What I am hoping will happen with shoggoth/face is that the Face will develop skills related to euphemisms, censorship, etc. and the Shoggoth will not develop those skills. For example maybe the Face will learn an intuitive sense of how to rephrase manipulative and/or deceptive things so that they don’t cause a human reading them to think ‘this is manipulative and/or deceptive,’ and then the Shoggoth will remain innocently ignorant of those skills.
I’m relatively sceptical that this will pan out, in the absence of some objective that incentivises this specific division of labour. Assuming you train the whole thing end-to-end, I’d expect that there are many possible ways to split up relevant functionality between the Shoggoth and the Face. The one you outline is only one out of many possible solutions and I don’t see why it’d be selected for. I think this is also a reasonable conclusion from past work on ‘hierarchical’ ML (which has been the subject of many different works over the past 10 years, and has broadly failed to deliver IMO)
The good news is that this is something we can test. I want someone to do the experiment and see to what extent the skills accumulate in the face vs. the shoggoth.
I agree it totally might not pan out in the way I hope—this is why I said “What I am hoping will happen” isntead of “what I think will happen” or “what will happen”
I do think we have some reasons to be hopeful here. Intuitively the division of cognitive labor I’m hoping for seems pretty… efficient? to me. E.g. it seems more efficient than the outcome in which all the skills accumulate in the Shoggoth and the Face just copy-pastes.
I’m relatively sceptical that this will pan out, in the absence of some objective that incentivises this specific division of labour. Assuming you train the whole thing end-to-end, I’d expect that there are many possible ways to split up relevant functionality between the Shoggoth and the Face. The one you outline is only one out of many possible solutions and I don’t see why it’d be selected for. I think this is also a reasonable conclusion from past work on ‘hierarchical’ ML (which has been the subject of many different works over the past 10 years, and has broadly failed to deliver IMO)
The good news is that this is something we can test. I want someone to do the experiment and see to what extent the skills accumulate in the face vs. the shoggoth.
I agree it totally might not pan out in the way I hope—this is why I said “What I am hoping will happen” isntead of “what I think will happen” or “what will happen”
I do think we have some reasons to be hopeful here. Intuitively the division of cognitive labor I’m hoping for seems pretty… efficient? to me. E.g. it seems more efficient than the outcome in which all the skills accumulate in the Shoggoth and the Face just copy-pastes.