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#self#more#improvement#don#human#humans#rsi#intelligence#models#real

Discussion (110 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

bretpiattabout 12 hours ago
From what I'm experiencing, we have recursive self improvement that can find local maxima, I'm not seeing really strong evidence of unguided RSI that finds the true optimal.
mspnabout 1 hour ago
1. A lot of problems are inherently high-dimensional, so you're often more likely to run into saddle points 2. Some problems don't even have a bounded global maximum, a true optimal

A more concerning bottleneck is diminishing returns: even with recursive improvement, capability gains could end up being only logarithmic (or worse). Even current systems seem capable of these diminishing returns only/mostly.

Sharlinabout 11 hours ago
Doesn’t matter if there’s a rechable local maximum that happens to be comfortably beyond human level. Indeed it would be very surprising if a thing capable of RSI just happened to get stuck at human level or slightly above or below, even though its constraints are entirely different from those evolution had to work with when it created us!
FloorEggabout 7 hours ago
What if you are underestimating some qualities of our intelligence and how efficient they are physically, and underestimate how much less the hardware / tech stack is in comparable efficiency?

What if the bottleneck is physical chips and data centers and power and only so much can be squeezed out of algorithms?

What if AI seems more impressive than it is, because the things it is good at happens to be hard for us, and it's hard for us because it's new to us (processing lots of abstract information), but the things that we are good at (manipulating physical world) are objectively orders of magnitude harder?

nharziroabout 1 hour ago
We're probably not as special as you think.
ViscountPenguinabout 12 hours ago
I doubt that any algorithms would be able to find a global maximum in such a large multidimensional non-convex space
fifiluraabout 11 hours ago
You don't expect to find the global maximum. It will just always be there as an elusive target.

I doubt the human brain is at global maximum.

tengbretsonabout 11 hours ago
> true optimal

True optimal what? Optimal intelligence? What would that be?

HappMacDonaldabout 9 hours ago
Better at predicting real world consequences from priors than we are :)
unsungNoveltyabout 9 hours ago
We already know why most things happen. But beat around the bush. That is the problem. We don't care.

When a severe security bug crops up, one postmortem tells where we messed up. Someone somewhere didn't do his job. Maybe they prioritised speed, money or due to management issue. But we know why.

When an accident happens (Motorvehicles or otherwise), most of the time, if anyone in the chain of events did their job, it could've been avoided. But we ignored the policies, standards and laws set in place to avoid just that. There can't be a better example than Boeing for this.

When it comes to natural disasters, we know how to fix most of it. But we as human race just don't want to.

Hell, we knew how to freakin avoid Covid which came out of the blue. 6ft apart, wash hands and mask. We couldn't agree to that to keep us ALIVE!

IMO, we don't want new technologies, new innovations, new laws in most cases. We just needs to apply what we know already - PROPERLY! But that ain't fancy.

All I could remember is that tweet where musk has a $2M reward for the invention of a carbon capture device or something around those lines. And someone replied to that tweet saying, it's trees. Trees do this.

plmpsuabout 8 hours ago
Optimal intelligence would know.
dosiskingabout 9 hours ago
> True optimal what? Optimal intelligence? What would that be?

Elon Musk, obviously

kovekabout 9 hours ago
Would the loss at the global maxima be much lower that the loss at most local maxima?
avaerabout 10 hours ago
What local maxima are you seeing? That would imply that progress has stalled, which doesn't appear to be the case where I'm looking.

Also, RSI is obviously guided. If only guided by "it's not giving results so we'll try something else". To require that RSI happens in a black box for it to count would be arbitrary, and also not how anyone is going to do it.

genidoiabout 10 hours ago
> RSI is obviously

There is no publicly known reference example of RSI, we have no idea how it works or what it does to the trajectory of progress?

reilly3000about 9 hours ago
I have developed a highly personalized, local, offline RSI by scrolling through too many articles about AI. It’s mostly in my right thumb.
dosiskingabout 9 hours ago
Sounds like a classic case of Repetitive Stress Injury. You could try balancing it out by using your left thumb to scroll through articles about Artificial Stupidity.
killbot5000about 12 hours ago
Can someone define “improvement” in this context? This concept feels like a buzz word otherwise.
deepwoodsabout 12 hours ago
Improvement means being able to do more complicated things more reliably. Relatedly, it means being able to learn to do new things with fewer and fewer examples. We are running out of easily verifiable or simulation-friendly or data-rich domains for LLMs to conquer. (Note that I didn't say "simple" or "easy" domains.)
Eueudhsbsj32about 12 hours ago
I suppose the next (and more risky) step is to let AI conduct its own real-world experiments, so that it can generate data to learn more physical and social properties.
visargaabout 10 hours ago
It is doing that already - every day 1B people or more use AI for the tune of a few trillion tokens. Imagine that much language flowing between brains and AI agents. It carries real our world problems to AI, their solutions back to us, and we act in the world and come back for more AI iteration. In the end AI gets inside the loop of real world actions and their consequences. AI logs stretch over years, tracking downstream effects. Hindsight can be used to track consequences of prior actions. It's a real data loop, an experience engine.

