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

What Is the Last Human Job in AI Research?

Dwarkesh Patel asked which innovations since 2012, engineering or conceptual, would be the last work humans still do before AI automates AI research. Beren Millidge says that job is deciding which experiments to run. Models can be pointed at an experiment and still propose only miscellaneous, very tiny steps. They are weaker at choosing experiments than at coding them.

John Schulman says the role that lasts longest is defining the objective and deciding what people actually want: how assistants should behave, what helpful means, the objective in reinforcement learning from human feedback, and later constitutions and model specs. Alignment splits into specification, figuring out the right objective, and optimization, achieving it once it is defined. Specification does not go away. Even if AI does the technical work, someone still has to decide how the model should behave.

Charlie O'Neill points at the same gap in the jump from DeepMind's plan to solve intelligence by playing games to Radford predicting the next token, and in the later decision to scale that result once scaling laws made the gains predictable.

Grokipedia·Dwarkesh Patel

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

Dwarkesh Podcast

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