“Recursive” is a reasonable term because the generation N AIs will train the Generation N+1 AIs. The term “iterative” doesn’t reflect this nuance as well IMO.

Recursion reduces each step toward a base case: each step is defined in terms of previous/simpler steps, not more advanced ones. The "recursive" in "recursive self improvement" has things precisely backward. Iteration correctly describes a process where each step is the starting point of its successive step, so it should be "iterative self improvement" but I guess that didn't sound as cool.

I think you’re conflating the direction of definition with the direction of evaluation.

Compare the similarity of:

  AI(n) = improve(AI(n-1))

With:

  Fib(n) = Fib(n-1) + Fib(n-2)

The latter is a classic example of recursion. So why isn’t the former?

Edit: formatting

I think you're confusing a recurrence relationship with recursive execution. Until AI has control over its inputs (including physical inputs - compute hardware, etc.) it's not quite RSI. We'll get there. They'll get there, rather.

It's not a nuance, it's a sequence.

The risks of open models are real.

However, I’d feel better about ceding control of AI to the government if they didn’t seem so intent on building an apparatus for surveillance/control.

Your “furry fanfic” is a somewhat pathetic scarecrow; this is a complicated topic.

Neuromancer came out in 1984, over 40 years ago, so that covers the broad concept. Or Neo in The Matrix: “Programs hacking programs… why?”

For non-fiction you could look at Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014).

More recently, see Cade Metz’s NYT profile of Geoffrey Hinton, “The Godfather of A.I. Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead” (May 1, 2023).

I was under the impression that Go also uses Elo, then I did a bit of cursory research and discovers that it varies.

Two major federations are American Go Association (AGA) and European Go Federation (EGF). EGF uses an Elo-inspired update rule since 2021. AGA uses a quite-different Bayesian system without pairwise update; they provide a paper and a C++ reference impl.

Asian countries don't bother with such numeric ratings. Instead, rankings are titles which are won through tournament promotion structures (sounds similar to Sumo to me).

Interesting, because I always thought that it was more "apples to apples", and that the higher upper limits of Go rankings was somehow indicative of the higher "dynamic range" of the game compared to chess. For example, if Elo were applied to basketball, what would the Elo of Lebron James be compared to a playground hooper (leaving aside that 1-on-1 isn't the best part of Lebron's game)... would it be higher or lower than Magnus Carlsen in chess? I don't have an intuition.

While it's not official, GoRatings (https://www.goratings.org/en/) ranks all players based on a variation of the Elo system (note that it is international, even if in practice you'd have to scroll quite far to find a few lonely Western persons).

AGA and EGF are very minor federations in the Go world, all the professionals are in Asia where the game is far bigger.

It was a joke referencing the typo in the message they responded to.

Not in this thread, the joke is in an aunt comment.

I was housemates with a couple with a kid. The kid learned Scratch first, and made some surprisingly sophisticated apps in that semester (or two).

By now he’s moved on to textual languages (not yet old enough for a career), but Scratch was engaging and gave him a good start.

I don't know about the article about Apple News scams, but how is an article about Waymo publishing a model for self driving cars not about AI?

It's not plagarism, Ciechanowski didn't invent this presentation form. His presentations are examples of "active essays", a term coined by Alan Kay no later than 2006.

(I don't know whether Alan invented the concept itself, I'm not aware of him claiming that)

See: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5350160

Your tone implies that the same people who freak out about reasonable gov intervention, are also (hypocritically) okay with the shenanigans being discussed.

Who are these straw men you refer to?

Nothing in my comment indicates the same ppl.

You could be more charitable. They did say “or” which you omitted in your quote, and also “who knows”. There are possibilities too. In my view, the primary contribution of that comment was to clarify the time frame.