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Back to AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement, with John Schulman & Beren Millidge.

How Will Labs Train AI to Do AI Research?

John Schulman says the first models capable of automating AI research will probably be trained with learning from human feedback plus a lot of practice environments. Human feedback is there to absorb the researcher's taste. The environments are multi-step research projects. Each iteration patches whatever seems most broken. Researchers using the systems notice consistent weaknesses and patch them by collecting more human feedback or by building another environment.

Dwarkesh Patel had framed a toy version, drawn from a point Ryan Greenblatt made, in which a later model builds smaller models for inner-loop challenges such as beating video games that require continual learning or reaching a certain loss with the least compute. The expected path is the feedback-plus-environments loop, not that toy alone.

Grokipedia·Dwarkesh Patel

Transcript

AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement ·

Dwarkesh Podcast

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