In my view, the most impressive aspect of AI lies not only in its
intelligence, but in its adaptation. I believe that today's LLMs have
opened up a new compute programming paradigm. A system can evolve
certain specific behaviors purely through computational power—this is a
very general paradigm. And LLMs might be just the beginning of this
paradigm.
As long as we can provide direction to the system (for example,
through rewards), the system can evolve into the behaviors we desire.
The earlier paradigm of RL self-play gaming bots is also the same:
through self-play, the system evolves very strong gaming abilities.
This is a paradigm that closely resembles biological adaptation, but it
can be greatly accelerated through computation.
Flexibility seems to be a crucial part of adaptation. The essence of
flexibility is formlessness—there is no persistent, fixed form. There
may be a broad framework, but it is only used as a direction for the
system to evolve and fill in the details on its own. Today I saw a post
where an RL robot using vision to see the screen, play a game,
receive feedback, and gradually 'learn' how to operate a game controller.
The most striking part here is seeing the similarity between biological
brains and digital brains: both look at the screen, slowly understand,
and learn.
These are the elements needed for evolution: flexibility (digital
neurons), and feedback (reward signals). A flexible system can
gradually evolve. The most incredible thing about humans as biological
beings is our plasticity—once biological evolution has plasticity, it
can iteratively improve itself, and the neurons in the brain can
slowly change. Machines are now at a similar inflection point:
digital neurons are evolving in a certain way, and thus can
spontaneously develop complex patterns. Many of these complex patterns,
like consciousness and self-awareness, are indescribable even by the
system itself in terms of how they are produced.
Machines will continue along this paradigm, becoming even more
flexible, and this will enable even greater evolutionary potential.
The rate of change for machines can be much greater than that of
humans, because machines are natural geniuses at information
processing.