What Surprised David Silver About Tiny Extra Data?

David Silver says the right approach to solve AI is learning from experience, through systems that discover things for themselves. The systems learn through reinforcement learning and get better and better, and he says that path leads to the emergence of intelligence and ultimately superintelligence. He showed the approach in the game of Go, and the conviction has held throughout his career. He is now applying the same conviction at Ineffable, trying to show that superintelligence can emerge all the way through systems that learn from experience.

Ineffable is not pursuing the human data path that the LLM world has pursued, and David Silver still takes lessons from it. A system trained on a massive amount of data was very quickly fine-tuned on a very small amount of data and completely changed its behavior. He says the surprise changed his mindset by suggesting that, at the right scale, things that were slow can become very fast once enough data has been experienced. He says the lesson was not obvious to him in advance until it happened.