It seems that at this point in time, neither Paul nor Eliezer are excited about IDA
I’m still excited about IDA.
I assume this is coming from me saying that you need big additional conceptual progress to have an indefinitely scalable scheme. And I do think that’s more skeptical than my strongest pro-IDA claim here in early 2017:
I think there is a very good chance, perhaps as high as 50%, that this basic strategy can eventually be used to train benign state-of-the-art model-free RL agents. [...] That does not mean that I think the conceptual issues are worked out conclusively, but it does mean that I think we’re at the point where we’d benefit from empirical information about what works in practice
That said:
I think it’s up for grabs whether we’ll end up with something that counts as “this basic strategy.” (I think imitative generalization is the kind of thing I had in mind in that sentence, but many of the ELK schemes we are thinking about definitely aren’t, it’s pretty arbitrary.)
Also note that in that post I’m talking about something that produces a benign agent in practice, and in the other I’m talking about “indefinitely scalable.” Though my probability on “produces a benign agent in practice” is also definitely lower.
I’m still excited about IDA.
I assume this is coming from me saying that you need big additional conceptual progress to have an indefinitely scalable scheme. And I do think that’s more skeptical than my strongest pro-IDA claim here in early 2017:
That said:
I think it’s up for grabs whether we’ll end up with something that counts as “this basic strategy.” (I think imitative generalization is the kind of thing I had in mind in that sentence, but many of the ELK schemes we are thinking about definitely aren’t, it’s pretty arbitrary.)
Also note that in that post I’m talking about something that produces a benign agent in practice, and in the other I’m talking about “indefinitely scalable.” Though my probability on “produces a benign agent in practice” is also definitely lower.