Thanks for the post! One narrow point: You seem to lean at least a bit on the example of ‘much like how humans’ sudden explosion of technological knowledge accumulated in our culture rather than our genes, once we turned the corner’. It seems to me that a. You don’t need to go to humans before you get significant accumulation of important cultural knowledge outside genes (e.g. my understanding is that unaccultured chimps die in the wild) b. the genetic bottleneck is a somewhat weird and contingent feature of animal evolution, and I don’t think there’s a clear analogy in current LLM ML paradigms
I’m not making any claims about takeoff speeds in models, just saying that I don’t think arguments that are based on features that are (maybe) contingent on a genetic bottleneck support the same inference for ML. Can you make the same argument without leaning on the genetic bottleneck, or explain to me why the analogy in fact should hold?
My impression is that they don’t have the skills needed for successful foraging. There’s a lot of evidence for some degree of cultural accumulation in apes and e.g. macaques. But I haven’t looked into this specific claim super closely.
Thanks for the post! One narrow point:
You seem to lean at least a bit on the example of ‘much like how humans’ sudden explosion of technological knowledge accumulated in our culture rather than our genes, once we turned the corner’. It seems to me that
a. You don’t need to go to humans before you get significant accumulation of important cultural knowledge outside genes (e.g. my understanding is that unaccultured chimps die in the wild)
b. the genetic bottleneck is a somewhat weird and contingent feature of animal evolution, and I don’t think there’s a clear analogy in current LLM ML paradigms
I’m not making any claims about takeoff speeds in models, just saying that I don’t think arguments that are based on features that are (maybe) contingent on a genetic bottleneck support the same inference for ML. Can you make the same argument without leaning on the genetic bottleneck, or explain to me why the analogy in fact should hold?
(Is that just because they get attacked and killed by other chimp groups?)
My impression is that they don’t have the skills needed for successful foraging. There’s a lot of evidence for some degree of cultural accumulation in apes and e.g. macaques. But I haven’t looked into this specific claim super closely.