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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34499 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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The question is not whether current technology will help you make better technology, or whether AGI is theoretically possible. The question is how quickly change happens, and to what extent advances make future advances faster: You have better tools but the problem has also become harder. So far, it seems to me like the latter effect is winning out. GPT 4 can write (allegedly) working code, use documentation, bug fix, etc. But is it good enough to make writing GPT 5 substantially easier or faster than making GPT 4 was?

But is it good enough to make writing GPT 5 substantially easier or faster than making GPT 4 was?

Well I doubt 'Open'AI would tell us, they like keeping things secret nowadays. Nevertheless, existing demonstrated capabilities seem to be accelerating progress. I'm not a subject matter technical expert but it seems this is happening: https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/04/18/nvidia-rd-chief-on-how-ai-is-improving-chip-design/

I can't judge how significant this is because I'm not an expert. But my intuition is that compound interest balloons outwards and there's plenty of physics/computing space for it to balloon outwards into. This is a fundamentally new kind of compound interest that is different to whatever input scaling we were already doing to keep up with Moore's law. In addition to increasing the amount of wealth and human intellect going in quantitatively, we get some qualitatively superior (albeit specialized) inhuman intellect too.

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