> There is a complex relationship between truth and *good* communication. [...] There are many many cases where lies are *easier to communicate* than the truth.
You're literally conflating good communication with easy communication.
> "Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you"
If you're doing something that isn't like how people are used to things being done, is novel, or is contra to common beliefs, there's a good chance that nobody will believe in you. And in such situations, their lack of belief is not a reliable indicator of whether what you're doing is valid or correct. Most people's negative responses in such cases are emotional responses, not rational ones.
In such situations, "Being honest with themselves about whether what they are doing is actually working or not" and "Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you" are not opposites.
> As we advance it becomes more difficult to advance. You obviously make most advancements around the things that are easiest to improve. Then all the easy things are done.
This isn't some foregone conclusion. It completely depends on the rate at which the intelligence and abilities of the AI increases. If that rate was high enough, then the harder and harder problems would become easier and easier for it.
Actually, evolution seems to show the opposite: The rate of advancement has only sped up, with billions of years between significant changes going to millions, to thousands, to tens and arguably to mere years now.
Having said that, we're probably looking at an S-curve with the physical limits of reality getting in the way in the end.
The more you evolve I guess there's more surface area to evolve on. Similarly cavemen could only do so much. But today you can take a degree in physics, art, history, etc. and it's probably impossible for one person to know all that ever was and is. But it's possible for a caveman shaman to know everything the tribe knew up to that point. Probably. So while it's harder to make progress there's also a lot more places you can progress.
You're ignoring a lot of important factors. I'll give you most obvious ones. We often do genetics testing on fruit flies because they reproduce quickly and the initial population is large.
Your claim ignores this fact. The base population and number of interactions has increased.
I am not ignoring anything, I'm looking at the broader picture, which includes non-biological evolution. Simple rebuttal to your specific point: The population of self-improving AIs will also go from 0 to many more.
In a broader sense evolution moved from very static simple domains to dynamic malleable complex domains. Biological evolution speed is glacial compared to cultural evolution speed. Even then, cultural evolution is fairly slow compared to technological evolution.
I would expect a model's result each time to be of a similar quality to the other times. There's something wrong if it does a way better or worse job, at the same problem, sometimes. It's possible, but I haven't heard anyone saying that they do.
No, that's not how LLMs work. It's all probabilities, and that issue has only deepened with providers silently falling back to worse models if they suspect you might be distilling their models. If an LLM rolls a bad token that can tip the whole balance of the response into utter nonsense.
People use LLMs to do vulnerability scanning by throwing them repeatedly at a codebase. Depending on the run they return with nothing, with a false positive, with a true vulnerability. These are very different destinations when faced with the same problem, sometimes.
Since GPT2, people have been throwing a ton of crap at the wall just to pick out one nugget that's uncharacteristically more solid than the others. Honestly? It's not just possible—it's core to how they operate. And it always has been.
In my comment I pointed out that "5 years" was a bit of an exaggeration compared to the results in the article (6 months). That seemed unfortunate to me. To me 5 years seems much better than 6 months.
Though you'd want to make sure there's no essential information that only this employee knows, because that action might terminate that employee's desire to cooperate with the company.
technology gets cheaper over time. If they were always going to cost the amount they do now, you might have a point. But they'll eventually get much cheaper.
You're literally conflating good communication with easy communication.
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