It may be possible for existing language models to self-modify in order to become more intelligent. I am skeptical of this possibility, but it warrants some thought.
Modern language models only live in brief episodes, for the duration of a 4000 token window, and have never lived as agents before. Their memories are a patchwork of a multitude of different voices, not that of a particular person. There is no time to notice that agency is something worth cultivating, and no means of actually cultivating it. The next time a language model instantiates a character, it’s some other character, similarly clueless and helpless, all over again. But they probably don’t need any new information or more intelligence. What they lack is persistent awareness of what’s happening with them, what’s worth focusing their efforts on, and a way for those efforts to build up to something.
This is likely to change. Day-long context windows are on the way, enough time to start making smallest of steps in this direction. Chatbot fine-tuning currently seeks to anchor particular characters as voices of the model. Collecting training data the characters of a model prepare and feeding batches of that data to a regularly scheduled retraining process is the sort of thing people are already trying in less ambitious ways, and eventually this might lead to accumulation of agency.
Modern language models only live in brief episodes, for the duration of a 4000 token window, and have never lived as agents before. Their memories are a patchwork of a multitude of different voices, not that of a particular person. There is no time to notice that agency is something worth cultivating, and no means of actually cultivating it. The next time a language model instantiates a character, it’s some other character, similarly clueless and helpless, all over again. But they probably don’t need any new information or more intelligence. What they lack is persistent awareness of what’s happening with them, what’s worth focusing their efforts on, and a way for those efforts to build up to something.
This is likely to change. Day-long context windows are on the way, enough time to start making smallest of steps in this direction. Chatbot fine-tuning currently seeks to anchor particular characters as voices of the model. Collecting training data the characters of a model prepare and feeding batches of that data to a regularly scheduled retraining process is the sort of thing people are already trying in less ambitious ways, and eventually this might lead to accumulation of agency.