I think any AI sufficiently good at world modeling to be much of a threat is also going to be quite good at learning from abstractions made from others. In other words, it can just read a history book to figure out about political change, it doesn’t need years of ‘personal’ experience. It’s pretty standard to give models access to training data encompassing a ton of detail about the world nowadays. Just because they currently don’t grok the physics textbooks, medical papers, and wikipedia entries doesn’t mean that that limitation will remain true.
I agree that there is a strong incentive towards making AI capable of understanding these things. The interesting question is going to be, how quickly will that succeed, and what will the properties of the kinds of models that succeed in this be?
I think any AI sufficiently good at world modeling to be much of a threat is also going to be quite good at learning from abstractions made from others. In other words, it can just read a history book to figure out about political change, it doesn’t need years of ‘personal’ experience. It’s pretty standard to give models access to training data encompassing a ton of detail about the world nowadays. Just because they currently don’t grok the physics textbooks, medical papers, and wikipedia entries doesn’t mean that that limitation will remain true.
I agree that there is a strong incentive towards making AI capable of understanding these things. The interesting question is going to be, how quickly will that succeed, and what will the properties of the kinds of models that succeed in this be?