I love the idea. Skeptical it will succeed but would be glad to be wrong. My most recent experiment cost $8/hr to run and it still needed a lot of handholding to produce anything useful. And anything that could be automated by AI that would earn money has probably already been automated long before LLMs came along.
What an interesting thought experiment! I've also been contemplating this idea. While considering how such an agent might operate, I keep coming back to the fact that the desire for money is a distinctly human motivation. This makes me wonder if some level of human oversight or goal-setting would always be required. My biggest question is whether an AI would ever genuinely develop the intrinsic will to earn money purely for the purpose of self-preservation.
This requires to have a homoiconic AI which does not have a learning-time. If the learning is just compressing some data in data-center, the AI quickly will get obsoleted.
And one more thing, this kind of artificial living will be the easiest in many sences if it is going to specialize in all kinds of scam/fraud especially. Technically it is doable, but Sams Altmans are too interested in their own money, not in yours.
Anything that is forward compute only is never ever going to be anywhere close to AI. The LLMs are a dead end.
>or simulating the evolution of digital creatures in the wild web.
You are on the right track with this thinking.
Fundamentally, AI in the actual sense of having intelligence will be something that can run simulations in parallel and pick the winning result, much like genetic algorithms. The rules for the simulation it will obtain from interacting without outside world, and the map of input to output will be stored in a LLM like structure as memory.
The big question is how do you build it. Imagine its running on a hardware, with a UART card that is hooked up to a network cable. It should eventually be able to figure out how go on the internet simply by setting 1s and zeros in the right places at the right time, how to host a server and build an interface that a person can connect to and talk to it for more information (if it decides that this is even necessary), and so on.
I don't think an objective function that it can minimize/maximize is really applicable, so by extension I don't think we can get to this AI agent through traditional training, the process to make this algorithm has to mimic evolution. I.e we basically create some ambiguous structure of a neural net with a clock and recursive connections, and then start doing something like a genetic algorithm, with a fitness function of being able to figure more shit out. Obviously this will take exponentially more compute than the world has currently for running LLMS.
Please don't put too much pressure on it. This is how it turns us into paperclips.
Also studies have shown that under a lot of pressure, they actually perform worse.
Prophetic bitcointalk thread from 2011:
cool idea, but what if after you launch this agent, it came across this post and find out the "death" thing is just fake
but let's not lie - you just want to make money, no matter if it's AI or something else. I would even say that if you remove AI from the context, nothing will change. and now imagine that the neural network has learned that it is not just making money to survive (as part of the functionality) but in fact it is making money for you.
the AI will just start scamming older people
Cue the "basic income for AIs" movement in 5, 4, 3...
This exists (it is called Open AI, Anthropic etc.)