Weight updating continual learning needs to be both LoRA weights and data that can be used to retrain LoRA weights on top of a different model (possibly also making use of the old model+LoRA as a teacher). It needs to be LoRA rather than full model updating to preserve batch processing of requests from many individual users. And there needs to be data to train LoRA on top of a new model, or else all adaptation/learning is lost on every (major) update of the underlying model.
Various memory/skill databases are already a thing in some form, and will be getting better, there's not going to be something distinct enough to be worth announcing as "continual learning" in that space. Weight updating continual learning is much more plausibly the thing that can leapfrog incremental progress of tool-like memory, and so I think it's weight updating that gets to be announced as "continual learning". Though the data for retraining LoRA on top of a new underlying model could end up as largely the same thing as a tool-accessible memory database.
(It's from Dec 2024. With arxiv papers, you can tell this from the URL, the first 4 digits are the year and the month.)
New paper
You are tracking down and patching the issue. Imagine a perpetuum mobile developer who had a specific issue pointed out to them, and who frantically redesigns the contraption around the place in its mechanism where the issue was identified.
(The perpetuum mobile is metaphorical, an analogy about methodology in reasoning around local vs. global claims, one that also carries appropriate connotations. I'm not saying that literally conservation of energy is being broken here.)
If you argue that branch communication is not real, there should be a reason: either MWI is false or in this exact setup there is some technical or theoretical flaw.
MWI in the usual sense follows quantum mechanics, which predicts that branch communication is not real. An observation that branch communication is not real agrees with MWI, it doesn't suggest that "MWI is false".
As I think you are pro-MWI and there is not much technical details, there should be some theoretical problem. What it could be?
Like with any other metaphorical perpetuum mobile, the exact technical issue is not very interesting. To the first and second approximations, the exact issue shouldn't matter, a form of argument that demands tracking down the issue is already on the wrong track.
Distributing computations between branches is a popular misconception about how quantum computing works. So Aaronson is naturally exasperated by needing to keep pointing out that it's not how it works, it works differently. These two things are not the same, in particular because only one of them is real.
If distributing computations between branches was possible, probably "quantum computing" would have a different meaning that involved distributing computations between branches. This post suggests what amounts to a method to distribute computations between branches, which would be more powerful than classical computers, but is also different and more powerful than quantum computers. Therefore it must be both wrong and not a way to test MWI, as quantum mechanics wouldn't expect an experiment that enables distributing computations between branches to work. If it works, it doesn't support MWI (in the usual sense, where it follows quantum mechanics), instead it shows that quantum mechanics is seriously wrong.
Unrestricted inter-branch communication enables pooling classical compute from all the branches (which can be arbitrarily numerous). This is clearly not what you can get with quantum computing, so something is wrong or at least highly misleading here, giving this overly bailey-ish "inter-branch communication" claim.
If you can't affect creation of an extortion ASI, then you can't affect its posited acausal incentives either, since these things are one and the same.
Within the hypothetical of expecting likely creation of an extortion ASI, what it does and why is no longer unimportant, Pascal's wager issues no longer apply. Though it still makes sense to remain defiant (to the extent you do have the ability to affect the outcomes), feeding the principle that blackmail works more rarely and that there's coordination around defying it, maintaining integrity of the worlds that (as a result) remain less affected by its influence.
The problem is, I expect it to be built
Then that is a far more salient issue than any acausal blackmail it might have going in its abstract form, which is the only thing that happens in the outcomes where it doesn't get built (and where it remains unimportant). This just illustrates how the acausal aspects of any of this don't seem cruxy/relevant, and why I wrote the (top level) answer above the way I did, getting rid of anything acausal from the structure of the problem (other than what acausal structure remains in ordinary coordination among mere humans, guided by shared/overlapping abstract reasons and explanations).
Coordination not to build wouldn't help (even if successful), you can't defeat an abstract entity, prevent it from doing something in its own abstract world, by preventing existence of its instances in the physical world (intentionally or not), and it can still examine everyone's motivations and act accordingly. I just suspect that the step of actually building it is a major component of anxiety this seems to produce in some people.
Without the step where an extortion ASI actually gets built, this seems closely analogous to Pascal's wager (not mugging). There are too many possible abstract entities that act in all sorts of ways in response to all sorts of conditions to make it possible to just point at one of them and have it notice this in an important way. Importance of what happens with all possible abstract entities has to be divided among them, and each of them only gets a little, cashing out as influence of what happens with the entity on what you should do.
So I don't think there is any reason to expect that any particular arbitrarily selected abstract bogeyman is normatively important for your decision making, because there are all the other abstract bogeymen you are failing to consider. And when you do consider all possible abstract bogeymen, it should just add up to normality.
This is extremely weak signal compared to understanding the technical argument, the literature is full of nonsense that checks all the superficial boxes. Unfortunately it's not always feasible or worthwhile to understand the technical argument. This leaves the superficial clues, but you need to be aware how little they are worth.