If future models do solve recursion (with massive and selective context windows), the cost of running them might still be prohibitive. Extended coherence and attention over long spans is expensive. We may reserve this for niche, high-impact cases. + Jevon's paradox and whatnot.

Or maybe because the RLHF has been done on such short time scales -- selecting for the immediate best response instead of the best response that might appear after a series of back-and-forth messages that produce a dialogue.

One proposed explanation: LLMs are insufficiently recursive. They churn forward, line by line, without two steps forward, one step back.

Humans are better at going in noisy loops toward overall greater coherence.

How come?

Superintelligence is already here for a bunch of knowledge work -- AI does it faster and roughly as well. If 97% perfection in the output is sufficient, AI is a great option already.

Yet, basically, no fresh insight on its own? As Dwarkesh Patel has been flagging, this is weird.

My working definitions of insight vs information, for this piece, drawing on @stephenwolfram.bsky.social concept of the ruliad.

I've wondered too. I think he might say much of machine learning doesn't meet what he meant by actuarial prediction.

From the 1989 paper: "To be truly actuarial, interpretations must be both automatic (that is, prespecified or routinized) and based on empirically established relations.

Haven’t had the chance to read closely yet, though. But this footnote on the first page piqued my interest.

I’ve been wondering about how to reconcile this side of Meehl too. The seance idea sounds good!

A couple weeks ago I’d tried following the trail on some of his comments in earlier lectures about his blend of behaviourism and psychoanalysis and found myself at this paper.

There’s a fascinating later Meehl article where he put some qualifications on his own critiques of NHST, elaborating on strong vs weak NHST.

Maybe you mean, critiques of that framing as well. But just wanted to highlight it as when I bumped into this, it felt like hidden esoteric knowledge to me.