alt Hacker NewsThe whole point of the letter was that if we adopt this gradient search strategy the humanity might get stuck in a local maximum forever.
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Thing is, you can say that about any technology (not being here necessarily pro AI in math, but I think we need better arguments).
Then we develop ways of breaking out of local maxima.
Wherever we can recognise a problem we can solve it.
Can't we get stuck in local maxima because of the lack of LLMs?
“Forever” is a long time. That’s quite the claim.
This pattern of argument keeps repeating in every place.
Pro tech people: technology removes bottlenecks. Sometimes we use those bottlenecks as a side effect to build muscle and so on. But removing bottlenecks gives us much higher degrees of freedom. It is up to us to coordinate and make use of the technology.
Anti tech people: bottlenecks are fundamentally useful. They should remain and technology shouldn't remove those so easily. Humans cannot coordinate as well when the bottlenecks are removed, so lets not remove them so quickly.
I think it is easy to just roll of a local maximum, however, you may get stuck in a local minimum.
I kid, of course, but I do wonder where the use of local "maximum" comes from, what is maximum there? Why do you not see this as a landscape of hills and valleys where marbles with certain energies may indeed get stuck in deep enough holes... Of course, I just assume and picture gravity pointing down in that landscape, but hey. I'm human, I feel it is expected of me.