Brendan Foody: belief

Transcript context

…How much of society, ideally, should become a big reinforcement learning machine? We tape everyone, everything, every debate people have over the coffee table. I think it will become an immense amount very quickly. There’s obviously still going to be the personal conversations over the coffee table that people don’t want recorded. But my firm belief is, especially for economically valuable tasks, we’ll move towards a world where people do things once. Instead of the investment banker redundantly analyzing a data room to prepare an analysis of a company every couple of weeks for a new project and a new customer, they’ll teach the model how to do that once in the particular domains that they operate in. Similar to building software once, they’ll be able to use that many times as they use their agent. Instead of the customer support rep monotonously responding to tickets every day, they’ll find the mistake that the agent makes. They’ll turn that into an RL environment, and then, all of a sudden, the agent will be able to solve that problem many times. I think, in many ways, the economic incentives and how knowledge work will change has a lot of similarities to software, and that we’ll move towards these fixed-cost investments of teaching an agent how to do something, building an RL environment for something, and then being able to use agents as many times as we want to perform that activity. That’s why I believe that a huge portion of the economy will become an RL environment machine. Do you think pendants or Meta-like glasses will be more important than that? Are we going to do both?…

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