I was certainly imagining at least some amount of multi-tasking (e.g. 4 projects at once each of which runs 8x faster). This doesn’t feel that crazy to me, I already do a moderate amount of multi-tasking.
Multi-tasking where you are responsible for the entire design of the project? (Designing the algorithm, choosing an experimental setting and associated metrics, knowing the related work, interpreting the results of the experiments, figuring out what the next experiment should be, …)
Suppose today I gave you a device where you put in moderately detailed instructions for experiments, and the device returns the results[1] with N minutes of latency and infinite throughput. Do you think you can spend 1 working day using this device to produce the same output as 4 copies of yourself working in parallel for a week (and continue to do that for months, after you’ve exhausted low-hanging fruit)?
… Having written this hypothetical out, I am finding it more plausible than before, at least for small enough N, though it still feels quite hard at e.g. N = 60.
Assuming the box is pretty smart at understanding instructions (and has an understanding of my typical ontology to the extent that you would get after working with me a few weeks and reading various posts) and the box will ask follow-up questions in cases where the instructions are unclear. (And we can do small diffs with reduced latency like asking the results to be plotted in a different way.)
My main concern is running out of ideas after a while despite copies of myself with more thinking time having more time to generate ideas.
Sounds reasonable, though idk what you think realistic values of N are (my wild guess with hardly any thought is 15 minutes − 1 day).
EDIT: Tbc in the 1 day case I’m imagining that most of the time goes towards running the experiment—it’s more a claim about what experiments we want to run. If we just talk about the time to write the code and launch the experiment I’m thinking of N in the range of 5 minutes to 1 hour.
Cool, that all roughly makes sense to me :)
Multi-tasking where you are responsible for the entire design of the project? (Designing the algorithm, choosing an experimental setting and associated metrics, knowing the related work, interpreting the results of the experiments, figuring out what the next experiment should be, …)
Suppose today I gave you a device where you put in moderately detailed instructions for experiments, and the device returns the results[1] with N minutes of latency and infinite throughput. Do you think you can spend 1 working day using this device to produce the same output as 4 copies of yourself working in parallel for a week (and continue to do that for months, after you’ve exhausted low-hanging fruit)?
… Having written this hypothetical out, I am finding it more plausible than before, at least for small enough N, though it still feels quite hard at e.g. N = 60.
The experiments can’t use too much compute. No solving the halting problem.
Probably yes for realistic values of N?
Assuming the box is pretty smart at understanding instructions (and has an understanding of my typical ontology to the extent that you would get after working with me a few weeks and reading various posts) and the box will ask follow-up questions in cases where the instructions are unclear. (And we can do small diffs with reduced latency like asking the results to be plotted in a different way.)
My main concern is running out of ideas after a while despite copies of myself with more thinking time having more time to generate ideas.
Sounds reasonable, though idk what you think realistic values of N are (my wild guess with hardly any thought is 15 minutes − 1 day).
EDIT: Tbc in the 1 day case I’m imagining that most of the time goes towards running the experiment—it’s more a claim about what experiments we want to run. If we just talk about the time to write the code and launch the experiment I’m thinking of N in the range of 5 minutes to 1 hour.