GPT4 can’t solve IMO problems. Now take an IMO gold medalist about to walk into their exam, and upload them at that state into an Em without synaptic plasticity. Would the resulting upload would still be able to solve the exam at a similar level as the full human?
I don’t have a strong belief, but my intuition is that they would. I recall once chatting to @Neel Nanda about how he solved problems (as he is in fact an IMO gold winner), and recall him describing something that to me sounded like “introspecting really hard and having the answers just suddenly ‘appear’...” (though hopefully he can correct that butchered impression)
Do you think such a student Em would or would not perform similarly well in the exam?
I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other on the Em here.
In terms of what I wrote above (“when I think about what humans can do that GPT-4 can’t do, I think of things that unfold over the course of minutes and hours and days and weeks, and centrally involve permanently editing brain synapses … being able to figure things out”), I would say that human-unique “figuring things out” process happened substantially during the weeks and months of study and practice, before the human stepped into the exam room, wherein they got really good at solving IMO problems. And hmm, probably also some “figuring things out” happens in the exam room, but I’m not sure how much, and at least possibly so little that they could get a decent score without forming new long-term memories and then building on them.
I don’t think Ems are good for much if they can’t figure things out and get good at new domains—domains that they didn’t know about before uploading—over the course of weeks and months, the way humans can. Like, you could have an army of such mediocre Ems monitor the internet, or whatever, but GPT-4 can do that too. If there’s an Em Ed Witten without the ability to grow intellectually, and build new knowledge on top of new knowledge, then this Em would still be much much better at string theory than GPT-4 is…but so what? It wouldn’t be able to write groundbreaking new string theory papers the way real Ed Witten can.
Hm, here’s a test case:
GPT4 can’t solve IMO problems. Now take an IMO gold medalist about to walk into their exam, and upload them at that state into an Em without synaptic plasticity. Would the resulting upload would still be able to solve the exam at a similar level as the full human?
I don’t have a strong belief, but my intuition is that they would. I recall once chatting to @Neel Nanda about how he solved problems (as he is in fact an IMO gold winner), and recall him describing something that to me sounded like “introspecting really hard and having the answers just suddenly ‘appear’...” (though hopefully he can correct that butchered impression)
Do you think such a student Em would or would not perform similarly well in the exam?
I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other on the Em here.
In terms of what I wrote above (“when I think about what humans can do that GPT-4 can’t do, I think of things that unfold over the course of minutes and hours and days and weeks, and centrally involve permanently editing brain synapses … being able to figure things out”), I would say that human-unique “figuring things out” process happened substantially during the weeks and months of study and practice, before the human stepped into the exam room, wherein they got really good at solving IMO problems. And hmm, probably also some “figuring things out” happens in the exam room, but I’m not sure how much, and at least possibly so little that they could get a decent score without forming new long-term memories and then building on them.
I don’t think Ems are good for much if they can’t figure things out and get good at new domains—domains that they didn’t know about before uploading—over the course of weeks and months, the way humans can. Like, you could have an army of such mediocre Ems monitor the internet, or whatever, but GPT-4 can do that too. If there’s an Em Ed Witten without the ability to grow intellectually, and build new knowledge on top of new knowledge, then this Em would still be much much better at string theory than GPT-4 is…but so what? It wouldn’t be able to write groundbreaking new string theory papers the way real Ed Witten can.