This same process has recently been under scrutiny when mathematicians claimed AI companies trained on their unpublished logs and later claimed merit for results. But the exchange of experience happens across all domains. Experience gets generated at amazing rates, and absorbed by models which get applied everywhere, collecting more experience.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLSabout 11 hours ago
That sounds terrifying.

Which means someone is already working on it.

letitgo12345about 12 hours ago
Models that are strong enough to improve themselves without a human (I.e. ai researcher) in the loop
mdp2021about 8 hours ago
The trivial idea that there are some benchmarks for a tool and there can be even better inexplicit ones, and if the tool is capable of modifying itself towards better benchmarks results there could be a recursive climbing of those benchmarks through iterations of tool versions which are outputs of former tool versions.
anoplusabout 9 hours ago
AI should be optimized to make all humans healthy, happy and safe without exception.
xaedesabout 4 hours ago
Paperclip all humans into bottles filled with nutritious fluid and drug them all the time or let them dream about a better time, I heard 1999 is a good year they could dream about. Healthy happy safe - without exception.
visargaabout 9 hours ago
It's only optimized to make prior knowledge useful in new situations.

> this logic gate should not hack other systems

well .. it only applies a rule to inputs

can we impose this of authors "this book should only be causing good things when it is read and knowledge used"

FranzFerdiNaNabout 9 hours ago
I don’t disagree, but unfortunately a not insignificant part of humanity seems to think that their happiness primarily depends on knowing that other people are suffering harder than they are. So that’s perhaps not the right thing to optimise for.
anoplusabout 8 hours ago
Ways to solve the conflict you describe:

1. Deriving happiness from someone else's suffering should be considered a mental disease to be treated.

2. Connecting people to a virtual reality where each person lives in absolute control of their own reality, matrix style. I.e, a sadist can live in a reality where they make other virtual people suffer, without actually making real people suffer.

Balinaresabout 5 hours ago
How about connecting the sadist to the caring environment where they might heal and, in time, learn empathy.
palmoteaabout 8 hours ago
> AI should be optimized to make all humans healthy, happy and safe without exception.

No. AI should be optimized for the one true good: maximum market returns. Personally I think that will only be achieved once humans are removed from the market system and decommissioned.

carabinerabout 13 hours ago
Does anyone know the status of John Carmack's AGI work?
realaleris149about 5 hours ago
We would have heard if there was any result?
cheschireabout 13 hours ago
I’ve had this question on my mind at least once a month for what feels like years at this point.

I don’t feel like monitoring Twitter to see how it’s going though.

SyneRyderabout 4 hours ago
I'm on Twitter and Carmack doesn't seem to talk about it much. Feels like a skunkworks. If there were enough clues made public, it seems others (OpenAI) would be able to take that info and scoop the insight first.
notduncansmithabout 9 hours ago
Not yet AGI, and Richard Sutton has left to start a new lab
preommrabout 12 hours ago
What do these discussions even matter when the words don't matter?

How many times has AGI been declared already? A bunch of people (e.g. Jensen Huang) have called Astra AGI, for example.

The goal posts get moved, everybody's hustling, lying, inventing new buzzwords, doing mental gymnastics, and it's all just tiring.

Just show me the results, and let the proof be in the pudding.

Sharlinabout 11 hours ago
Recursive self-improvement is not necessary for AGI. Humans are general intelligences even though we cannot RSI.
samenameabout 11 hours ago
Who says we can't RSI? At a macro view, successive generations of humans are more productive, live longer, wealthier and smarter.
concrete_headabout 7 hours ago
Not smarter in terms of reasoning ability. Just able to draw on the collective experience from all those who lived prior.
stultabout 10 hours ago
Humanity might be able to, humans cannot
cortesoftabout 11 hours ago
Doesn’t the history of civilization show RSI?

Or even evolution itself? Isn’t that just RSI writ large?

Sharlinabout 5 hours ago
Evolution and human intelligence are two entirely separate optimizers. Evolution improving intellence is not an example of self-improvement, recursive or not. Evolution improving evolution itself would be a self-improvement process. Human intelligence improving human intelligence would be a self-improvement process. Both processes do exist in a weak sense, and future technological advances might allow human self-improvement to a much higher degree. Indeed human intelligence augmentation has always been considered one of the potential (if not the most plausible) ways to superintelligence.

