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The a16z Show

The Quest for AGI: Q*, Self-Play, and Synthetic Data

The a16z Show

a16z

Software Eating The World, Science, Technology, Innovation, Culture, Disruption, Business, Entrepreneurship

4.21.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

One topic at the center of the AI universe this week is a potential breakthrough called Q*. Little has been revealed about this OpenAI project, other than its likely relationship to solving certain grade-school mathematical problems. Amid much speculation, we decided to bring in our new general partner, Anjney Midha – focused on all things AI – to sift through the sea of noise. Today, we discuss the key frontier research areas that AI labs are exploring on their path toward generalizable intelligence, from self-play, to model-free reinforcement learning to synthetic data. Anjney also shares his insights on which approach he expects to be most influential in the next wave of LLMs and why math problems are even a suitable testing ground for this kind of research.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Highly ambiguous problems with unclear reward functions that do have correct answers.

0:05.6

That's sort of the elusive goal right now.

0:07.6

The big idea for why people are so interested in understanding what Q-star is, is that if you can produce an AI system that is

0:16.4

four to six orders of magnitude better than GPD4, right? So 10,000 times better or 100,000 times better,

0:22.0

then you start approaching this North Star of an AGI.

0:25.0

Synthetic data and self-play come into relevance here because when you're having an AI

0:30.0

score each individual step of your reasoning, then you're generating a bunch of really valuable data

0:34.8

that then you can train the system on.

0:37.2

We don't actually know how much data is required

0:40.1

to get and surpass human level intelligence.

0:43.5

Chat JBT was launched on November 30th, 2022.

0:48.0

Little did we know just how much would change in the whirlwind year that followed.

0:53.0

And quite frankly, the speed of change during the last few weeks

0:55.7

has been no different.

0:57.9

One topic at the center of the AI universe

1:00.3

this week was a potential breakthrough called Q-Star. Now, universe this

1:03.3

week was a potential breakthrough called Q-Star.

1:04.2

Now, little has been revealed about this open AI project

1:07.5

other than its likely relationship to solving certain grade school

1:11.6

math problems.

1:13.0

Amid much speculation, we decided to bring in our new general partner at A16C,

1:18.0

who's focused on all things AI to sift through this sea of noise. So today, together with Antray Mida, we discuss the key frontier

...

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