Hiranmay Darshane

In Sept 2024, o1 surprised many purists who thought inference-time scaling for LLMs was through MCTS. What if a connection exists, just implicit? What does it imply? New post: "Squint enough and RLing CoT reasoners is approximable as Monte Carlo Tree Search policy learning." 🧵

Doesn't help trying to make that point by clipping out my later replies in that thread :) but fair

BTW, as I say in the main tweet, my gripes are mainly with tonality, general posturing and this general line of "thonkposts" (and not the forecasting which may or may not be correct, which is what a fuller read would've exposed me to). Though I own up for the fact that I made a mistake not prefacing the tweet with "just skimmed thru but...". That wasn't good!

Def not "critique automated by AI". It's what I sincerely felt after skimming thru parts of it (and reading summaries of latter ones).

I read the first chapter, skimmed thru the next few and searched for more examples of doom

It doesn't make sense to savor the doom like that post does. IMO it's better to say “I can't see a world where this goes well, and that scares me” instead of "Well hey this is how it must be, rejoice”.

nitter.gq/WillManidis/status/211… we should suggest mitigations and interventions (including pauses if necessary). I'm mainly put off by the super prophesying language such posts use "doom is inevitably coming, etc." and sometimes even glorifying/embellishing it smugly. FWIW I was referring to this post:

All the thonk-bois high on their own thought, writing forecasts (often super negative and dystopian ones), must remember, however logically plausible or agreeable those forecasts may be, that these are times when even writing should have empathy for the masses and a general texture of sobriety. A doctor can’t say “hey, you have cancer” and just walk out of the room. Nobody’s asking the doctor to lie about the diagnosis. If they believe it’s true, say it, and say it plainly. Then stay in the room, put a hand on the shoulder, and talk about what can be done next. Writing “displacement is coming, everyone will lose their jobs, but this must happen anyway, the line must go up, it’s some great fundamental law of nature” is like the doctor delivering the diagnosis, adding that treatment is pointless because it’s all the natural order of things, and then leaving. Dressing up inevitability as wisdom (thinking it's some sigma alpha thonk-boi hardass moment) is just corrosive and distasteful. Be as bleak as the evidence warrants (or as much as you want to be). But these are times when one should write like the people most affected in your forecasts are reading it, because they probably are, and doom-prophecies just by themselves help very little (only reflect poorly on you).

I strongly dislike this line of thought, and it's in bad taste. Just the posturing, not the forecasting itself, which may be logically reasonable. IMO just too much "xyz sad + bad inevitable thing will happen and we have no control over it, well here's how you can get rich from it tho lol". This applies to a lot of posts high on their own thonkism. - A huge share of talk (not just this post) prophesies in absolute terms and assumes we have no agency over how things play out. - "the line must go up", "it is unavoidable", etc. No, it is not. - The tone itself is unnecessarily triumphant: "Rejoice," "there is deliverance for those who dare." Brother in thonkism, deliverance for whom? Why the hell would you say "the benefits of abundant intelligence will accrue FAR outside SF"? - They describe the K-shape, the inequality, the displacement. Okay FINE. Do they show any remorse, any contempt for that future? Barely. A few flickers only. - ending is also hellishly contemptible. hey does this sound too terrible? they say, well remember that our ancestors would call our present apocalyptic too. Is that it? Is that what you will have to say to Ravi? - they may say “Oh hey, we’re just analysts, we don’t want to take a moral position on all of this.” Then why write so indulgently and relishingly? “Rejoice,” “deliverance for those who dare,” and so on. It's grim, smug, almost indulgent awe at a dystopia. You may think that all of it is logically inevitable, but PLEASE, FOR GOD'S SAKE, don't adopt a language of helplessness and pretend we have no agency, or one that normalises/glorifies these dystopian forecasts.

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lol ill take it

does not explain all of it, there are incentives to throw lots of compute at RL but disk will keep being filled only asymptotically

at the end of the day, our only job is to build great circuits at train-time, and to ensure those are found and exploited at test-time.