This isn’t clear to me, because “human imitation” here refers (I think) to “imitation of a human that has learned as much as possible (on the compute budget we have) from AI helpers.” So as we pour more compute into the predictor, that also increases (right?) the budget for the AI helpers, which I’d think would make the imitator have to become more complex.
In the following section, you say something similar to what I say above about the “computation time” penalty … I’m not clear on why this applies to the “computation time” penalty and not the complexity penalty
Yes, I agree that something similar applies to complexity as well as computation time. There are two big reasons I talk more about computation time:
It seems plausible we could generate a scalable source of computational difficulty, but it’s less clear that there exists a scalable source of description complexity (rather than having some fixed upper bound on the complexity of “the best thing a human can figure out by doing science.”)
I often imagine the assistants all sharing parameters with the predictor, or at least having a single set of parameters. If you have lots of assistant parameters that aren’t shared with the predictor, then it looks like it will generally increase the training time a lot. But without doing that, it seems like there’s not necessarily that much complexity the predictor doesn’t already know about. (In contrast, we can afford to spend a ton of compute for each example at training time since we don’t need that many high-quality reporter datapoints to rule out the bad reporters. So we can really have giant ratios between our compute and the compute of the model.)
But I don’t think these are differences in kind and I don’t have super strong views on this.
Yes, I agree that something similar applies to complexity as well as computation time. There are two big reasons I talk more about computation time:
It seems plausible we could generate a scalable source of computational difficulty, but it’s less clear that there exists a scalable source of description complexity (rather than having some fixed upper bound on the complexity of “the best thing a human can figure out by doing science.”)
I often imagine the assistants all sharing parameters with the predictor, or at least having a single set of parameters. If you have lots of assistant parameters that aren’t shared with the predictor, then it looks like it will generally increase the training time a lot. But without doing that, it seems like there’s not necessarily that much complexity the predictor doesn’t already know about.
(In contrast, we can afford to spend a ton of compute for each example at training time since we don’t need that many high-quality reporter datapoints to rule out the bad reporters. So we can really have giant ratios between our compute and the compute of the model.)
But I don’t think these are differences in kind and I don’t have super strong views on this.