Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…First of all, you realize in principle that the task of minimizing losses on predicting human text does not stop when you’re as smart as a human, right? Like you can see the computer science of that? I don’t know if I see the computer science of that, but I think I probably understand. Okay so somewhere on the internet is a list of hashes followed by the string hashed. This is a simple demonstration of how you can go on getting lower losses by throwing a hypercomputer at the problem. There are pieces of text on there that were not produced by humans talking in conversation, but rather by lots and lots of work to extract experimental results out of reality. That text is also on the internet. Maybe there’s not enough of it for the machine learning paradigm to work, but I’d sooner buy that the GPT system just bottleneck short of being able to predict that stuff better rather than. You can maybe buy that but the notion that you only have to be smart as a human to predict all the text on the internet, as soon as you turn around and stare at that it’s just transparently false.…

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