David Duvenaud

Like once you have an element that has a rough idea of like what sort of thing happened in what time, then when I see some like reference to like genetic engineering and like some like 1930s data, it's like, oh, that no one used that phrase at this point.

And then you can use that to like help clean the data more.

But it's like I think this is like an Achilles heel of this approach.

Yeah, it's also.

actually another technical problem of data poisoning just through the questions you ask.

So if you are just doing metaculous style, like is there going to be a war between India and Pakistan this year?

It's actually hard because when you tune your scaffolding to go back, most of the questions you ask about, you're asking because something happened, right?

So it's like, imagine a future person comes back and asks me if I'm worried about, I don't know, Lithuania invading Canada.

I'd be like, well, I wasn't until you asked me, right?

Yeah, so it's easy to sort of like unintentionally poison your, or rather incentivize your model to be the opposite of the nothing ever happens guy, to just be like, yes, whatever you're asking, like there was a 1% chance it happened.

How do you avoid that?

Well, so then, I mean, you try to, I guess I'll say that's one nice thing about the open-ended just generate text approach, because then you have to normalize over all possible newspaper headlines.

So that actually already guards against this sort of validation poisoning problem.

But then that has its own problem because the likelihood is very sensitive to styles.

Maybe there's a new nickname for the president in the future, and if one model guesses it or thinks it's plausible, another one doesn't, and that ends up dominating the likelihood.

So there's a bunch of interesting technical problems here, and I am a technical person, and that's like...

actually might be greatest fear is that I just end up nerd sniping myself and spending time on like fun technical problems instead of the problems that matter.

Exactly.

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I think everyone agrees that sort of going forward, history is just happening faster.