I’m not sure we can accept the premise that LLMs haven’t made any breakthroughs. What if people aren’t giving the LLM credit when they get a breakthrough from it?
First time I got good code out of a model, I told my friends and coworkers about it. Not anymore. The way I see it, the model is a service I (or my employer) pays for. Everyone knows it’s a tool that I can use, and nobody expects me to apportion credit for whether specific ideas came from the model or me. I tell people I code with LLMs, but I don’t commit a comment saying “wow, this clever bit came from the model!”
If people are getting actual bombshell breakthroughs from LLMs, maybe they are rationally deciding to use those ideas without mentioning the LLM came up with it first.
Anyway, I still think Gwern’s suggestion of a generic idea-lab trying to churn out insights is neat. Given the resources needed to fund such an effort, I could imagine that a trading shop would be a possible place to develop such a system. Instead of looking for insights generally, you’d be looking for profitable trades. Also, I think you’d do a lot better if you have relevant experts to evaluate the promising ideas, which means that more focused efforts would be more manageable. Not comparing everything to everything, but comparing everything to stuff in the expert’s domain.
If a system like that already exists at Jane Street or something, I doubt they are going to tell us about it.
First time I got good code out of a model, I told my friends and coworkers about it. Not anymore. The way I see it, the model is a service I (or my employer) pays for. Everyone knows it’s a tool that I can use, and nobody expects me to apportion credit for whether specific ideas came from the model or me. I tell people I code with LLMs, but I don’t commit a comment saying “wow, this clever bit came from the model!”
If people are getting actual bombshell breakthroughs from LLMs, maybe they are rationally deciding to use those ideas without mentioning the LLM came up with it first.
Anyway, I still think Gwern’s suggestion of a generic idea-lab trying to churn out insights is neat. Given the resources needed to fund such an effort, I could imagine that a trading shop would be a possible place to develop such a system. Instead of looking for insights generally, you’d be looking for profitable trades. Also, I think you’d do a lot better if you have relevant experts to evaluate the promising ideas, which means that more focused efforts would be more manageable. Not comparing everything to everything, but comparing everything to stuff in the expert’s domain.
If a system like that already exists at Jane Street or something, I doubt they are going to tell us about it.