(The New Atlantis) – “Language models are just glorified autocomplete” has been the critics’ refrain — but reinforcement learning is proving them wrong. New breakthroughs could follow.

For firms like OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic to achieve their ambitious goals, AI models will need to do more than write prose and code and come up with images. And the companies will have to contend with the fact that human input for training the models is a limited resource. The next step in AI development is promising as it is daunting: AI building upon AI to solve ever more complex problems and check for its own mistakes.

There will likely be another leap in LLM development, and soon. Whether or not it’s toward “general intelligence” is up for interpretation. But what the leap will look like is already becoming clear. (Read More)