Overhangs, overhangs everywhere. A thousand gleaming threads stretching backwards from the fog of the Future, forwards from the static Past, and ending in a single Gordian knot before us here and now.
That knot: understanding, learning, being, thinking. The key, the source, the remaining barrier between us and the infinite, the unknowable, the singularity.
When will it break? What holds it steady? Each thread we examine seems so inadequate. Could this be what is holding us back, saving us from ourselves, from our Mind Children? Not this one, nor that, yet some strange mix of many compensating factors.
Surely, if we had more compute, we’d be there already? Or better data? The right algorithms? Faster hardware? Neuromorphic chips? Clever scaffolding? Training on a regress of chains of thought, to better solutions, to better chains of thought, to even better solutions?
All of these, and none of these. The web strains at the breaking point. How long now? Days? Months?
If we had enough ways to utilize inference-time compute, couldn’t we just scale that to super-genius, and ask the genius for a more efficient solution? But it doesn’t seem like that has been done. Has it been tried? Who can say.
Will the first AGI out the gate be so expensive it is unmaintainable for more than a few hours? Will it quickly find efficiency improvements?
Or will we again be bound, hung up on novel algorithmic insights hanging just out of sight. Who knows?
Surely though, surely.… surely rushing ahead into the danger cannot be the wisest course, the safest course? Can we not agree to take our time, to think through the puzzles that confront us, to enumerate possible consequences and proactively reduce risks?
I hope. I fear. I stare in awestruck wonder at our brilliance and stupidity so tightly intermingled. We place the barrel of the gun to our collective head, panting, desperate, asking ourselves if this is it. Will it be? Intelligence is dead, long live intelligence.
Overhangs, overhangs everywhere. A thousand gleaming threads stretching backwards from the fog of the Future, forwards from the static Past, and ending in a single Gordian knot before us here and now.
That knot: understanding, learning, being, thinking. The key, the source, the remaining barrier between us and the infinite, the unknowable, the singularity.
When will it break? What holds it steady? Each thread we examine seems so inadequate. Could this be what is holding us back, saving us from ourselves, from our Mind Children? Not this one, nor that, yet some strange mix of many compensating factors.
Surely, if we had more compute, we’d be there already? Or better data? The right algorithms? Faster hardware? Neuromorphic chips? Clever scaffolding? Training on a regress of chains of thought, to better solutions, to better chains of thought, to even better solutions?
All of these, and none of these. The web strains at the breaking point. How long now? Days? Months?
If we had enough ways to utilize inference-time compute, couldn’t we just scale that to super-genius, and ask the genius for a more efficient solution? But it doesn’t seem like that has been done. Has it been tried? Who can say.
Will the first AGI out the gate be so expensive it is unmaintainable for more than a few hours? Will it quickly find efficiency improvements?
Or will we again be bound, hung up on novel algorithmic insights hanging just out of sight. Who knows?
Surely though, surely.… surely rushing ahead into the danger cannot be the wisest course, the safest course? Can we not agree to take our time, to think through the puzzles that confront us, to enumerate possible consequences and proactively reduce risks?
I hope. I fear. I stare in awestruck wonder at our brilliance and stupidity so tightly intermingled. We place the barrel of the gun to our collective head, panting, desperate, asking ourselves if this is it. Will it be? Intelligence is dead, long live intelligence.