Regarding the maturity of a field, and whether we can expect progress in a mature field to take place in relatively slow / continuous steps:
Suppose you zoom into ML and don’t treat it like a single field. Two things seem likely to be true:
(Pretty likely): Supervised / semi-supervised techniques are far, far more mature than techniques for RL / acting in the world. So smaller groups, with fewer resources, can come up with bigger developments / more impactful architectural innovation in the second than in the first.
(Kinda likely): Developments in RL / acting in the world are currently much closer to being the bottleneck to AGI than developments in supervised / semi-supervised techniques.
I’m not gonna justify either of these right now, because I think a lot of people would agree with them, although I’m very interested in disagreements.
If we grant that both of these are true, then we could still be in either the Eliezeriverse or Pauliverse. Both are compatible with it. But it sits a tiny bit better in the Eliezeriverse, maybe, because it fits better with clumpy rather than smooth development towards AGI.
Or at least it fits better if we expect AGI to arrive while RL is still clumpy, rather than after a hypothetical 10 or 20 future years of sharpening whatever RL technique turns out to be the best. Although it does fit with Eliezer’s short timelines.
Regarding the maturity of a field, and whether we can expect progress in a mature field to take place in relatively slow / continuous steps:
Suppose you zoom into ML and don’t treat it like a single field. Two things seem likely to be true:
(Pretty likely): Supervised / semi-supervised techniques are far, far more mature than techniques for RL / acting in the world. So smaller groups, with fewer resources, can come up with bigger developments / more impactful architectural innovation in the second than in the first.
(Kinda likely): Developments in RL / acting in the world are currently much closer to being the bottleneck to AGI than developments in supervised / semi-supervised techniques.
I’m not gonna justify either of these right now, because I think a lot of people would agree with them, although I’m very interested in disagreements.
If we grant that both of these are true, then we could still be in either the Eliezeriverse or Pauliverse. Both are compatible with it. But it sits a tiny bit better in the Eliezeriverse, maybe, because it fits better with clumpy rather than smooth development towards AGI.
Or at least it fits better if we expect AGI to arrive while RL is still clumpy, rather than after a hypothetical 10 or 20 future years of sharpening whatever RL technique turns out to be the best. Although it does fit with Eliezer’s short timelines.