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Trenton Bricken: prediction

28 Mar 2024 Dwarkesh Podcast Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken — How LLMs actually think

“When you play a new video game or study a new textbook, you're bringing a whole bunch of skills to the table to form those associations much more quickly. And because everything in some way ties back to the physical world, I think there are general features that you can pick up and then apply in novel circumstances.”

— Trenton Bricken

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Trenton Bricken
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
prediction
Recorded
28 Mar 2024
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

Transcript context

…But wait, if intelligence is fundamentally about these associations, the recursive self-improvement is just them getting better at association. There's not another thing that's happening. So then it seems like you might disagree with the intuition that they can't be that much more powerful, if they're just doing that. I think then you can get into really interesting cases of meta-learning. When you play a new video game or study a new textbook, you're bringing a whole bunch of skills to the table to form those associations much more quickly. And because everything in some way ties back to the physical world, I think there are general features that you can pick up and then apply in novel circumstances. Should we talk about the intelligence explosion then? The reason I'm interested in discussing this with you guys in particular is that the models of the intelligence explosion we have so far come from economists. That’s fine but I think we can do better because in the model of the intelligence explosion, what happens is you replace the AI researchers. There's a bunch of automated AI researchers who can speed up progress, make more AI researchers, and make further progress. If that's the mechanism, we should just ask the AI researchers whether they think this is plausible. So let me just ask you, if I have a thousand agent Sholtos or agent Trentons, do you think that you get an intelligence explosion? What does that look like to you?…

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