Sufficiently competent code rewriting isn’t implied by R1/o3, and how much better future iterations of this technique get remains unclear, similarly to how it remains unclear how scaling pretraining using $150bn training systems cashes out in terms of capabilities. It remains possible that even after all these directions of scaling run their course, there won’t yet be sufficient capabilities to self-improve in some other way.
Altman and Amodei are implying there’s knowably more there in terms of some sort of scaling for test-time compute, but that could mean multiple different things: scaling RL training, scaling manual creation of tasks with verifiable outcomes (graders), scaling effective context length to enable longer reasoning traces. The o1 post and the R1 paper show graphs with lines that keep going up, but there is no discussion of how much compute even this much costs, what happens if we pour more compute into this without adding more tasks with verifiable outcomes, and how many tasks are already being used.
Sufficiently competent code rewriting isn’t implied by R1/o3, and how much better future iterations of this technique get remains unclear, similarly to how it remains unclear how scaling pretraining using $150bn training systems cashes out in terms of capabilities. It remains possible that even after all these directions of scaling run their course, there won’t yet be sufficient capabilities to self-improve in some other way.
Altman and Amodei are implying there’s knowably more there in terms of some sort of scaling for test-time compute, but that could mean multiple different things: scaling RL training, scaling manual creation of tasks with verifiable outcomes (graders), scaling effective context length to enable longer reasoning traces. The o1 post and the R1 paper show graphs with lines that keep going up, but there is no discussion of how much compute even this much costs, what happens if we pour more compute into this without adding more tasks with verifiable outcomes, and how many tasks are already being used.