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Comment by yo-cuddles on What are the strongest arguments for very short timelines? · 2024-12-23T22:29:14.432Z · LW · GW

Can we bet karma?

Edit: sarcasm

Comment by yo-cuddles on What are the strongest arguments for very short timelines? · 2024-12-23T22:24:29.530Z · LW · GW

Hmm, mixed agree/disagree. Scale probably won't work, algorithms probably would, but I don't think it's going to be that quick.

Namely, I think that the company struggling with fixed capital costs could accomplish much more, much quicker using the salary expenses of the top researchers they already have they'd have done it or gave it a good try at least

I'm 5 percent that a serious switch to algorithms would result in AGI in 2 years. You might be more well read than me on this so I'm not quite taking side bets right now!

Comment by yo-cuddles on What are the strongest arguments for very short timelines? · 2024-12-23T21:00:18.301Z · LW · GW

I think the algorithm progress is doing some heavy lifting in this model. I think if we had a future textbook on agi we could probably build one but AI is kinda famous for minor and simple things just not being implemented despite all the parts being there

See ReLU activations and sigmoid activations.

If we're bottlenecking at algorithms alone is there a reason that isn't a really bad bottleneck?

Comment by yo-cuddles on We are in a New Paradigm of AI Progress - OpenAI's o3 model makes huge gains on the toughest AI benchmarks in the world · 2024-12-23T20:53:13.541Z · LW · GW

I haven't had warm receptions when critiquing points, which has frustratingly left me with bad detection for when I'm being nasty, so if I sound thorny it's not my intent.

Somewhere I think you might have misstepped is the frontier math questions: the quotes you've heard are almost certainly about tier 3 questions, the hardest ones meant for math researchers in training. The mid tier is for grad student level problems and tier 1 is bright high schooler to undergrad level problems

Tier 1: 25% of the test

Tier 2: 50% of the test

Tier 3: 25%

O3 got 25%, probably answering none of the hard questions and suspiciously matching almost exactly the proportion of easy questions. From some, there seems to be disagreement about whether tier 2 questions are consistently harder than tier 1 questions

Regardless, some (especially easier) problems are of the sort that can be verified and have explicitly been said to have instantaneously recognizable solutions. This is not an incredibly flattering picture of o3

THIS IS THE END OF WHERE I THINK YOU WERE MISTAKEN, TEXT PAST THIS IS MORE CONJECTURE AND/OR NOT DIRECTLY REFUTING YOU

the ARC test looks like it was taken by an overfit model. If the test creators are right, then the arc test for an 85 percent off a tuned model and probably spamming conclusions that it could verify, it trained on 75 percent of the questions from what I understand so one of that score seems like memorization and a mildly okay score on the 25 percent that was held as test data.

And this part is damning: the arc-2 test which is the success of to the first one, made by the same people, gets a 95 percent pass rate form humans (so easier than the 85 percent pass rate of the first test) but o3's score dropped to a 30%, a 55% drop and now 65% below human on a similar test made by the same people.

Let me be clear: if that isn't VERY inaccurate, then this is irrefutably a cooked test and o3 is overfit to the point of invalidating the results for any kind of generalizability.

There are other problems, like the fact that this pruning search method is really, really bad for some problems and that it seems to ride on validation being somewhat easy in order to work at all but that's not material to the benchmarks

I can cite sources if these are important points, not obviously incorrect, etc, I might write my first post about it if I'm digging that much!

Comment by yo-cuddles on o3 · 2024-12-23T20:26:10.084Z · LW · GW

Ah wait was reading it wrong. I thought each time was an order of magnitude, that looks to be standard notation for log scale. Mischief managed

Comment by yo-cuddles on o3 · 2024-12-23T20:00:13.130Z · LW · GW

Maybe a dumb question, but those log scale graphs have uneven ticks on the x axis, is there a reason they structured it like that beyond trying to draw a straight line? I suspect there is a good reason and it's not dishonesty but this does look like something one would do if you wanted to exaggerate the slope

Comment by yo-cuddles on o3 · 2024-12-23T19:46:42.759Z · LW · GW

I do not have a gauge for how much I'm actually bringing to this convo, so you should weigh my opinion lightly, however:

I believe your third point kinda nails it. There are models for gains from collective intelligence (groups of agents collaborating) and the benefits of collaboration bottleneck hard on your ability to verify which outputs from the collective are the best, and even then the dropoff happens pretty quick the more agents collaborate.

10 people collaborating with no communication issues and accurate discrimination between good and bad ideas are better than a lone person on some tasks, 100 moreso

You do not see jumps like that moving from 1,000 to 1,000,000 unless you set unrealistic variables.