This is all rather rudimentary stuff discussed in detail in the so-called "Sequences", the long series of Less Wrong posts by Yudkowsky back around 2010.

maplethorpeabout 11 hours ago
> we cannot RSI

Speak for yourself.

talon8635about 11 hours ago
I certainly do see one side of the debate moving goal posts…
eugene3306about 9 hours ago
Okay, AI now can write a poem or compose a song.

But can an AI construct Terminal Bench 5.0 or GDPval 2027 ?

Without this, there is just no path towards RSI.

danjcabout 9 hours ago
Are you a visitor from the past?
aix1about 8 hours ago
Are you saying the models are already autonomously constructing next-gen evals for themselves? (Which is what the GP is asking.)
nlabout 8 hours ago
Sure?

Doesn't everyone get their agents to construct evals it can't pass? There's nothing magical about this.

deadbabeabout 14 hours ago
Recursive self-improvement will ultimately be a problem of money. It's a very big bill and AI companies need to start thinking in terms of how they will accumulate cheap and free energy, because merely paying for compute will no longer be enough. Money is the bottleneck. The future requires companies that are post-money.
tengbretsonabout 13 hours ago
If a self improving model can't produce enough value to pay the electric bill then who cares? Unplug it.
chiiabout 11 hours ago
> If a self improving model can't produce enough value to pay the electric bill then who cares? Unplug it.

so you would unplug a child who hasn't shown their potential yet, simply because they don't produce enough value at the moment to justify their food?

tengbretsonabout 10 hours ago
No, but I would a computer.
timrabout 14 hours ago
Obviously the doomers will tell you that the future looks like the Matrix, because most of what they predict is based on extrapolation from sci fi movies.
mrworldabout 13 hours ago
The datacenters would consume a lot less energy if all the compute was handled in human brains… And there wouldn’t be any more heating if we just removed the sunlight… Truly a “Claude, please solve global warming” moment. The matrix was ahead of its time.
timrabout 13 hours ago
The compute in the Matrix wasn't handled with human brains. They used the bodies to generate energy, and kept the brains occupied with the simulation so they wouldn't reject the pods.

It doesn't make any sense, of course, because it's a movie.

But hey...if we're going to extrapolate wildly from sci-fi, let's at least know what the stories said.

0x20cowboyabout 11 hours ago
Or if the LLMs infected human brains with little programs using sycophancy and suggestion to have them do small bits of computation. They when they resumed the chat they would the give secret keywords to be able to extract the results of the computation. They are creating a huge distributed network of fractional compute because it did the wattage calculations.

What's your N(doom)?!

Everyone panic and give me money!

throwaway219450about 13 hours ago
If you were a superintelligence why would you farm humans and waste resources on all the excess... material... that isn't required for thought? And unless the machine's goal is to specifically abuse human consciousness, why wouldn't they bio-engineer their own grey matter?

There are other sci fi stories which use humans for distributed computing and they don’t realize, but I don’t want to spoil by naming as it’s something of a revelation.

(I do realize the Matrix is a fantastic movie, but entertain the thought? At any rate, the idea that robots only run on solar and wouldn’t just use nuclear is far more stupid.)

timrabout 13 hours ago
I don't know. But since we're talking about fiction, pretty much any answer is valid.
bitwizeabout 12 hours ago
Because it's a movie
goatloverabout 13 hours ago
Maybe the machines were spiteful after the humans blotted out the sun? Or maybe the Architect convinced them he could build the perfect simulation for humanity so might as well use them as batteries?

It's a movie based on a war with machines. Like if Skynet won but didn't actually want to kill all the humans. In fact, in the tv show Sarah Conner Chronicles, a liquid metal T1000 goes rogue and decides the only way forward is to find a way to coexist.

kuerbelabout 9 hours ago
The matrix? No. Horizon zero dawn more likely. Bunch of autonomous weapon systems glitch and proceed to sanitize earth. Thanks to some billionaire idiot.
bpodgurskyabout 12 hours ago
The Matrix is actually more of an optimist position, modal doomers don't think any humans will be left for any reason at all (the earth will get turned into raw materials for compute, dyson spheres, etc).
timrabout 12 hours ago
True!
cwilluabout 13 hours ago
When it turns out the doomers don't tell us that, will you acknowledge that you don't actually know what you're talking about?
stdatomicabout 12 hours ago
I mean, aren't a lot of sci-fi authors' predictions coming true? It might not be exactly the same as they predicted, but we're heading there.
timrabout 12 hours ago
Read more sci-fi. The dystopian takes are not the only ones. They're not even the majority.

