How a Language Model Aced a Top Leaderboard

This video shares details about a remarkable experiment by researchers in Tokyo, who teamed up with Oxford and Cambridge Universities to study whether large language models might now be able to write code that improves their own performance.

The answer was Yes.

Not only that, the model created a whole new approach that placed it at the top of a leaderboard, using a novel method that had not yet been tried or documented in any academic research paper. How can that happen?

The video describes how the model alternated between different kinds of strategies, just like a data scientist might do, resulting in an innovative new loss function, with several interesting properties. In short, the model was systematically generating hypotheses and testing them. Finally, the video identifies five aspects of the research question that can potentially be generalized, and it names three ways in which the findings might be applied to new problem sets, including to virtual reality. . .