I think inference time probably works in a similar way: dependent on discrimination between right and wrong answers and steeply falling off as inference time increases

My understanding is that o3 is similar to o1 but probably with some specialization to make long chains of thought stay coherent? The cost per token from leaks I've seen is the same as o1, it came out very quickly after o1 and o1 was bizarrely better at math and coding than 4o

Apologies if this was no help, responding with the best intentions

Comment by yo-cuddles on o3 · 2024-12-21T23:31:05.942Z · LW · GW

I sense that my quality of communication diminishes past this point, I should get my thoughts together before speaking too confidently

I believe you're right we do something similar to the LLM's (loosely, analogously), see

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i42Dfoh4HtsCAfXxL/babble

(I need to learn markdown)

My intuition is still LLM pessimistic, I'd be excited to see good practical uses, this seems like tool ai and that makes my existential dread easier to manage!

Comment by yo-cuddles on o3 · 2024-12-21T22:30:47.030Z · LW · GW

Thank you for the warm reply, it's nice and also good feedback I didn't do anything explicitly wrong with my post

It will be VERY funny if this ends up being essentially the o1 model with some tinkering to help it cycle questions multiple times to verify the best answers, or something banal like that. Wish they didn't make us wait so long to test that :/

Comment by yo-cuddles on o3 · 2024-12-21T07:04:39.699Z · LW · GW

small nudge: the questions have difficulty tiers of 25% easy, 50% medium, and 25% hard with easy being undergrad/IMO difficulty and hard being the sort you would give to a researcher in training.

The 25% accuracy gives me STRONG indications that it just got the easy ones, and the starkness of this cutoff makes me think there is something categorically different about the easy ones that make them MUCH easier to solve, either being more close ended, easy to verify, or just leaked into the dataset in some form.

Comment by yo-cuddles on o3 · 2024-12-21T06:59:39.890Z · LW · GW

First post, feel free to meta-critique my rigor on this post as I am not sure what is mandatory, expected, or superfluous for a comment under a post. Studying computer science but have no degree, yet. Can pull the specific citation if necessary, but...

these benchmarks don't feel genuine.

Chollet indicated in his piece:

Furthermore, early data points suggest that the upcoming ARC-AGI-2 benchmark will still pose a significant challenge to o3, potentially reducing its score to under 30% even at high compute (while a smart human would still be able to score over 95% with no training)

The model was tuned to the ARC AGI Test, got a great score but then faceplanted on a reasoning test apparently easier for humans than the first one, a test that couldn't have been adversarially designed to stump o3. I would have expected that this would immediately expose it as being horrifically overfit but few people seem to be honing in on that so maybe I don't understand something?

Second, the Frontiers math problems appear to be structured in a way that 25% of the problems are the sort that clever high schoolers with bright futures in mathematics would be able to answer if they studied, International Math Olympiad or undergrad level questions. We don't know EXACTLY which questions it answered right but it's almost exactly 25% and I suspect that these are almost entirely from the lower tier questions, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the questions (or similar questions) were in the training set. Perhaps the lowest tier questions were formulated with a sort of operational philosophy that didn't prioritize guarding against leaked data?

Third, the codeforces ELO doesn't mean anything. I just can't take this seriously, unless someone thinks that existing models are already mid tier competitive SWE's? Similar benchmark, similarly meaningless, dismissed until someone shows me that these can actually deliver on what other models have provenly exaggerated on.

Fourth, the cost is obscene: thousands of dollars per task, with indications that this model is very similar to o1 going by cost per token, this looks less like a strong model with way more parameters and more like the same model doing a mind boggling amount of thinking. This is probably something like funsearch, a tool bag of programs that an LLM then combines and tries to gauge the effectiveness of, brute forced until it can get an answer it can verify. This seems useful, but this would only work on close-ended questions with answers that are easy to verify, either way this wouldn't really be intelligence of the kind that I had imagined looking for.

This would PERFECTLY explain the failure on the ARC-AGI2 benchmark: the bag of tools it would need would be different, it wasn't tuned to the new test and came with the wrong tool bag. Maybe this could be fixed, but if my model of how this AI works is right then the complexity of tasks would increase by O(n!) with n being the number of "tools" it needs. I'm probably wrong here but something LIKE that is probably true.

Lecun also seems to be confident on threads that this is NOT an LLM, that this is something that uses an LLM but that something else is going on. Perfectly matched my "oh, this is funsearch" intuition. My caveat is that this might all be handled "in house" in an LLM, but the restrictions on what this could do seem very real.

Am a critically wrong on enough points here that I should seriously rethink my intuition?