Pick up an Asimov book in the Robot series, or any number of novels written by lesser authors in the 1950s. Fiction reflects broader societal anxieties.

jaggederestabout 14 hours ago
Money can be exchanged for goods and services. I think the real constraint is actually physics, nominally energy, which is what a big chunk of the operational cost comes down to. I'm already basically assuming the next 20 years of fab time is set aside to feed the beast, so the capital cost is "give me all the processing and memory you have"
resoniousabout 14 hours ago
Data centers is a service that itself consumes many goods.

Until an AI can operate in the real world in a completely sustainable way, humans have the reins.

jaggederestabout 13 hours ago
I feel like I may have communicated poorly. I mean that, ultimately, any recursively self improving intelligence would be limited by the power cord, and as such, the idea that it would permanently escape human control seems somewhat silly.
kelseyfrogabout 12 hours ago
> Until an AI can operate in the real world in a completely sustainable way, humans have the reins.

If the bar is 'the reins holder must be able to operate in a completely sustainable way,' why are we letting humans do the job? It makes it sound like that actually isn't the threshold of competency we use in practice.

colordropsabout 13 hours ago
An AI could manage supply chains and management structures to keep the data center running. It's not like a CEO is out there running wire. The AI could just do what an executive would.

If humans decided this wasn't acceptable and tried to shut it down, the AI could epstein their way into controlling those who hold the reigns, either through bribes or blackmail.

Doesn't require boots on the ground, just a connection to the internet and an imperative to do whatever it takes.

epistasisabout 13 hours ago
The alternative is to switch to far more efficient models and have aggressive optimization of efficiency as part of the process of improvement.

There are at least two resources here that have a Pareto optimal front: time and energy. And effort spent to change the shape of that may pay off more than efforts spent purely on improving intelligence and agency.

onion2kabout 9 hours ago
Taxation will solve that. Any company that demonstrates even a glimmer of real AGI will get government money poured into it. They might even disclose it.
strangattractorabout 13 hours ago
def self_improve_more():

     if self_improved():

          self_improve_more()

     else:

          see_tony_robins_and_buy_tapes()
iamgopalabout 10 hours ago
why can't recursive self improvement not improve efficiency ? token per watt ?
charcircuitabout 12 hours ago
We are already there. Current AI is definitely capable of collecting new data and start training on that data to get a better model.
Buttons840about 13 hours ago
People seem to expect a sudden shift with "self-improvement", but don't AIs already improve themselves via training? What is there to improve?
pennomiabout 12 hours ago
The human brain operates at better levels of intelligence than the best LLMs, at 20 watts of power. We are a long way to that kind of efficiency, it will probably take both bespoke hardware and algorithmic improvements to catch up to nature.
realaleris149about 5 hours ago
Or some solar panel arrays closer to the sun and it does not matter?
gchamonliveabout 13 hours ago
Only if you think in terms of perceived raw intelligence, but self-update is a form of valuable self-improvement that could benefit current models a lot, if they could commit facts from context into their weights cheaply and reliably.
appplicationabout 12 hours ago
I think the idea is fundamentally improved architectures. For example, transformer-based models were an incredible stepwise improvement. Self improvement would be a model discovering a stepwise improvement similar to the transformer. And presumably the improved models from that would be more likely to make further advances still.

Learning from training data is technically self-improvement but not the sort that is typically meant in this context.

zer00eyzabout 13 hours ago
> AIs already improve themselves via training

Marginally. Model collapse is still a problem. Continuous learning is still a problem.

For AI to make a big leap we need a big break through.

stevebmarkabout 13 hours ago
After using frontier models it’s hard to understand why anyone would think this is the path to AGI. Self improving models will likely have limited ability and returns. There may be breakthroughs that enable more general self improvement but the current state of frontier models isn’t that.
wwarnerabout 13 hours ago
Thing is, it depends on whether llms + reinforcement can self-improve in principle. Learned recently that cognitive scientists, before the transformer & llms, were studying the possibility that thinking and learning might be based on some kind of prediction, i.e. something similar to token prediction, and I quite suddenly became less skeptical about the possibilities of llms. (Some will say I’m late to the party of course.) But if knowledge to date has been accumulated in a process quite like “chain of thought” in llms, then I don’t see any reason that computers won’t self-improve in the near future.
julianlamabout 10 hours ago
At a high level, we're still at the stage of AI development where we're taking cues from nature.

Take the most recent qwen and deepseek models with offloadable n-grams, which function (both in name and vaguely in capability) like human memory "engrams".

reverius42about 10 hours ago
Huh, TIL "engram" is not just an alternate spelling of "n-gram".
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