Yeah, with the word “capability” I meant completely new capabilities (in Aschenbrenner’s case, the relevant new capabilities would be general intelligence abilities such as the learning-planning ability), but I can see that for example object permanence could be called a new capability. I maybe should have used a better word there. Basically, my argument is that while the image generators have become better at generating images, they haven’t gotten anything that would take them nearer towards AGI.
I’ll grant you, as does he, that unhobbling is hand-wavy and hard to measure (although that by no means implies it isn’t real).
I’m not claiming that unhobbling isn’t real, and I think that the mentioned improvements such as CoT and scaffolding etc. really do make models better. But do they make them exponentially better? Can we expect the increases to continue exponentially in the future? I’m going to say no. So I think it’s unsubstantiated to measure them with orders of magnitude.
But we can certainly measure floating point operations! So accusing him of using “OOMs” as a unit, and one that is unmeasurable/detached from reality, surprises me.
Most of the time, when he says “OOM”, he doesn’t refer to FLOPs, he refers to the abstract OOMs that somehow encompass all three axes he mentioned. So while some of it is measurable, as a whole it is not.
Yeah, with the word “capability” I meant completely new capabilities (in Aschenbrenner’s case, the relevant new capabilities would be general intelligence abilities such as the learning-planning ability), but I can see that for example object permanence could be called a new capability. I maybe should have used a better word there. Basically, my argument is that while the image generators have become better at generating images, they haven’t gotten anything that would take them nearer towards AGI.
I’m not claiming that unhobbling isn’t real, and I think that the mentioned improvements such as CoT and scaffolding etc. really do make models better. But do they make them exponentially better? Can we expect the increases to continue exponentially in the future? I’m going to say no. So I think it’s unsubstantiated to measure them with orders of magnitude.
Most of the time, when he says “OOM”, he doesn’t refer to FLOPs, he refers to the abstract OOMs that somehow encompass all three axes he mentioned. So while some of it is measurable, as a whole it is not.