I be a lot more optimistic about it for math than for anything touching the real world.
Also, there are lots of real-world places where factorization is known to work well. Basically any competitive market, with lots of interchangeable products, corresponds to a good factorization of some production problem. Production lines, similarly, are good factorizations. The issue is that we can’t factor problems in general, i.e. there’s still lots of problems we can’t factor well, and using factorization as our main alignment strategy requires fairly general factorizability (since we have to factor all the sub-problems of alignment recursively, which is a whole lot of subproblems, and it only takes one non-human-factorable subproblem to mess it all up).
I be a lot more optimistic about it for math than for anything touching the real world.
Also, there are lots of real-world places where factorization is known to work well. Basically any competitive market, with lots of interchangeable products, corresponds to a good factorization of some production problem. Production lines, similarly, are good factorizations. The issue is that we can’t factor problems in general, i.e. there’s still lots of problems we can’t factor well, and using factorization as our main alignment strategy requires fairly general factorizability (since we have to factor all the sub-problems of alignment recursively, which is a whole lot of subproblems, and it only takes one non-human-factorable subproblem to mess it all up).