I think it's interesting that human minds generally (though not always!) improve when exposed to the output of other human minds. It seems to be the opposite for current LLMs.
I don't think a human mind would be improving if they're in a echo-chamber with no new information. I think the reason the human mind is improving is because we're exposed to new, original and/or different thoughts, that we hadn't considered or come across before.
Meanwhile, a LLM will just regurgitate the most likely token based on the previous one, so there isn't any originality there, hence any output from a LLM cannot improve another LLM. There is nothing new to be learned, basically.
If this were true of humans, we would have never made it this far
Humans are very capable of looking around themselves and thinking "I can do better than this", and then trying to come up with ways how
LLMs are not
Doesn't this require at least some perspective of what "better than this" means, which you could only know with at least a bit of outside influence in one way or another?
Yes, even in math and science, those were built on top of our feeling of "better than this" iterated over thousands of years.
A sequence of AI models trained on each other's output gets mutations, which might help or hurt, but if there's one dominant model at any given time then it's like asexual reproduction with only living descendant in each generation (and all the competing models being failures to reproduce). A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy — this seems to me to also be the incorrect model which Intelligent Design proponents seem to mistakenly think is how evolution is supposed to work.
A huge number of competing models that never rise to dominance would be more like plants spreading pollen in the wind.
A huge number of AI there are each smart enough to decide what to include in its training set would be more like animal reproduction. The fittest memes survive.
Memetic mode collapses still happen in individual AI (they still happen in humans, we're not magic), but that manifests as certain AI ceasing to be useful and others replacing them economically.
A few mega-minds is a memetic monoculture, fragile in all the same ways as a biological monoculture.
Natural examples are prions such as Bovine spongiform encephalopathy [0] or sheep scrapie. This seems to really become a problem in systems with a strong and fast positive feedback loop with some selector. In the case of cattle it was feeding rendered bonemeal from dead cattle back to livestock. Prions are immune to high temperature removal so are selected for and concentrated by the feedback process.
To really feel the horror of this, read Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" [1] and ponder the ways that a trojan can be replicated iteratively (like a worm) but undetectably.
It isn't loss functions we should worry about. It's gain functions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...
[1] https://tebibyte.media/blog/reflections-on-trusting-trust/
While some persons can strive in these kind of environment (think Kant for example), many would become crazy.
If anything I think this just demonstrates yet again that these aren't actually analogous to what humans think of as "minds", even if they're able to replicate more of the output than makes us comfortable.