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Just to play devils advocate: are we sure humans have demonstrated the ability to go beyond their training data? Like.. are we sure-sure about that?

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I'm not asking for anything close enough to the boundary for questions like that to be difficult. There are some ML systems like AlphaGo that have crossed the line in specific domains. It's just that making self-play and online learning work for huge LLMs is highly non obvious.

The idea is simply that the basic idea behind LLMs, that you're distilling the entropy out of the entire available world of text, is antithetical to creativity.

Further developing on the theme of self-play, humans have the ability to sense what we want (intellectually) and reach for it communally over thousands of years. It's an innate quality, and if AI starts participating (contrast to giving people psychosis) we will all be able to tell.

> Further developing on the theme of self-play, humans have the ability to sense what we want (intellectually) and reach for it communally over thousands of years. It's an innate quality, and if AI starts participating (contrast to giving people psychosis) we will all be able to tell.

Well.. that's not true is it. There are human cultures that haven't reached for anything for thousands of years even though they clearly saw what western culture was doing and that they were being left behind badly.

Planes, trains, and automobiles are not natural features of the environment.

And all were invented piece by piece. Each human had to have updated training data to be able to handle the next tweak.

Are you suggesting intelligent design got us here?

The exact opposite. Improvements are step by step and small.

Idk, I mean, Shakespeare never read Shakespeare, so, I mean, unless aliens?

AI images are all unique and new.

Not nearly as new as Shakespeare was when he single handedly reinvented English vocabulary, for example.

He accidentally formalized spelling. You can't invent vocabulary when you're writing plays for a mass audience and want the audience to actually understand what is being said. That makes no sense.

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