AIs that are superhuman at just about any task we can (or simply bother to) define a benchmark, for
Something that I’m really confused about: what is the state of machine translation? It seems like there is massive incentive to create flawless translation models. Yet when I interact with Google translate or Twitter’s translation feature, results are not great. Are there flawless translation models that I’m not aware of? If not, why is translation lagging behind other text analysis and generation tasks?
I agree. It seems awfully convenient that the all of the “fun” described in this post involve the legibly-impressive topics of physics and mathematics. Most people, even highly technically competent people, aren’t intrinsically drawn to play with intellectually prestigious tasks. They find fun in sports, drawing, dancing, etc. Even when they take adopt an attitude of intellectual inquiry to their play, the insights generated from drawing techniques or dance moves are far less obviously applicable to working on alignment than the insights generated from studying physics. My concern is that presenting such a safely “useful” picture of fun undercuts the message to “follow your playful impulses, even if they’re silly”, because the implicit signal is “and btw, this is how smart people like us should be having fun B)”