o1 has a METR time horizon of around 40 minutes, opus 4.7 has an implied horizon of 18 hours based on its ECI score. this study is on a model that's several generations behind wrt the kind of tasks it can complete. it would be shocking if this number were anywhere near as low with GPT 5.5, to the point it seems nearly totally irrelevant to talk about these results
I watched a talk from Bjarne Stroustrup at CppCon about safety and it was pretty second hand embarrassing watching him try to pretend C++ has always been safe and safety mattered all along to them before Rust came along.
Well, there has been a long campaign against manual memory management - well before Rust was a thing. And along with that, a push for less use of raw pointers, less index loops etc. - all measures which, when adopted, reduce memory safety hazards significantly. Following the Core Guideliness also helps, as does using span's. Compiler warnings has improved, as has static analysis, also in a long process preceding Rust.
Of course, this is not completely guaranteed safety - but safety has certainly mattered.
Yes, this what Stroustrup said and it makes me laugh. IIRC he phrased with a more of a 'we had safety before Rust' attitude. It also misses the point, safety shouldn't be opt-in or require memorising a rulebook. If safety is that easy in C++ why is everyone still sticking their hand in the shredder?
You're "moving the goal posts" of this thread. Safety has mattered - in C++ and in other languages as well, e.g. with MISRA C.
As for the Core Guidelines - most of them are not about safety; and - they are not to be memorized, but a resource to consult when relevant, and something to base static analysis on.
some ai detectors work now. pangram detects this as 57% AI written, and the parts it thinks are human are.... the ascii diagrams / screenshots. all the actual text it detects as generated.
ai detectors are never totally accurate but this one is quite good and it suggests something like 80% of this article is llm generated. honestly idk how you didn't get that just by reading it tho, maybe you haven't been exposed to much modern llm-generated content?
A lot of people forget how whimsical and strange and beautiful the old smaller GPT models and the original 3 base model pre-RHLF could be. Nowadays hundreds of millions of people have talked to heavily assistant tuned 4 or 5, but comparatively very few people have ever even seen GPT-1 outputs. It's cheap to run so I threw up a simple interface + single server hosting it.
It looks like the person who added the backdoor is in fact the current co-maintainer of the project (and the more active of the two): https://tukaani.org/about.html
Why do you think that the human population is more intelligent, knowledgeable, and achieves greater technological feats as time goes on? It's because of recursive self-improvement, we are raised and educated into being better in a quite general sense, which includes being better at raising and educating; nearly every generation this cycle repeats and has for all of human history, at least since we acquired language. We also build machines that help us to make better machines, and then we use those better machines to make even better machines, another example of recursive self-improvement.
You're pointing out that groups/institutions/cultures/civilizations are examples of recursively self-improving entities, but the original point was about a recursively self-improving individual intelligent entity.
Well, to the extent that a human-level intelligence is an individual, anyway. We ourselves are probably a mixture-of-experts in some sense.
An individual human starts out a mewling baby and can end up a maxillofacial surgeon through at least partial examples of recursive self-improvement. Learn to walk, talk, read, write, structure, argue, essay, study, cite etc all the way through to the end, with what you previously learned allowing you to learn even more. There's a huge amount of outside help, but at least some of it is also self-improvement.
Also, for the purposes of talking about the phenomenon of recursive self-improvement, individual vs society isn't the end of analysis. Part of the reason AI recursive self-improvement is concerning is that people are worried about it happening on much faster than societal timescales, in ways that are not socially tractable like human societies are (e.g. if our society is "improving" in a way we don't like, we or other humans can intervene to prevent, alter, or mitigate it). It's also important to note that when we're talking about "recursive self-improvement" when it comes to AI, the "self" is not a single software artifact like Llama-70B. The "self" is AI in general, and the most common proposed mechanism is that an AI is better than us at designing and building AIs, and the resulting AI it makes us even better at designing and building AIs.
New generations build onto the scientific knowledge of previous generations. It may not be fast but that sounds like recursive improvement to me. It seems reasonable for AI to accelerate this process.
A very small percentage maybe. I think I agree with the notion that most people bias toward thinking they are improving while actually self-sabotaging.
reply