AI is dramatically accelerating AI research

cronin101

Not trying to discredit the premise but I do wonder how much this is from vertical scaling of model intelligence in weights vs the sheer amount of capital being thrown at training and horizontal scaling of agent swarms etc. Anecdotally it seems like the majority of continued uplift comes from models doing more and exploring more of the search space, and we are getting better at giving them embarrassingly parallel problems to Hoover up with infinite token spend.

lukax

Or maybe Anthropic got more user data to train on when they launched Fable without ZDR. That could explain large Opus 5.5 improvements.

annodomini2019

"The industry is not prepared to handle this safely" After the election, titles like this just irritate me. Every piece written about AI progress is: "The machines taking jobs, flooding the internet with sludge and poisoning our online experiences, are getting better even faster! Isn't this incredible? Yeah but sorry we also think it's only riskier than ever to deploy these systems at scale. That being said, we're still going to do it, go public and take institutional money from people's retirement funds, destroy the job market, and make 3000 Anthropic employees and 500 investors really rich. There wasn't anything we could do besides write a lot of ink on it and be shocked we lost every local data center referendum."

usernametaken29

The very same report also found that AI could not be deployed outside of a narrow domain of verifiable rewards … so take it with grains, or mountains of salt. It’s also extremely unclear how the productivity measures are calculated. They surely don’t seem to translate into economic output. Antrophic has seen its valuation corrected by 50% and possibly more… so yeah. This all sounds very fishy.

qahgf

METR always says what BigAI wants to hear. They are not independent in any way.

strongwaddle

As long as we believe, we can imagine it is true. All seeing Oracle: how do you command me? Praise his name, bringer of many miracles - he who definitely can't be manipulated from the backend to provide biased information that suites a person's malicious purpose. Ya totally.

megadragon9

i'm also wondering whether there are confounding factors like more domain experts and talents joining the AI research field because there are more interesting problems to be solved (or other 2nd order effects of AI models being more powerful).

mlmonkey

Another data point: look at the number of submissions to Neurips, ICLR, etc. Now, I agree that a submission does not by itself imply groundbreaking resesarch, but the fact that people are able to try out/vet ideas much faster now makes a difference. In my own work, I've found that it's much faster to brainstorm with a frontier model like Opus. I'll have an idea and be able to get a working implementation and try it out on toy problems within O(minutes), instead of O(weeks) earlier.

origini

Yeah it already helps me too with finetuning small models for image stuff. Im not telling it what to do, i ask it for ar eport/analysis and research and read its article and tell it what to implement based on 'feelings' and it works. Limit is hardware and tokens and an AI Researcher not having hardware or tokens is probably not what they refer to. Alone normal researchers were quite handicaped: converting data from tool a to python library x, understanding how tools work, doing basic google research etc.

spwa4

I do agree. AI isn't "free" the way silicon valley products are. Therefore it cannot avoid taxes the way they did before (using shell companies to route the money through tax havens). It'll be expensive, every government will double the price or more, and you're selling to consumers, and the products will be at the mercy of every government where they try to sell AI and other services. People don't get how serious this is. If AI doubles revenue but drives silicon valley firms' tax rates from 5% to 10%, it's a loss. Add to that that it's something silicon valley firms have never done before.

conartist6

Emacs is dramatically accelerating Emacs research

gwbas1c

Does anyone remember the book "The Singularity is Near?" I read it about 20 years ago, and once it got into nanobots and Kurzweil's vision that the whole universe would be intelligent, I didn't find the book credible. But I'm wondering if the short-term prediction, that in the 2030s we won't be able to anticipate what tech does for us, (IE, the Singularity,) is useful? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near

mapontosevenths

The article says "AI can copy, it cannot innovate." That is factually incorrect, and seems to be much of the premise behind the authors way of thinking. EDIT - No it doesn't. I replied to the wrong post. Mea Culpa.

deepsquirrelnet

For a much more thorough, alternate take I found this article better: https://open.substack.com/pub/rameznaam/p/ai-rsi-isnt-leadin...

hoppp

I like the article except the fear mongering about extinction is not very professional. Opus 5.5 is so amazing I'm not surprised if it can improve itself.

bajard

I suspect that if models were able to be aware of and answer questions about their internal vectors, they would be much smarter and able to progress faster.

nsilvestri

AI is accelerating my work...work which only exists because of AI. If I had to do my individual tasks without AI, I would be slower. But if I take a step back, I'm really not changing the world any faster than I was before.

ionwake

what if the greatest threat is simply there will be hedonistic experiences so great most humans will find them irresistible to the point of shorter lives. Could be from a sandwich that tastes like the best sandwich ever, but is super bad for your cholesterol or something. I dont know where Im going with this. Actually did some research I think the term is "Wireheading" from a story/theory from the 50s

thakoppno

This reminds me of asking an HPC researcher what they use the cluster to do. He used it to make and simulate better HPCs.

atemerev

"Lock the weights, weights are dangerous" again. Sorry, keeping such power in few hands is inherently more dangerous than distributing it. AIs do not kill people, people kill people.