alt Hacker NewsThis refers specifically to "AI Frontiers", a research group within Microsoft Research that focuses on fundamental advances in AI. There is no end in sight to real AI frontiers.
Perhaps "The End of Microsoft Research's AI Frontiers Group" would be a less ambiguous title.
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Yeah, I went down the rabbit hole scratching my head the whole time. This is about the group at Microsoft Research that was disbanded or reorged into what is now Microsoft Research.
To the author: 100% need this kind of thinking. It’s a balancing act. Historically though, dedicated labs haven’t had the best track record at commercializing their tech. The skillset differs vastly from running a product-focused business.
That said, even within this narrow scope - there are areas ripe for research.
Some of my particular interests include:
(1) Latent thinking/reasoning, which could arguably be more efficient but also opaque is one
(2) Separation of “intelligence” from knowledge - ie. keep the ability to reason like a frontier model and make tool calls (calling the ‘oracle’ or searching the web) but remove all parameters associated with niche knowledge/facts.
These are a couple off the top of my head that are very much aligned to scaling.
> There is no end in sight to real AI frontiers.
That statement is broad enough to be unfalsifiable, but if you narrow it down just a bit to scaling LLMs, maybe there is an end in sight. At least financial markets are skeptical of there being no end in sight.
If scaling LLMs really was the road to God in a box, then compute demand would be infinite, and nobody building to meet that demand would have a junk debt rating. Did those money people just not get it?
I see this playing the same way in the other big companies that have a pressure to deliver (cough *value for shareholders*)
Ok we'll use that above. Thanks!