If these rumors are true, it sounds like we’re already starting to hit the issue I predicted in LLMs May Find It Hard to FOOM. The majority of content on the Internet isn’t written by geniuses with post-doctoral experience, so we’re starting to run out of the highest-quality training material for getting LLMs past doctoral student performance levels. However, as I describe there, this isn’t a wall, it’d just a slowdown: we need to start using AI to generate a lot more high-quality training data, As o1 shows, that’s entirely possible, using inference-time compute scaling and then training on the results. We’re having AI do the equivalent of System 2 thinking (in contexts where we can check the results are accurate), and then attempting to train a smarter AI that can solver the same problems by System 1 thinking.
However, this might be enough to render fast takeoff unlikely, which from an alignment point of view would be an excellent thing.
Now we just need to make sure all that synthetic training data we’re having the AI generate is well aligned.
If these rumors are true, it sounds like we’re already starting to hit the issue I predicted in LLMs May Find It Hard to FOOM. The majority of content on the Internet isn’t written by geniuses with post-doctoral experience, so we’re starting to run out of the highest-quality training material for getting LLMs past doctoral student performance levels. However, as I describe there, this isn’t a wall, it’d just a slowdown: we need to start using AI to generate a lot more high-quality training data, As o1 shows, that’s entirely possible, using inference-time compute scaling and then training on the results. We’re having AI do the equivalent of System 2 thinking (in contexts where we can check the results are accurate), and then attempting to train a smarter AI that can solver the same problems by System 1 thinking.
However, this might be enough to render fast takeoff unlikely, which from an alignment point of view would be an excellent thing.
Now we just need to make sure all that synthetic training data we’re having the AI generate is well aligned.
This is also my interpretation of the rumors, assuming they are true, which I don’t put much probability on.