My intention is not to criticize you in particular!
Let me describe my own thought process with respect to the originality of work. If I get an academic paper to referee and I suspect that it’s derivative, I treat it as my job to demonstrate this by locating a specific published work that has already proposed the same theory. If I can’t do this, I don’t criticize it for being derivative. The epistemic rationale for this is as follows: if the experts working in an area are not aware of a source that has already published the idea, then even if the idea has already been published somewhere obscure, it is useful for the epistemic community to have something new to cite in discussing it. And of course, if I’ve discussed the idea in private with my colleagues but the paper I am refereeing is the first discussion of the idea I have seen written down, my prior discussions do not show the idea isn’t original — my personal discussions don’t constitute part of the collective knowledge of the research community because I haven’t shared them publicly.
It’s probably not very fruitful to continue speculating about whether Gwern read the linked paper. It does seem to me that your disagreement directly targets our thesis in the linked paper (which is productive), whereas the disagreement I quoted above took Simon to be making the rather different claim that GPTs (considered by themselves) are not architecturally similar to Gato.
My intention is not to criticize you in particular!
Let me describe my own thought process with respect to the originality of work. If I get an academic paper to referee and I suspect that it’s derivative, I treat it as my job to demonstrate this by locating a specific published work that has already proposed the same theory. If I can’t do this, I don’t criticize it for being derivative. The epistemic rationale for this is as follows: if the experts working in an area are not aware of a source that has already published the idea, then even if the idea has already been published somewhere obscure, it is useful for the epistemic community to have something new to cite in discussing it. And of course, if I’ve discussed the idea in private with my colleagues but the paper I am refereeing is the first discussion of the idea I have seen written down, my prior discussions do not show the idea isn’t original — my personal discussions don’t constitute part of the collective knowledge of the research community because I haven’t shared them publicly.
It’s probably not very fruitful to continue speculating about whether Gwern read the linked paper. It does seem to me that your disagreement directly targets our thesis in the linked paper (which is productive), whereas the disagreement I quoted above took Simon to be making the rather different claim that GPTs (considered by themselves) are not architecturally similar to Gato.