Diminishing returns make recursive self-improvement unlikely

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:02:49

   excited about that i'd love to finish on a sort of like high level note so you hold two unusual positions that not everybody holds one is that uh we are not on the path to rsi so ai improving itself so we're not on that path but on the other hand you said that ai has now averted the winter that you thought may happen so walk us through each and sort of your general take for where the world is going and then you know next whatever year or two on the rsi comment i think i've just been in the field long enough to see this dance happen many many times people see small percentage gains and then they extrapolate it to like the absolute moon when the reality is amdahl's law occurs people used to give the exact same story of rsi during the neural architecture search days this is when you use neural networks to make better architectures and they're like holy crap

2. 1:03:52

   it's 10 more efficient what if that more efficient thing then like discovers the next thing and then we repeat it until we get unbelievable More efficient architectures, and that entire field ended up getting thrown in the trash because it was never useful. People don't understand diminishing returns in the real world, and I think that it's going to be a similar thing for the bottles of today, as far as I can tell.

3. 1:04:16

   Obviously, I have error bars in my predictions, but this keeps on happening despite people relatively young to the field getting jazzed about their first taste of self-improvement. um so i don't i don't think that that's really happening based on the evidence i've seen and based on my sense of where the field is going i do think that ai is an incredible technology and we are like under leveraging it to absolutely insane degrees and i just think this is like just a completely different branch and i think that ai winter may still happen in the sense that you know the the stock prices of the giant companies and the hyperscalers whatever might crash down i don't think the hyperscalers will just to be clear but i think that there could be some market correction because everyone is pricing in some sort of god moment um so that

4. 1:05:11

   could be happening i'm not an expert at this but the way ai winter i'm worried about is ai continuing to be so unbelievably useless in automation and i just think that that's not going to happen anymore um this whole like and to be clear i think that ai was still valuable but just not an automation love chat gpt love cloud code and codex um and still i don't think that that is enough given how incredible ai is and i think almost everyone deep down feels this way like chatbots are kind of feel magical and it's kind of weird how little they've changed the world so um you'd expect you know if you bottled up this intelligence and made it super cheap you could put it everywhere yet somehow every single year you get like a famous failure of a company failing to automate a drive-through because the chatbots are not reliable enough like that's kind

5. 1:06:03

   of like a wild state of affairs and like that that is going to be addressed quite quickly in my opinion okay wonderful uh diogo it's been amazing um i know you're uh working insane hours by the