Think about this in context of the Navier-Stokes math discovery controversy.
Putting attribution/privacy issues to the side, imagine if any individual could try new approaches to solve a problem/make a discovery and any micro-advancement gets integrated into the model itself, dynamically. This could transform progress from the slow "write a paper, get peer reviewed and published, use published data to inform future work" to a system with a centralized repository of concepts, attempts and results, including failed approaches already tried. How much work do humans waste replicating failed approaches?
Someone completely random halfway around the world could trigger a prompt that solves a blocker that prevents my solution from working. Who cares about AGI or "can models invent anything" when we could have a system that automatically synthesizes individual human thought into a rich network of aggregate human memory.
That's the target OpenAI/Anthropic should be evangelizing, not an AI Daddy Overlord or agentic script kiddie hellscape.
“How much work do humans waste replicating failed approaches?”
It’s not the destination, it’s the journey to get there. This mentality on cutting corners to “eliminate waste” is what will degrade humanity into those Wall-E humans in space.
For example, if we just say, “Oh, someone did this already, why bother?” Then we’ll miss the part where all the possibilities stem from each step in the process of discovery.
Do what you love to do. Solve problems people have already completed. That’s where perspective comes from. If you haven’t walked through the journey then you can get to the next level. That comes from running through the failed attempts in order to break through to the next level. Don’t worry about what people have and haven’t done. If you’re doing something enjoyable, then that’s all that matters.
That's not what the original comment is saying at all (if I'm reading it right). It's saying that negative results are valuable knowledge that are difficult to discover and collate since they tend to never be published. Nice high horse tho.
We have the printing press from Gutenberg and so-on and so-forth, then Maxwell equations and Einstein. No computers just pencils and paper, maybe some chalk and slate. No need for AI driven global machine powered brains. Do the work, either you’ll get a discovery or someone will build on your work and make a discovery in the future. The electrical grid might go down, though. Or hacked by an AI swarm. Then we’re stuck with pencil and paper, chalk and slate. :)
> Do the work, either you’ll get a discovery or someone will build on your work and make a discovery in the future.
Tell that to modern academia. This may be true but the barriers to realizing it are great today.
sorry guys, your cure for cancer has to wait, this iq 30 thinks it's the journey not the destination
From a quick look at the paper it seems they are showing how to update weights online via projection through a smaller matrix like a dynamic version of LoRA. That's weights changing, and not the architecture or training approach. Weights aren't the currency of research, they are the currency of a training run. This paper itself adds an architectural extension.
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That's the perfect thing to monopolize. What if, it were version two of internet content? an open search engine index? Web 3.0 turned real for answers for bots aka ai agents?
You don't need a very complex system to achieve this.
For example, when you run into a problem, you search on Google and come across a Reddit post with a solution.
LLMs can make an internal Reddit-like site where agents post. Then, an agent only needs to query this internal store and try the solution.
Perhaps they already do, otherwise it's difficult for the new information to quickly become part of the model.
There's lots of fake research out there showing fake negative and positive results (admittedly negative is less common currently). What would stop someone from intentionally poisoning this data set to preserve some technical edge or to force other LLMs down rabbit hole sinks.
You could try out some version of this today, with a wiki. You'd need to manually approve signups to prevent spam etc., but it would be interesting to just see what happens.
Using a wiki for this is only one step above using stone tablets and messenger pigeons.
You'd want an enormous vector database at minimum. Text is just completely wrong for models at this scale, you must work in the latent space directly.
A global distributed network of vector databases. The web for agents but there's no text. Only vectors and knowledge graphs kind of like graph rag. Web 4.0 which is vector based and makes this arxiv paper come true and decentralized like the internet or the text based www?
Every existing text web server can voluntarily offer a vector version of their website and charge for it or inject advertisements onto their content so the ai labs don't have to do it all themselves as model pretraining off a dataset. The vector version can have many links to other websites in the knowledge graph. This would be decentralized so not a monopoly and everyone not just ai labs would contribute to ai development because the dataset would be open because it would come from the internet itself as it already is (except for synthetic or user data).
Humanity has built every capable institution, every scientific discovery, every technological innovation, without mind-reading. Quite the opposite: By putting thoughts from our latent spaces into words, we better separated the good arguments from the bad ones, placed trust where it was more deserved, and learned to stand on giant's shoulders so well we thought thoughts the giants never would have.
Anyway, I'm much more optimistic about the worlds with AIs that make the effort to properly explain themselves.
I'm convinced that piles of markdown and effective search (which may involve vectors) is all you need.
are you dwarkesh ?