Probably at least somewhat relevant w.r.t. discussions of what the first AIs capable of obsoleting humanity could look like.
I’d bet against any of this providing interesting evidence beyond basic first principles arguments. These types of theory results never seem to add value on top of careful reasoning from my experience.
Hmm, unsure about this. E.g. the development models of many in the alignment community before GPT-3 (often heavily focused on RL or even on GOFAI) seem quite substantially worse in retrospect than those of some of the most famous deep learning people (e.g. LeCun’s cake); of course, this may be an unfair/biased comparison using hindsight. Unsure how much theory results were influencing the famous deep learners (and e.g. classic learning theory results would probably have been misleading), but doesn’t seem obvious they had 0 influence? For example, Bengio has multiple at least somewhat conceptual / theoretical (including review) papers motivating deep/representation learning; e.g. Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives.
I think Paul looks considerably better in retrospect than famous DL people IMO. (Partially via being somewhat more specific, though still not really making predictions.)
I’m skeptical hard theory had much influence on anyone though. (In this domain at least.)
I’d bet against any of this providing interesting evidence beyond basic first principles arguments. These types of theory results never seem to add value on top of careful reasoning from my experience.
Hmm, unsure about this. E.g. the development models of many in the alignment community before GPT-3 (often heavily focused on RL or even on GOFAI) seem quite substantially worse in retrospect than those of some of the most famous deep learning people (e.g. LeCun’s cake); of course, this may be an unfair/biased comparison using hindsight. Unsure how much theory results were influencing the famous deep learners (and e.g. classic learning theory results would probably have been misleading), but doesn’t seem obvious they had 0 influence? For example, Bengio has multiple at least somewhat conceptual / theoretical (including review) papers motivating deep/representation learning; e.g. Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives.
I think Paul looks considerably better in retrospect than famous DL people IMO. (Partially via being somewhat more specific, though still not really making predictions.)
I’m skeptical hard theory had much influence on anyone though. (In this domain at least.)