I GUESS

But the "cancel" in "he was canceled" meant that the whole show was canceled.

What is super intelligence?
What is the singularity?

> And there were claims that it would lead to super-intelligence and the singularity

Doesn't it? The genetic algorithms for walking were very crude, but the biggest improvements in robotics came from reinforcement learning, which is now the core of what makes LLMs useful at doing anything

Anthropomorphising is also easier for conversation, because the alternative would be to say:

> "The sampled token sequence is consistent with the model having traversed a low-loss region of the policy manifold in which the KL-regularised objective, as shaped by RLHF reward model gradients, assigns high probability mass to trajectories that an external observer applying the intentional stance would parsimoniously compress as 'wanting Y'"

... each time you wanted to refer to a reasoning LLM's action trajectory...

I remember seeing demos of genetic algorithms learning to walk in the ‘90s. Even without the robots, there was a little physics simulator where you could build frames of muscles (things that could contract) bones (rigid) and skin (surface for pushing against the environment).

It was neat because you could build things that looked like real animals and it would normally converge on how they actually moved. Pretty much anything vaguely fish-like swam like a fish, and it would learn this starting from a bunch of programs that randomly twitched muscles and then combining parts of the ones that travelled the furthest each generation. You could add other metrics (can it turn corners, can it navigate this path) later on. If you built something completely weird (five-legged create with different-length legs) you’d get fascinating ways of moving. And the most interesting thing about that was that it showed symmetry was an evolutionary path that was largely coincidental to movement: animals would work fine without it, it just happened to be an easy path.

And it was cool. And there were claims that it would lead to super-intelligence and the singularity, but mostly people ignored them because they were obvious nonsense. But when you show them generated text they suddenly all anthropomorphise.

It was a rhetorical question restating what you suggested... which the rest of the post answers.

That's literally what I just described with autoresearch

https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2031135152349524125

They can produce interesting results, but the improvement loop is pure suffering.

Debugging testing etc. already eat enough time... this just makes that so much worse.

The thinking behind RSL seems to be LLMs can make code and LLMs are fundamentally code plus the training database, so why not have the LLM write THAT code and ask it to make it better in some way.

To test if this works you need to train the LLM.. (unless the changes are just in post training interface code)

That's a long improvement loop. Better put a human in it to avoid wasting time.. or have the human choose the changes... WAIT.

Influencers, yuck.

Producing code that could be run to spin up an LLM isn't the same thing as designing an LLM.

I suppose if you do it thousands of times you might get one a little better than the training data ... eventually. But the process an LLM does to produce that code is guided by making the code seem like the expected output. This is limiting.

Assuming you train it on the codebases of a bunch of LLMs. There is no path to kind of changes that make such systems to make a leap in efficacy.

All the slick demos never talked about that. This guy I knew in college destroyed so many little motors trying to get it to work... then they moved to just simulating the motors, which was a bit better, but the "unexpected walking solutions" were mostly worse than what he could plan out by programing the machine based on the logic he had in mind when he made the design.

Do you remember all of the soft robots? The worms? They were supposed to have evolved a way to do the dishes by now.

I remember seeing a presentation about such a system and the speaker said (with an air of doom and wonder) "and in just five min. it had learned how to walk, what could it learn in a day?"

And you know back then that kind of gave me a little chill "wow this stuff so good it is alarming" I thought.

I'm... kind of grouchy about it now.