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Discussion (24 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I noted that they use the acronym RSI (for Recursive Self-Improvement) without defining it. I think that's a little out of touch - I don't think RSI is a well-known acronym outside of OpenAI's bubble yet.
The message is running through all of them. It's a mix of marketing and pacifying the intelligentia.
It's timed this way because the term is not yet well known outside the safety debate circles, so they get to frame it now.
Instead of something to fear, it will be accepted as the next step. In approximately two days the groupie crowd will write LinkedIn posts about how Sam is winning because they have the better RSI, and this will become the new standard wisdom.
In a month an AI expert will try to sell you a webinar on how to enable "RSI" in your org and your inbox will ask you if your team is doing the "RSI" yet.
I don't know why whoever coined the term chose "recursive" rather than "iterative" - just sounds more likely to lead to infinite regress I suppose.
This notion of recursive/iterative self-improvement, whereby generation #1 AI improves itself to create generation #2, then generation #2 further improves itself to create generation #3, etc, seems to conflict with the reality that what we have with LLMs is models whose performance/capability is defined by data, not code, so the most you can do is have your LLM design synthetic data, or just do Karpathy-style "auto research" where all you are doing is using the LLM to automate your experiments.
At the end of the day, each experiment, designed by a person and/or LLM, then needs to compete with all your other ideas for compute to be tested at scale, and no amount of recursion or self-improvement will materialize an infinite amount of compute out of thin air, so your recursively synthetic-data gobbling LLM will continue to improve at the same pace it ever did.
How do you think why there's this fad of producing general purpose humanoid robots?
It's funny that we've got the Dwarkesh contingent saying that GPUs will become infinitely expensive, and now another contingent saying that they will become infinitely abundant.
Even if compute were free, and/or the AI was so smart that it picked the right experiments to run every time ("make no mistakes"), you still have to actually train the model, which takes months, and if model Ver. N+1 depends on model Ver. N, then it's iterative regardless of how much compute you have.
Sounds like repetitive stress to me.
>loop forever using output as input but at some point the result will stop changing
Running in place will eventually wear you out too. Plus with some things it can be difficult to know for sure if that's where you are at the time.
Even worse may be if you were almost running in place, it could be orders of magnitude more difficult to discern, especially if the scale was massive to an unprecedented degree.
I mean one could argue that RSI always begins in any physical environment.
The book "What is intelligence?" by Blaise Aguera is great