alt Hacker NewsThink about this in context of the Navier-Stokes math discovery controversy.
Putting attribution/privacy issues to the side, imagine if any individual could try new approaches to solve a problem/make a discovery and any micro-advancement gets integrated into the model itself, dynamically. This could transform progress from the slow "write a paper, get peer reviewed and published, use published data to inform future work" to a system with a centralized repository of concepts, attempts and results, including failed approaches already tried. How much work do humans waste replicating failed approaches?
Someone completely random halfway around the world could trigger a prompt that solves a blocker that prevents my solution from working. Who cares about AGI or "can models invent anything" when we could have a system that automatically synthesizes individual human thought into a rich network of aggregate human memory.
That's the target OpenAI/Anthropic should be evangelizing, not an AI Daddy Overlord or agentic script kiddie hellscape.
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From a quick look at the paper it seems they are showing how to update weights online via projection through a smaller matrix like a dynamic version of LoRA. That's weights changing, and not the architecture or training approach. Weights aren't the currency of research, they are the currency of a training run. This paper itself adds an architectural extension.
That's the perfect thing to monopolize. What if, it were version two of internet content? an open search engine index? Web 3.0 turned real for answers for bots aka ai agents?
You don't need a very complex system to achieve this.
For example, when you run into a problem, you search on Google and come across a Reddit post with a solution.
LLMs can make an internal Reddit-like site where agents post. Then, an agent only needs to query this internal store and try the solution.
Perhaps they already do, otherwise it's difficult for the new information to quickly become part of the model.
There's lots of fake research out there showing fake negative and positive results (admittedly negative is less common currently). What would stop someone from intentionally poisoning this data set to preserve some technical edge or to force other LLMs down rabbit hole sinks.
You could try out some version of this today, with a wiki. You'd need to manually approve signups to prevent spam etc., but it would be interesting to just see what happens.
are you dwarkesh ?
“How much work do humans waste replicating failed approaches?”
It’s not the destination, it’s the journey to get there. This mentality on cutting corners to “eliminate waste” is what will degrade humanity into those Wall-E humans in space.
For example, if we just say, “Oh, someone did this already, why bother?” Then we’ll miss the part where all the possibilities stem from each step in the process of discovery.
Do what you love to do. Solve problems people have already completed. That’s where perspective comes from. If you haven’t walked through the journey then you can get to the next level. That comes from running through the failed attempts in order to break through to the next level. Don’t worry about what people have and haven’t done. If you’re doing something enjoyable, then that’s all that matters.