I wasn’t saying that there were only a few research directions that don’t require frontier models period, just that there are only a few that don’t require frontier models and still seem relevant/promising, at least assuming short timelines to AGI.
I am skeptical that agent foundations is still very promising or relevant in the present situation. I wouldn’t want to shut down someone’s research in this area if they were particularly passionate about it or considered themselves on the cusp of an important breakthrough. But I’m not sure it’s wise to be spending scarce incubator resources to funnel new researchers into agent foundations research at this stage.
Good points about mechanistic anomaly detection and activation additions though! (And mechanistic interpretability, but I mentioned that in my previous comment.) I need to read up more on activation additions.
I wasn’t saying that there were only a few research directions that don’t require frontier models period, just that there are only a few that don’t require frontier models and still seem relevant/promising, at least assuming short timelines to AGI.
I am skeptical that agent foundations is still very promising or relevant in the present situation. I wouldn’t want to shut down someone’s research in this area if they were particularly passionate about it or considered themselves on the cusp of an important breakthrough. But I’m not sure it’s wise to be spending scarce incubator resources to funnel new researchers into agent foundations research at this stage.
Good points about mechanistic anomaly detection and activation additions though! (And mechanistic interpretability, but I mentioned that in my previous comment.) I need to read up more on activation additions.