currently ignored because the big labs are swimming in money (debt).
"Becoming obsolete" due to increased efficiency could lead to sigificant economic and political unrest, but there's no fundamental reason it must.
How much do you want to bet that an LLM with the ability to search the web and write python scripts would smoke the best humans at chess and MTG?
How comforting is it really when it’s not the bare LLM beating you, but the LLM using tools it created?
> an LLM with the ability to search the web and write python scripts would smoke the best humans at chess and MTG?
Even if that were true, humans don't need to search the web and write python scripts to play a competitive game of MTG.
> and MTG
No. The current frontier models would not beat the best humans at MTG, even with Python scripts and web search. Unlike Chess, there are no existing engines that beat humans.
I too could smoke the best humans at chess if I was allowed to search the web and write python scripts.
That makes me a good engineer, but not good at chess, and definitely not super intelligent.