It’s not clear to me that it’s necessarily possible to get to a point where a model can achieve rapid self-improvement without expensive training or experimenting. Evolution hasn’t figured out a way to substantially reduce the time and resources required for any one human’s cognitive development.
I agree that even in the current paradigm there are many paths towards sudden capability gains, like the suboptimal infrastructure scenario you pointed to. I just don’t know if I would consider that FOOM, which in my understanding implies rapid recursive self-improvement.
Maybe this is just a technicality. I expect things to advance pretty rapidly from now on with no end in sight. But before we had these huge models, FOOM with very fast recursive self-improvement seemed almost inevitable to me. Now I think that it’s possible that model size and training compute put at least some cap on the rate of self-improvement (maybe weeks instead of minutes).
It’s not clear to me that it’s necessarily possible to get to a point where a model can achieve rapid self-improvement without expensive training or experimenting. Evolution hasn’t figured out a way to substantially reduce the time and resources required for any one human’s cognitive development.
I agree that even in the current paradigm there are many paths towards sudden capability gains, like the suboptimal infrastructure scenario you pointed to. I just don’t know if I would consider that FOOM, which in my understanding implies rapid recursive self-improvement.
Maybe this is just a technicality. I expect things to advance pretty rapidly from now on with no end in sight. But before we had these huge models, FOOM with very fast recursive self-improvement seemed almost inevitable to me. Now I think that it’s possible that model size and training compute put at least some cap on the rate of self-improvement (maybe weeks instead of minutes).