It’s very similar. The underlying phenomenon is the same one: information persisting and propagating in a latent (non-human-legible) medium, driven by an efficiency incentive, at the cost of interpretability.
Cotra located it temporally (a single agent carrying thoughts forward through time). LatentMAS locates it both temporally and spatially (across agents in a system)
Also, Cotra’s idea, I think, assumes a single continuous agent that can be backpropagated through end-to-end. LatentMAS does not do this. That’s arguably worse, because it means there is no training signal to stabilize the handover, and so we don’t know if this will destabilize or not.
LatentMAS is basically neuralese, but for the inter-agent channel rather than the intra-agent one.
How similar is this new technique to Cotra-like long-term memos?
It’s very similar. The underlying phenomenon is the same one: information persisting and propagating in a latent (non-human-legible) medium, driven by an efficiency incentive, at the cost of interpretability.
Cotra located it temporally (a single agent carrying thoughts forward through time). LatentMAS locates it both temporally and spatially (across agents in a system)
Also, Cotra’s idea, I think, assumes a single continuous agent that can be backpropagated through end-to-end. LatentMAS does not do this. That’s arguably worse, because it means there is no training signal to stabilize the handover, and so we don’t know if this will destabilize or not.
LatentMAS is basically neuralese, but for the inter-agent channel rather than the intra-agent one.