Many people in the AI community are confused by OpenAI's pivot from non-profit to for-profit, its cult-like, beyond-parody PR about "capturing the lightcone of all future value in the universe", and its billion-dollar partnership with Azure...
Personally, I feel bad for the employees. It must be disappointing to sign up for a non-profit org that aims at doing open AI research in the public interest, only to find out a bit later than your job is now to make Azure a more attractive enterprise AI cloud than AWS & GCP
And on top of it, you are now part -- in the eyes of the world -- of a doomsday techno-cult...
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I'm joining forces with @mikeknoop to start Ndea (@ndeainc), a new AI lab.
Our focus: deep learning-guided program synthesis. We're betting on a different path to build AI capable of true invention, adaptation, and innovation.
We're really excited about our current research direction. We believe we have a small but real chance of achieving a breakthrough -- creating AI that can learn at least as efficiently as people, and that can keep improving over time with no bottlenecks in sight.
People scaled LLMs by ~10,000x from 2019 to 2024, and their scores on ARC stayed near 0 (e.g. GPT-4o at ~5%). Meanwhile a very crude program search approach could score >20% with hardly any compute.
Then OpenAI started adding test-time CoT search. ARC scores immediately shot up.
It's not about scale. It's about working on the right ideas.
Like deep-learning guided CoT synthesis or program synthesis. Via search.
Today OpenAI announced o3, its next-gen reasoning model. We've worked with OpenAI to test it on ARC-AGI, and we believe it represents a significant breakthrough in getting AI to adapt to novel tasks.
It scores 75.7% on the semi-private eval in low-compute mode (for $20 per task in compute ) and 87.5% in high-compute mode (thousands of $ per task). It's very expensive, but it's not just brute -- these capabilities are new territory and they demand serious scientific attention.
While the new model is very impressive and represents a big milestone on the way towards AGI, I don't believe this is AGI -- there's still a fair number of very easy ARC-AGI-1 tasks that o3 can't solve, and we have early indications that ARC-AGI-2 will remain extremely challenging for o3.
This shows that it's still feasible to create unsaturated, interesting benchmarks that are easy for humans, yet impossible for AI -- without involving specialist knowledge. We will have AGI when creating such evals becomes outright impossible.
When we develop AI systems that can actually reason, they will involve deep learning (as one of two major components, the other one being discrete search), and some people will say that this "proves" that DL can reason.
No, it will have proven the thesis that DL is not enough, and that we need to combine DL with discrete search.
From my DL textbook (1st edition), published in 2017. Seven years later, there is now overwhelming momentum towards this exact approach.
I find it especially obtuse when people point to progress on math benchmark as evidence of LLMs being AGI, given that all of this progress has been driven by methods that leverage discrete search. The empirical data is completely vindicating that DL in general, and LLMs in particular, can't do math on their own, and that we need discrete search.
In the last Trump administration, legal, high-skilled immigration was cut by ~30% before Covid, then by 100% after Covid (which was definitely a choice: a number of countries kept issuing residency permits and visas). However illegal immigrant inflows did not go down (they've been stable since the mid-2000s).
If you're a scientist or engineer applying for a green card, you're probably keenly aware that your chances of eventually obtaining it are highly dependent on the election. What you may not know is that, if you're a naturalized citizen, your US passport is also at stake
The last Trump administration launched a "denaturalization task force" aiming at taking away US citizenship from as many naturalized citizens as possible, with an eventual target of 7M (about one third of all naturalized citizens). Thankfully, they ran into a little problem: the courts.
When we say deep learning models operate via memorization, the claim isn't that they work like literal lookup tables, only being able to make sense of points that are exactly part of their training data. No one has claimed that -- it wouldn't even be true of linear regression.
Of course deep learning models can generalize to unseen data points -- they would be entirely useless if they couldn't. The claim is that they perform *local generalization*: generalization to known unknowns, to degrees of variability for which you can provide a dense sampling at training time.
If you take a problem that is known to be solvable by expert humans via pure pattern recognition (say, spotting the top move on a chess board) and that has been known to be solvable via convnets as far back as 2016, and you train a model on ~5B chess positions across ~10M games, and you find that the model can solve the problem at the level of a human expert, that isn't an example of out-of-distribution generalization. That is an example of local generalization -- precisely the thing you expect deep learning to be able to do.