Comment by c7b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by c7b | Hacker News Reader

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The cycle could look something like this: LLMv1 > prompt "get me the code for a better LLM" > paste output to terminal, execute > LLMv2 > repeat.

There are lots of different singularity definitions on wikipedia, most focus on 'intelligence' (eg "an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a 'runaway reaction' of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly"). I think focusing on what 'intelligence' really means, or whether any model is 'truly' intelligent can be be a bit of a distraction. So I just emphasized capabilities in a rather generic sense instead.

It's clear that LLMs can compete with humans on many tasks (coding, creative writing, medical diagnosis, psychotherapy,...), and it is conceivable that they may surpass most humans on those tasks some day. If we have models that can outperform most or all humans on important professional and everyday tasks, and also produce new models that perform even better, maybe at an accelerating rate, through means that are ultimately not interpretable for us, I'd say that's pretty close to a singularity, regardless of whether they're 'truly' intelligent. Even more so if they pass a duck test (walks like a duck, quacks like a duck,...).

What does a better LLM mean? We again… already have terminal usage in AutoGPT. It describes a little what you are talking about. What measurement do you use to test if a language model 1 is better than 2? Accuracy? Self reliance? Is that what a Transformer should be doing? Sure an LLM can compete with humans on all of those tasks. Fantastic. So are we at the singularity now as it’s defined? Do I quit my job now?

Like I said in the original post, clearly telling which of two LLMs is better is difficult, and probably one of the things holding us back from having a singularity right now. But that doesn't seem to be an insurmountable problem. Most people who have used both seem to agree that GPT4 is 'better' than GPT3, so maybe we can formalize that intuition somehow.

You can already do this in theory with tools like AutoGPT and BabyAGI. Why hasn't the singularity happened already?

Exactly AutoGPT is exactly what he is describing but I’m still lost as to what the verbiage is then. Is that the singularity?

Yes AutoGPT would be the singularity if it had more brain-like subsystems like long and short term memory and is hooked up to real world instruments.

"Yes AutoGPT would be the singularity if it was way more advanced and could manipulate physical reality at will"

Way to handwave all the difficulties with this in reality.

Lmao neither of those things I mentioned really cost more than 50 million dollars.

I personally think the same as the other comment. Do you really think money is the bottleneck? Let’s assume Sam Altman felt that way. He couldn’t drum up that cash tomorrow if he wanted??? For the pinnacle of human invention. Twitter was purchased for way way more than 50 mil.

Yes? He's invested in GPT-4 which just came out. He needs to retrain a new model with higher context limit as well as build out memory systems probably with vector databases. OpenAI needs to continuously raise money and buy more hardware. I'm not sure what OpenAI is doing but they're obviously resource constrained, else they wouldn't be outpaced by competitors in text2img.

He probably doesn't want to give away more of his company since it's such an obvious winner.

Suppose Altman is actually doing this. Would he want anyone to know, especially given the ongoing brouhaha over the models that are already public?

Money is definitely not the bottleneck here.

Yes it is, if not I would've already done it.

With comments like "lmao" and "brain-like subsystems", I'd go back to hitting the proverbial books (or more likely reddit in your case) rather than empty boasts.

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