My reply to a similar statement Eliezer made on Twitter today:
Reversing hashes nicely drives home that the training objective is technically vastly superhuman. But such far-fetched examples might give the impression that we’re not going to get any superhuman capabilities realistically/any time soon with SSL.
There are much more tractable superhuman capabilities that I expect current and near future LLMs to learn, such as having a much more universal “type of guy” prior than any individual human, modeling statistical regularities that no humans think about, stream-of-thought outputting of types of text that would require painstaking effort/ revision/collaboration for humans to create. Etc.
Statistical analysis of an audio recording of someone typing at a keyboard is sufficient to reverse engineer keystrokes. Clever humans figured this out, but there are many more evidential entanglements like this lurking that no one has thought of, but will be transparent to LLMs.
The 2020 extrapolation example gets at a more realistic class of capability that even GPT-3 has to a nonzero extent, and which will scale more continuously in the current regime with practical implications.
My reply to a similar statement Eliezer made on Twitter today:
The 2020 extrapolation example gets at a more realistic class of capability that even GPT-3 has to a nonzero extent, and which will scale more continuously in the current regime with practical implications.