Regarding the weird mediocrity of modern AI, isn’t part of this that GPT-3-style language models are almost aiming for mediocrity?
Would a hypothetical “AlphaZero of code” which built its own abstractions from the ground up—and presumably would not reinvent Python (AlphaCode is cool and all, but it does strike me as a little absurd to see an AI write Python) - have this property?
Game-playing AI is also mediocre, as are models fine-tuned to write good code. 100B parameter models trained from scratch to write code (rather than to imitate human coders) would be much better but would take quite a lot longer to train, and I don’t see any evidence that they would spend less time in the mediocre subhuman regime (though I do agree that they would more easily go well past human level).
Regarding the weird mediocrity of modern AI, isn’t part of this that GPT-3-style language models are almost aiming for mediocrity?
Would a hypothetical “AlphaZero of code” which built its own abstractions from the ground up—and presumably would not reinvent Python (AlphaCode is cool and all, but it does strike me as a little absurd to see an AI write Python) - have this property?
Game-playing AI is also mediocre, as are models fine-tuned to write good code. 100B parameter models trained from scratch to write code (rather than to imitate human coders) would be much better but would take quite a lot longer to train, and I don’t see any evidence that they would spend less time in the mediocre subhuman regime (though I do agree that they would more easily go well past human level).