I'd especially like to hear your thoughts on the above proposal of loss-minimizing a language model all the way to AGI.
I hope you won't mind me quoting your earlier self as I strongly agree with your previous take on the matter:
If you train GPT-3 on a bunch of medical textbooks and prompt it to tell you a cure for Alzheimer's, it won't tell you a cure, it will tell you what humans have said about curing Alzheimer's ... It would just tell you a plausible story about a situation related to the prompt about curing Alzheimer's, based on its training data. Rather than a logical Oracle, this image-captioning-esque scheme would be an intuitive Oracle, telling you things that make sense based on associations already present within the training set.
What am I driving at here, by pointing out that curing Alzheimer's is hard? It's that the designs above are missing something, and what they're missing is search. I'm not saying that getting a neural net to directly output your cure for Alzheimer's is impossible. But it seems like it requires there to already be a "cure for Alzheimer's" dimension in your learned model. The more realistic way to find the cure for Alzheimer's, if you don't already know it, is going to involve lots of logical steps one after another, slowly moving through a logical space, narrowing down the possibilities more and more, and eventually finding something that fits the bill. In other words, solving a search problem.
So if your AI can tell you how to cure Alzheimer's, I think either it's explicitly doing a search for how to cure Alzheimer's (or worlds that match your verbal prompt the best, or whatever), or it has some internal state that implicitly performs a search.
Near the beginning, Daniel is basically asking Jan how they plan on aligning the automated alignment researcher, and if they can do that, then it seems that there wouldn't be much left for the AAR to do.
Jan doesn't seem to comprehend the question, which is not an encouraging sign.