I haven’t read the linked post/comment yet, and perhaps I am missing something very obvious, but: we have exaflop computing (that’s 10^18) right now. Is Tim Dettmers really saying that we’re not going to see a 1000x speed-up, in a century or possibly ever? That seems like a shocking claim, and I struggle to imagine what could justify it.
EDIT: I have now read the linked comment; it speaks of fundamental physical limitations such as speed of light, heat dissipation, etc., and says:
...These are all hard physical boundaries that we cannot alter. Yet, all these
These are great (and terrifying).
It’s hard to pick just one favorite, but I think I’ll go with that amazing last entry:
We noticed that our agent discovered an adversarial policy to move around in such a way so that the monsters in this virtual environment governed by the M model never shoots a single fireball in some rollouts. Even when there are signs of a fireball forming, the agent will move in a way to extinguish the fireballs magically as if it has superpowers in the environment.
Literally “hacking the Matrix to gain superpowers”.
Ah, I see.
As far as whether Eliezer came up with the idea on his own—as with most (though not all) of his ideas, the answer, as I understand it, is “sort of yes, sort of no”. To expand a bit: much of what Eliezer says is one or both of: (a) prefigured in the writings of other philosophers / mathematicians / etc., (b) directly inspired by some combination of things he’d read. However, the presentation, the focus, the emphasis, etc., are often novel, and the specifics may be a synthesis of multiple extant sources, etc.
In this particular case, I do not recall
...
It’s “Novaya Zemlya” (“New Land”), not “Zovaya”.