This is almost certainly not true of the proposal in the post because it’s just navigating “text space,” not the real world. But yes, in general if you have a research idea describable as “make a powerful agent and see what happens,” probably don’t do that research.
I don’t buy that argument at all. “text space” seems to have been adequate to get to GPT3 which is incredibly impressive and useful in a variety of ways. Furthermore, what proof do you have that resulting insights wouldn’t transfer to multi-modal systems like GPT4 (which can see) or Palm-E which is embodied and can see and operate in “text space”. Moreover, I’m not the first to point out that text space seems to incentivize models develop highly sophisticated thinking abilities which seem like the more important thing to focus on.
You seem to be making a very general cloud of claims about the impressiveness of transformers. I was making a very specific claim about the system described in the post, and in what sense it’s not myopic.
I mean, any approach for building friendly AI is going to be dangerous.
Keep in mind that this would work best if used to amplify a small LLM (since it requires many samples), so I think it’s a case of positive differential acceleration.
“In this post, I’ll present a way to turn LLMs into agents such that we can approximately model them as a utility maximizer.”
If this works it would be very dangerous and kind of thing we would want to avoid. We’re very lucky current systems are as poorly agentic as they are.
This is almost certainly not true of the proposal in the post because it’s just navigating “text space,” not the real world. But yes, in general if you have a research idea describable as “make a powerful agent and see what happens,” probably don’t do that research.
I don’t buy that argument at all. “text space” seems to have been adequate to get to GPT3 which is incredibly impressive and useful in a variety of ways. Furthermore, what proof do you have that resulting insights wouldn’t transfer to multi-modal systems like GPT4 (which can see) or Palm-E which is embodied and can see and operate in “text space”. Moreover, I’m not the first to point out that text space seems to incentivize models develop highly sophisticated thinking abilities which seem like the more important thing to focus on.
You seem to be making a very general cloud of claims about the impressiveness of transformers. I was making a very specific claim about the system described in the post, and in what sense it’s not myopic.
I mean, any approach for building friendly AI is going to be dangerous.
Keep in mind that this would work best if used to amplify a small LLM (since it requires many samples), so I think it’s a case of positive differential acceleration.