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Ok, and how many of them were done by MIRI?
Exactly the ones we burned through? We're talking about math and theory here, I don't see a reason why these things couldn't be prepared ahead of time.
No? Distillation is not self-improvement. The kind of recursive self-improvement the Rats were talking about would be if you could distill Fable just from the output of Opus.
Interesting comparison. Let me take a particular aspect of the legal system that is analogous here. Way back when, people would occasionally get into fight about gun control on this forum (and I think that the kind of dynamics I'm about to describe still occasionally pop up). A blue triber would say they're just in favor of "common sense regulation", and what would inevitably surface from conversation is that:
a) They have no idea how guns actually work, leading them to suggest laws far more unreasonable than they imagined, and
b) To the extent their ideas were "common sense", they had no idea of what laws were already on the books, and didn't know that laws far more restrictive were already in effect
I don't think we should listen to people like that on policy, and I think it's roughly analogous to the Rat crowd on AI.
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