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by energy123 295 days ago
Re online learning - If I freeze 40 yo Einstein and make it so he can't form new memories beyond 5 minutes, that's still an incredibly useful, generally intelligent thing. Doesn't seem like a problem that needs to be solved on the critical path to AGI.

Re training data - We have synthetic data, and we probably haven't hit a wall. Gpt-5 was only 3.5 months after o3. People are reading too much into the tea leaves here. We don't have visibility into the cost of Gpt-5 relative to o3. If it's 20% cheaper, that's the opposite of a wall, that's exponential like improvement. We don't have visibility into the IMO/IOI medal winning models. All I see are people curve fitting onto very limited information.

2 comments

> If I freeze 40 yo Einstein and make it so he can't form new memories beyond 5 minutes, that's still an incredibly useful, generally intelligent thing

A "frozen mind" feels like something not unlike a book - useful, but only with a smart enough "human user", and even so be progressively less useful as time passes.

>Doesn't seem like a problem that needs to be solved on the critical path to AGI.

It definitely is one. I know we are running into definitions, but being able to form novel behavior patterns based on experience is pretty much the essence of what intelligence is. That doesn't necessary mean that a "frozen mind" will be useless, but it would certainly not qualify as AGI.

>We don't have visibility into the IMO/IOI medal winning models.

There are lies, damn lies and LLM benchmarks. IMO/IOI is not necessarily indicative of any useful tasks.

>If I freeze 40 yo Einstein and make it so he can't form new memories beyond 5 minutes, that's still an incredibly useful, generally intelligent thing.

But every time you tried to get him to do something you'd have to teach him from first principles. Good luck getting ChatStein to interact with the internet, to write code or design a modern airplane. Even in physics, he'd be using antiquated methods and assumptions, this getting worse as time progresses(like sib comment I believe was alluding to).

And don't even get me started on the language barrier.

I recently read this short story[1] on the topic so it's fresh on my mind.

[1]https://qntm.org/mmacevedo