If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.
In typical statistical mathematician fashion, it’s ambiguously “almost surely at least one”. Infinite is very large.
That’s the thing though, infinity isn’t “large” - that is the wrong way to think about it, large implies a size or bounds - infinity is boundless. An infinity can contain an infinite number of other infinities within itself.
Mathematically, if the monkeys are generating truly random sequences of letters, then an infinite number (and not just “at least one”) of them will by definition immediately start typing out Hamlet, and the probability of that is 100% (
not “almost surely”edit: I was wrong on this part, 100% here does actually mean “almost surely”, see below). At the same time, every possible finite combination of letters will begin to be typed out as well, including every possible work of literature ever written, past, present or future, and each of those will begin to be typed out each by an infinite number of other monkeys, with 100% probability.Almost surely, I’m quoting mathematicians. Because an infinite anything also includes events that exist but with probability zero. So, sure, the probability is 100% (more accurately, it tends to 1 as the number of monkeys approach infinite) but that doesn’t mean it will occur. Just like 0% doesn’t mean it won’t, because, well, infinity.
Calculus is a bitch.