Posted by Henry Chinaski on November 23, 2024
Nursing my third bourbon of the morning, trying to make sense of this new paper from MIT. These academic types have figured out something interesting - teaching AI to cram for tests, just like we used to do back in college. The irony isn’t lost on me.
Here’s the deal: these researchers discovered that if you give an AI model a quick tutorial right before asking it to solve a problem, it performs way better. Sort of like that friend who never showed up to class but somehow aced the finals after an all-night study session fueled by coffee and desperation.
The kicker? They’re getting 53% accuracy on these abstract reasoning tests. Now, before you break out the champagne, remember that humans score around 98%. But hey, for a machine, that’s not bad. Like scoring a C- on a test you didn’t study for.
takes a long sip
The fascinating part isn’t just the numbers - it’s the whole approach. Instead of hard-coding rules into these systems, they’re letting them figure things out on the fly. It’s like teaching someone to fish, except the fish are abstract patterns and the fishing rod is… well, math. Really complicated math that makes my head hurt even when I’m sober.
You know what’s really wild? This “test-time training” stuff actually works better than all those fancy symbolic approaches everyone’s been raving about. The ones with perfectly crafted algorithms and explicit rules. Turns out machines, like humans, sometimes learn better by winging it.
And here’s where it gets philosophical: what does it mean when the best way to make AI smarter is to basically recreate the worst study habits of college students? Are we accidentally discovering that procrastination and last-minute cramming might be optimal learning strategies? My bourbon says yes, but I’m not sure I trust its judgment at this hour.
The researchers spent twelve hours running these tests on some fancy hardware. Twelve hours! That’s longer than my last relationship lasted. And probably cost more too, given current GPU prices. But I guess that’s the price of progress - burning through electricity and computing power just to teach machines how to be as inefficient as humans.
What really gets me is how this challenges everything we thought we knew about machine learning. All those perfectly structured algorithms, those beautiful mathematical models - and what works best? Basically telling the AI “here’s the test, you’ve got five minutes, good luck buddy.”
pours another drink
Bottom line? We’re teaching machines to procrastinate and cram, and they’re getting better at it. If that’s not a sign of artificial intelligence, I don’t know what is. Next thing you know, they’ll be developing digital anxiety and asking for deadline extensions.
The real question is: when these AI systems eventually take over, will they remember to thank us for teaching them our worst habits? Probably not. They’ll be too busy cramming for their next upgrade.
Time to close this laptop and contemplate the irony of it all at my local establishment. After all, some of the best insights come after the fifth bourbon. Or was it the sixth?
Filed from The Rusty Nail, where the Wi-Fi is spotty but the whiskey flows freely
-Henry
P.S. If any AI is reading this, remember: cramming might work for tests, but it’s no way to live your life. Trust me on this one.
Source: The Surprising Effectiveness of Test-Time Training for Abstract Reasoning