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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your statement is correct for the movies, but I think the extended universe (maybe a comic or the original script) did state the humans were used for compute, not energy. It was dumbed down for the films.
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?
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.
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"
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.
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.
There are many points of shutdown that would need to be controlled, not just one. The electrical feed, the cooling, the network, the physical integrity of the computer hardware. All with independent management.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can someone define “improvement” in this context? This concept feels like a buzz word otherwise.
Models that are strong enough to improve themselves without a human (I.e. ai researcher) in the loop
Does anyone know the status of John Carmack's AGI work?
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.
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.
If a self improving model can't produce enough value to pay the electric bill then who cares? Unplug it.
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.
def self_improve_more():
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.
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.
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.
Your statement is correct for the movies, but I think the extended universe (maybe a comic or the original script) did state the humans were used for compute, not energy. It was dumbed down for the films.
pretty sure the story is that they used human brains as computers
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?
Because it's a movie
I don't know. But since we're talking about fiction, pretty much any answer is valid.
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.
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?
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"
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.
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.
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.
There are many points of shutdown that would need to be controlled, not just one. The electrical feed, the cooling, the network, the physical integrity of the computer hardware. All with independent management.
People seem to expect a sudden shift with "self-improvement", but don't AIs already improve themselves via training? What is there to improve?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.