[FRIAM] fat tails

[Marcus Daniels]

Isn't it better to feed as much info back to centralized training as possible?   Sure, there's a big energy advantage to independent agents with narrow attention.   With the self-attention mechanisms of Transformers being O(n^2 * d), having large context (n) is very expensive.   One could imagine debriefing these agents by having them generate samples from interesting distributions they encounter in the wild and use those samples for refining the full model.  Ideally, as formal systems:  "Write me a program that demonstrates a model you've learned."   That's basically what is happening with academic work now.   The humans write their papers, and periodically the LLMs read the papers.   The cybernetic solution doesn't only need to involve humans, though, e.g. https://www.lila.ai/  https://www.biopharmatrend.com/post/1160-lila-sciences-raises-200m-to-automate-scientific-discovery-with-ai-and-robotics/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2025 7:26 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] fat tails

https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/p/why-tech-bros-overestimate-ai-s-creative-abilities

So, if we accept the assumption that the stuff way out in the tails (good writing, good cinematography, good science, etc.) is somehow a function of the stuff in the middle of the distribution, what happens when we replace the generators of the mediocre stuff with AI? What happens to the generators of the stuff in the tails? What *is* the functional relationship between the generators in the middle and the generators in the tail(s)? (Note I'm talking about processes more than artifacts.)

I think the relationship is diversity. And a critical part of the assignation to the categories (incl. mediocre and great) depends on applying lenses (or baffles) to the diverse, percolating stew. And that includes those lenses being held by the components inside the stew. So not merely a diversity of generators, but a diversity of lens sizes and types.

What I don't yet see in LLMs is that diversity of diverse generators. And, yes, it's more than "multimodal". It's born of scope limiting. If we can limit the scopes (experiences, fine-tunings, biasings) of a diverse population of otherwise expansively trained (universal) LLMs, then we might be able to fit the tails as well as the middles.

This implies that while, yes, LLMs demonstrate a universality ratchet we haven't seen before, in order to fit the tails, we need autonomy, agency, embodiment, etc. And that implies moving them *off* the cloud/net, out of the data centers. Similar to these diary entries of one of my favorite monks:

https://world.hey.com/corlin/burnout-an-internet-fast-5517ccaa

-- 
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