The main question here is how to define whether something is a novel idea or not. I think that ideas that seem very creative or novel are still in some way constructed from ideas or concepts that were available before. (In some trivial sense this has to be true, if there were no connection to any previous thoughts the idea would be incomprehensible.)
You make a useful distinction that I would like to respond to:
“applying a known procedure to create something” versus “inventing the procedure from scratch”.
It seems to me like 'inventing the procedure from sc... (read more)
Some suggestions:
Russia doesn't have enough money; carpet bombing civilians is expensive and inefficient
Didn't Russia actually use carpet bombing over the past several years in Chechnia and in Syria? If they were willing to do it in those cases I can't imagine money being the limiting factor now... And from what I see so far is consistent with the Russian army switching their strategy more and more towards bombing the enemy into submission like they did in Syria.
Question to Eliezer: would you agree with the gist of the following? And if not, any thoughts on what lead to a strong sense of 'coherence in your worldview' as Vaniver put it?
Vaniver, I feel like you're pointing at something that I've noticed as well and am interested in too (the coherence of Eliezer's worldview as you put it). I wonder if has something to do with not going to uni but building his whole worldview all by him self. In my experience uni often tends towards to cramming lots of facts which are easily testable on exams, with less emphasis on un... (read more)
Thanks for the reply! Two points.
In your original comment you said “LLMs can’t form and use novel concepts”. However, in your explanation you seem to be saying something different. I would summarise what you say there as: "Sure, LLMs can form and use new concepts. However, the degree to which they can generate new ideas and then continue to develop new ideas on top of those (serial complexity) is limited by their context window because they can't do continual learning." Is that a fair summary of what you are saying?
The second point is that even if you agre... (read more)