[FRIAM] PhDs and curiosity

Thu May 29 18:16:29 EDT 2025

Glen writes: 

< Maybe what's required is that we train foundation models on the entire human corpus, but then fine-tune each agent toward their sub-domains? >

Intuitively, one cannot be a dead lift champion and a King of the Mountain cyclist. They require different specializations to the body. 

Yet, fine tuning architectures for LLMs have a stackable plug-in architecture. So, an agentic LLM could recognize it needs to form of something different, like ballerina and not an offensive lineman, and then load in that tensor file. If the transition could lose capability, it might fork off new agents so that both the ballerina and the offensive lineman could co-exist, along with the meta-agent. I suppose it gets interesting if there is a survival requirement that involves energy limitations. 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of cody dooderson <d00d3rs0n at gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, May 29, 2025 at 2:49 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] PhDs and curiosity 

I have been working my way through this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBL7J0kgldU&t=1046s <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBL7J0kgldU&t=1046s> . The speaker pokes at LLMs in some very clever and systematic ways. He may have some answers to your questions. 

The video above starts when he talks about how adding junk internet crawls to LLM training data makes the LLM significantly less knowledgeable. I wonder if our own brains are similar? 

His talk points out a handful of other quirks about LLMs, like they seem to exhibit regret when they get the answer wrong. 

_ Cody Smith _ 
d00d3rs0n at gmail.com <mailto:d00d3rs0n at gmail.com> 

On Wed, May 28, 2025 at 12:31 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote: 

In my fit of insomnia a couple nights ago, I kept turning over the hype around "agentic" LLMs. Both Pieter and Marcus are right in that, yes, LLMs must be prompted but all that's needed is automated prompting. Were we to equip LLMs with multimodal sensors, all of which have some "natural" frequency, that would provide the automatic prompting, some random, some not.

Dave raises the issue of cultural artifact half-life. So in a mixture of experts (MoE) sense, maybe a set of parameters encodes a 4chan meme and another encodes Analytic Philosophy. The lifetime of any one of those encodings would be set by the frequenc[y|ies] and distributions of the relevant sensor inputs (including the feedback loops in which they participate).

The question I guess I'm asking is whether the LLMs can automatically discover new stability states or not. Do paths off of, say, the 4chan meme lead to new stable encodings or does it devolve into noise? Arriving at a new stable point would be evidence of curiosity and a devolution into noise would be akin to a psychological disorder. Quickly hopping from one "hobby" to another would be one personality. Focusing on a single "hobby" for a long time would be a different personality. But curiosity would be represented by the facility with which one *can* hop, even if that LLM finds it distasteful to hop around all the time.

My whipping post is that our intention is to build LLMs that capture *all* of *every* curious thing humans have ever written/talked about. Agentic LLMs slice that totalist space into pieces. The purpose of your Agent(s) isn't to be able to do anything anywhere and at any time. The purpose is to do some things, somewhere, at some times. This seems to defy the MoE conception.

Maybe what's required is that we train foundation models on the entire human corpus, but then fine-tune each agent toward their sub-domains? Your 4chan posting Agent gets very low frequency whole corpus updates, but high frequency - focused - sub-domain updates.

Before, I was thinking germline changes are architectural. So the only way out of our current Exploitation of the transformer is a new/better architecture. But if we assume the transformer is sufficient, then germline might be that low frequency updating of the whole corpus. So even if, say, logical positivism is non-arbitrarily distinguishable from analytic philosophy (or 4chan posts are distinct from bluesky posts) each whole corpus update has to contain it all.

And cultural changes would then be in the mixture. Sure the youngsters wear what looks like bell bottoms these days. But somewhere in their gametes lies the encoding for actual bell bottoms.

On 5/27/25 10:17 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Meh.
> 
> *From:*Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> *On Behalf Of *Pieter Steenekamp
> *Sent:* Tuesday, May 27, 2025 8:53 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] PhDs and curiosity
> 
> In my view, current AI systems are not capable of curiosity-driven science. Take DeepMind’s AlphaFold, for instance—it’s hard to argue that its contribution isn’t “real” science. Predicting the 3D structures of over 200 million proteins is an extraordinary achievement, especially when you consider that determining the structure of a single complex protein was once enough to earn a PhD.
> 
> Now, I realize I’m being a bit cheeky here: the brilliant creators of AlphaFold received a Nobel Prize, yet poor AlphaFold—who tirelessly crunched the data and did all the work—got nothing. Shame!
> 
> But to return to the core point: AlphaFold operates in a fundamentally mechanical way. It was trained on existing protein structures and learned to identify patterns. Of course, that’s a simplification, but the crucial point is this—AlphaFold wasn’t curious. It didn’t form questions, seek out unknowns, or explore beyond its programming. It simply did what it was designed to do.
> 
> On Tue, 27 May 2025 at 23:50, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm> <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm>>> wrote:
> 
> Can't speak to germs, but the cultural half is, I believe, dead on.
> 
> Two of the most pervasive aspects of culture are "worldview" and "language." Sometime after the Age of Reason, Western Industrial culture adopted a worldview of the Universe as a machine (clockworks, steam engines, computers) exemplified by 19th century physics of La Place and Mach. (All that pesky quantum stuff was kept in the closet almost to the 1950s.) Physics dominated the University and all the new disciplines that came into existence wanted to be just like Physics. Business adopted the machine metaphor and touted "scientific management." Computer Science and Software Engineering. Sociology split from Anthropology (actually more of a parallel development) based on the former's desire to be more scientific and experimental. Cognitive 'Science' tried to subsume much of psychology, tolerating Freud and eschewing Jung. Philosophy moved to Logical Positivism and its successor Analytic Philosophy.
> 
> All of this, mostly, non-consciously; the same way that culture influences the behavior of those within it.
> 
> Had a great conversation with a History of Science professor the other day about how misogyny became entangled in the 'scientific' and still manifests itself in language, behaviors, and worldview of the university as a whole.
> 
> davew
> 
> 
> On Tue, May 27, 2025, at 3:11 PM, glen wrote:
> > So, with the recent conversations about when an LLM might be considered
> > alive and the extent to which some/all PhD programs represent
> > intelligence/knowledge, I landed on this question:
> >
> > Is curiosity-driven science like germ-line genetics, whereas
> > ideals/values-driven science is like cultural inheritance?
> >
> > The analogy seems OK to me. Nothing short of significant trauma can
> > divert the curious. But a cultural value/ideal (including things like
> > capitalism or whatnot) seems like it could pretty easily fade beyond 1
> > or 2 generations. Please trash this idea! I want to use it at the pub.
> > But if it doesn't pass muster, here, I may not. >8^D

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