Sholto Douglas: belief

Transcript context

…Sorry, let me interrupt. When Carl Shulman was talking about it on the podcast, he did say that things like improving inference or even literally making better chips or GPUs, that’s part of the intelligence explosion. Obviously if the inference code runs faster, it happens better or faster or whatever. Sorry, go ahead. So concretely, what does a day look like? I think the most important part to illustrate is this cycle of coming up with an idea, proving it out at different points in scale, and interpreting and understanding what goes wrong. I think most people would be surprised to learn just how much goes into interpreting and understanding what goes wrong. People have long lists of ideas that they want to try. Not every idea that you think should work, will work. Trying to understand why that is is quite difficult and working out what exactly you need to do to interrogate it. So a lot of it is introspection about what's going on. It's not pumping out thousands and thousands and thousands of lines of code. It's not the difficulty in coming up with ideas. Many people have a long list of ideas that they want to try, but paring that down and shot calling, under very imperfect information, what are the right ideas to explore further is really hard. What do you mean by imperfect information? Are these early experiments? What is the information?…

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