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Comment by robot-wrangler | Hacker News Reader

> Curious how you'd handle the reward signal for deciding when to switch between observation and active exploration without it collapsing into one mode.

If you like biomimetic approaches to computer science, there's evidence that we want something besides neural networks. Whether we call such secondary systems emotions, hormones, or whatnot doesn't really matter much if the dynamics are useful. It seems at least possible that studying alignment-related topics is going to get us closer than any perspective that's purely focused on learning. Coincidentally quanta is on some related topics today: https://www.quantamagazine.org/once-thought-to-support-neuro...

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The question is does this eventually lead us back to genetic programming and can we adequately avoid the problems of over-fitting to specific hardware that tended to crop up in the past?

Or possibly “in addition to”, yeah. I think this is where it needs to go. We can’t keep training HUGE neural networks every 3 months and throw out all the work we did and the billions of dollars in gear and training just to use another model a few months.

That loops is unsustainable. Active learning needs to be discovered / created.

if that's the arguement for active learning, wouldn't it also apply in that case? it learns something and 5 minutes later my old prompts are useless.

I don't think old prompts would become useless. A few studies have shown that prompt crafting is important because LLMs often misidentify the user's intent. Presumably an AI that is learning continuously will simply get better at inferring intent, therefore any prompts that were effective before will continue to be effective, it will simply grow its ability to infer intent from a larger class of prompts.

That depends on the goals of the prompts you use with the LLM:

* as a glorified natural language processor (like I have done), you'll probably be fine, maybe

* as someone to communicate with, you'll also probably be fine

* as a *very* basic prompt-follower? Like, natural language processing-level of prompt "find me the important words", etc. Probably fine, or close enough.

* as a robust prompt system with complicated logic each prompt? Yes, it will begin to fail catastrophically, especially if you're wanting to be repeatable.

I'm not sure that the general public is that interested in perfectly repeatable work, though. I think they're looking for consistent and improving work.

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