It’s entirely possible to improve current AI using only information available to us right now. Once that well runs dry, current AI is in theory capable of running experiments and training on their results if we give it a harness to do that. This gives it access to new information. Could it succeed doing this? Unclear, but it is capable of trying. How do you think we discover AI improvements? Divine inspiration? No, we follow a relatively simple research loop.

you’re drowning in slop my man

In one sense, true… in another sense, somehow, evolution did just that over the course of hundreds of millions of years. We are the proof.

“That” is not what evolution did.

But we are the material manifestation of the evolutionary process in modern time… one small slice of it, at least.

Our minds simulate everything. We simulate our body schema, our selves, others (theory of mind), the external world.

We evolved to do that, from a prior state of not doing that.

Hence, evolution as a process has increased the information entropy of a system (us). We are a system that naturally undergoes evolution.

How could it be that we are not proof of exactly what you say should be impossible? The human mind isn’t a constant natural given in this universe. It came to be from simpler, historic forms of mind.

I want to believe this but every biology major I talked to is like “that’s the middle-school explanation of evolution” and mention the actual process had more things going on.

So you think that AI increasing the capability of new AI just involves training a new model on the output of the old model? Or are you pretending to be a science?

All that an AI has to do to disprove that claim is pay someone to weigh one orange through fivr. So either your claim is wrong, or LLMs as they exist now are no longer statistical models. Go ahead and move the goal post if you want, my complaint was about your overly broad claim.

I think their point is the LLM didn’t contain the information on the weight of that orange, it had to outsource it.

I picked the way in which an AI model (as the exist now) could most trivially produce a piece of novel (and deliberately trivial) information.

I wasn’t worried about whether the credit could fairly be attributed to it. We’re talking about whether they can produce information with which to grow their knowledge. Moral credit for the growth of their knowledge is outside the scope of the discussion.