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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.
It's not distillation that we're talking about, this is what the guy is saying. The model is actually doing the training process directly. Aidan works at OpenAI on post-training.
https://x.com/aidan_mclau/status/2075328409400738229
He also says that it's guided a lot by his taste.
Likewise, it's not Fable distillation that we're talking about but Fable actually directly performing research tasks in machine learning, overseeing experiments, improving utilization. 'How do I get GPU utilization up Fable, look at these stats for me and these logs, should I change the kernel?' is what we're talking about. Anthropic deliberately degrades that ability.
Now I agree that what is being proposed in AI 2040 is very difficult and a little naive. The notion that the US is gonna build all these datacentres in Mongolia so China could feel confident they could capture them is pretty unlikely, that's not really how it works... It has a sense of nerdy 'here's my rules-lawyering to fix the problem' to it. But what is the alternative path? Unilateral racing? A free for all between the most psychopathic/paranoid billionaire and intelligence agency spook for control? This is the best answer they could find, given the constraints of the system. I can't come up with anything better, so even while I have criticisms I think that on the whole they did a decent job.
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