What does foom actually mean? How does it relate to concepts like recursive self-improvement, fast takeoff, winner-takes-all, etc? I’d appreciate a technical definition, I think in the past I thought I knew what it meant but people said my understanding was wrong.
There’s an article on Stampy’s AI Safety Info that discusses the differences between FOOM and some other related concepts. FOOM seems to be used synonymously with “hard takeoff” or perhaps with “hard takeoff driven by recursive self-improvement”; I don’t think it has a technical definition separate from that. At the time of the FOOM debate, it was taken more for granted that a hard takeoff would involve recursive self-improvement, whereas now there seems to be more emphasis by MIRI people on the possibility that ordinary “other-improvement” (scaling up and improving AI systems) could result in large performance leaps before recursive self-improvement became important.
What does foom actually mean? How does it relate to concepts like recursive self-improvement, fast takeoff, winner-takes-all, etc? I’d appreciate a technical definition, I think in the past I thought I knew what it meant but people said my understanding was wrong.
There’s an article on Stampy’s AI Safety Info that discusses the differences between FOOM and some other related concepts. FOOM seems to be used synonymously with “hard takeoff” or perhaps with “hard takeoff driven by recursive self-improvement”; I don’t think it has a technical definition separate from that. At the time of the FOOM debate, it was taken more for granted that a hard takeoff would involve recursive self-improvement, whereas now there seems to be more emphasis by MIRI people on the possibility that ordinary “other-improvement” (scaling up and improving AI systems) could result in large performance leaps before recursive self-improvement became important.