Panda cited Claude and GPT-5.5 Codex as pretraining successes.
@PandaAshwinee efficiency is definitely important, but I've seen rapid progress in things like compaction, and I get the ick when people say we can do it bc humans have it
continual learning did not bring us gpt-5.5 codex, better pretraining did. obsessive pragmatism in pretraining is what fuels the success of the latest claude models, not romanticizing "what could be" if we cracked some ill-defined moonshot.
Negative users voiced unease toward arguments that scaling current models beats continual learning, citing discomfort with concepts like compaction and human-analogy framing.
the crux of my ick is the link to the human brain. Just saying the products aren't good enough is fine.
I feel like the obsession with continual learning / sample efficiency leads the field in the wrong direction. It's the bad career strategy of focusing on addressing your weaknesses instead of maximizing your strengths.
Yes, there is an existence proof in the human brain, but it doesn't by any means guarantee that that'll be the most interesting AI. It may require $100T of R&D on chips and AI methods to get that unlock.
On the other side of things, it's obvious that the coming models are extremely transformative and built on technologies that we already have. There's great reason to focus on just maximizing this. In reality, this is what the frontier labs are doing. They're going as fast as possible down the current development tree. This is good for progress and mixed for safety/geopolitics.
Things like "automate white color work" and "replace the AI researcher job" are the guesses of labs because it's super hard to imagine futures for what these dramatic technologies will be. Don't take the labs too seriously about this being the exact goal. The exact goal is to push the frontier and monetize later.
Solving continual learning, sample efficiency, etc would be great, but its trying to predict when a scientific breakthrough will come instead of trying to grapple with how the 100% sure thing coming technological revolution will change our lives.
This isn't to say the Dwarkesh post is bad, it addresses some reasonable critiques, but it is the least bitter lesson pilled thing to be obsessed with human intelligence and how that can inform AI.
We are in the AGI era of research. This is about embracing the unknown, scaling resources, and seeing what is enabled by making a series of magical tweaks to complex recipes that build frontier models. Lean into the alchemy.
(it should be pretty clear that I personally, investing in open research agree we need fundamental science -- just not agreeing that this is what the "cutting edge of the frontier" is governed by)
@natolambert it = compaction? continual learning? (both of them give me the ick)
@PandaAshwinee All of the above 🤷♂️
Panda cited Claude and GPT-5.5 Codex as pretraining successes.
@PandaAshwinee efficiency is definitely important, but I've seen rapid progress in things like compaction, and I get the ick when people say we can do it bc humans have it
continual learning did not bring us gpt-5.5 codex, better pretraining did. obsessive pragmatism in pretraining is what fuels the success of the latest claude models, not romanticizing "what could be" if we cracked some ill-defined moonshot.