17 Comments
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Sergey Alexashenko's avatar

I really wanted to make a communism joke in the bit about human preferences and economics but I managed to restrain myself.

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Josh Davis's avatar

Great post Sergey!

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Mills Baker's avatar

Excellent as always! I keep worrying that LLMs have a lower ceiling than a lot of enthusiasts seem to think, but I know *nothing* about what can be done with / on top of / around LLMs, technically; their indecipherability seems problematic from an “extension” angle, but I would know!

Anyway, great read!

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Sergey Alexashenko's avatar

I think we are barely scratching the surface of what can be done around them. Consider, for example, in isolation the idea that we now have an autonomous planning engine that can be hooked up to anything.

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Mills Baker's avatar

That’s how it feels to me. I’m very irritated by my position: a Cambrian explosion about to happen without my having any particular purchase on what’s possible and the technical details of it all. Exciting, but annoying to be a pure bystander!

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Sergey Alexashenko's avatar

I want to come out and play

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Michael Spencer's avatar

I think realistically the era of ambient computing starts in the 2030s. The era of prompting by text feels somewhat painful. If conversational AI reaches a point of convenience and utility, what would it take?

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Sergey Alexashenko's avatar

You'd need the actions it takes from a text prompt to be GREATLY more difficult than writing the prompt. So far, ChatGPT plug-ins don't clear that hurdle. Adept might in the future, but I wouldn't say that their demo does.

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Monsieur Mike de Substack's avatar

awesome read! need that Longformer attention window :kek:

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Monsieur Mike de Substack's avatar

btw i finally got that working 😎

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Sergey Alexashenko's avatar

GOAT

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Chris Best's avatar

Even if you get stuck at human level.. could you just create a lot of them and have them interact with and learn from each other?

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Sergey Alexashenko's avatar

I think, at the limit, the question is: at what point does speed matter more than ability? If I were to guess, I'd guess that 100,000 median human-level AIs running around the clock would create superintelligence slower than OpenAI. But if they were 2 standard deviations above the median level... I don't know.

Regardless, I think the idea of giving LLMs access to a longer term memory and a way to shift their context windows around it is crucial. Right now, the models are human-level on short tasks.

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Monsieur Mike de Substack's avatar

Langchain is kinda doing this where you can chain them up to chat w/ each other in a sequence to accomplish a task: https://github.com/hwchase17/langchain

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Ben Cohen's avatar

heh, I used to work with Harrison, cool to see his thing in the wild :)

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Monsieur Mike de Substack's avatar

oh wow! yeah people are losing their minds over langchain!

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Sergey Alexashenko's avatar

Yeah, langchain is really cool

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