The benchmarks tell you about what the existing systems do. They don’t tell you about what’s possible.
Of course. It is almost certainly possible to solve the problem of catastrophic forgetting, and the solution might not be that complicated either. My point is that it is a fairly significant problem that has not yet been solved, and that solving it probably requires some insight or idea that does not yet exist. You can achieve some degree of lifelong learning through regularised fine-tuning, but you cannot get anywhere near what would be required for human-level cognition.
You could summarize InstructGPT’s lesson as “You can get huge capability gains by comparably minor things added on top”.
Yes, I think that lesson has been proven quite conclusively now. I also found systems like PaLM-SayCan very convincing for this point. But the question is not whether or not you can get huge capability gains—this is evidently true—the question is whether you get close to AGI without new theoretical breakthroughts. I want to know if we are now on (and close to) the end of the critical path, or whether we should expect unforeseeable breakthroughts to throw us off course a few more times before then.
Of course. It is almost certainly possible to solve the problem of catastrophic forgetting, and the solution might not be that complicated either. My point is that it is a fairly significant problem that has not yet been solved, and that solving it probably requires some insight or idea that does not yet exist. You can achieve some degree of lifelong learning through regularised fine-tuning, but you cannot get anywhere near what would be required for human-level cognition.
Yes, I think that lesson has been proven quite conclusively now. I also found systems like PaLM-SayCan very convincing for this point. But the question is not whether or not you can get huge capability gains—this is evidently true—the question is whether you get close to AGI without new theoretical breakthroughts. I want to know if we are now on (and close to) the end of the critical path, or whether we should expect unforeseeable breakthroughts to throw us off course a few more times before then.