One must notice that in order to predict the next token as well as possible the LMM will benefit from being able to simulate every situation, every person, and every causal element behind the creation of every bit of text in its training distribution, no matter what we then train the LMM to output to us (what mask we put on it) afterwards.
Is there any rigorous justification for this claim? As far as I can tell, this is folk wisdom from the scaling/AI safety community, and I think it’s far from obvious that it’s correct, or what assumptions are required for it to hold.
It seems much more plausible in the infinite limit than in practice.
In the context of his argument I think the claim is reasonable, since I interpreted it as the claim that, since it can be used a tool that designs plans, it has already overcome the biggest challenge of being an agent.
But if we take that claim out of context and interpret it literally, then I agree that it’s not a justified statement per se. It may be able to simulate a plausible causal explanation, but I think that is very different from actually knowing it. As long as you only have access to partial information, there are theoretical limits to what you can know about the world. But it’s hard to think of contexts where that gap would matter a lot.
Is there any rigorous justification for this claim? As far as I can tell, this is folk wisdom from the scaling/AI safety community, and I think it’s far from obvious that it’s correct, or what assumptions are required for it to hold.
It seems much more plausible in the infinite limit than in practice.
In the context of his argument I think the claim is reasonable, since I interpreted it as the claim that, since it can be used a tool that designs plans, it has already overcome the biggest challenge of being an agent.
But if we take that claim out of context and interpret it literally, then I agree that it’s not a justified statement per se. It may be able to simulate a plausible causal explanation, but I think that is very different from actually knowing it. As long as you only have access to partial information, there are theoretical limits to what you can know about the world. But it’s hard to think of contexts where that gap would matter a lot.