Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…That feels like old-school software. As long as you’re able to describe that in some way. You have old-school software that amplifies that entropy. If you’re able to put a clear ontology to the distinct ways of thinking that you want to prompt, you explore that full ontology, and then each individual one runs off doing what it is. There’s a certain design question there about how exactly you describe the different approaches. The easy one is: are you trying to prove it or disprove it? The harder one would be to say, what are all the tactics you could take to prove this, and make sure you’re applying sufficient breadth to exploring them. Obviously, AI in math is making much faster progress than everything else, and people point to the verifiability of the domain as the key reason this is happening. I think that’s one of the two important reasons, but people really neglect the other one. I’m outside the labs, so I don’t know what’s actually going on. This is a totally naive theory. A tangential question to why AI is making so much progress in math: why has it been so slow at computer use? A computer is very verifiable. Is my Etsy package coming? Is my event booked? These are extremely verifiable things to survey. What computer use lacks is grindability. Because websites have bot detectors—and it takes a tremendous amount of compute to run parallel rollouts—it’s very hard to run a thousand parallel rollouts of the same checkout flow on Amazon. You’ll get shut down by Andy Jassy. Him personally. He presses the red X on Dwarkesh button.…

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