Thanks for mentioning the self programming AI paper. It seems that you place a lot of faith in how far such approaches can take us on the way to some sort of human-like AI. But when I read the paper I was not so convinced. The critical part for me is how the AI is allowed to change its program: “The possible modifications include adding convolutional layers, changing the size of convolutional or hidden layers, and increasing the number of hidden layers.” But this is quite trivial. The recent history of AI shows us that big breakthroughs happen with advances in architecture. The transformer model is a prime example. But this program will never come up with a new architecture if all it can do is modify trivial aspects of an existing architecture. We can of course dream that if an existing architecture becomes good enough it can break its chains and modify anything at all about its code base and even create new architectures. But this seems like a very big stretch of the imagination from what is actually presented in the paper.
Thanks for mentioning the self programming AI paper. It seems that you place a lot of faith in how far such approaches can take us on the way to some sort of human-like AI. But when I read the paper I was not so convinced. The critical part for me is how the AI is allowed to change its program: “The possible modifications include adding convolutional layers, changing the size of convolutional or hidden layers, and increasing the number of hidden layers.” But this is quite trivial. The recent history of AI shows us that big breakthroughs happen with advances in architecture. The transformer model is a prime example. But this program will never come up with a new architecture if all it can do is modify trivial aspects of an existing architecture. We can of course dream that if an existing architecture becomes good enough it can break its chains and modify anything at all about its code base and even create new architectures. But this seems like a very big stretch of the imagination from what is actually presented in the paper.