Re:Cargo Cult AI
by TeMPOraL on Thursday May 18, 2023 @07:10PM
(#35995575)
> Brute forcing is the basis of evolution. The algorithm running inside the head of the mouse is the survivor of a million iterative generations as the species brute-forced the entire "get to the food" survival problem.
Here is an interesting corollary: the same is the case with humans. Evolution being what it is, whatever makes the mouse brain tick, and whatever makes our brains tick, must have been relatively easy for evolution to stumble upon and scale up, and it must have been delivering continuous improvements to survival. Otherwise, natural selection wouldn't be able to home in on the solution.
In short: the fundamentals of intelligence have to be something simple enough to be discoverable by accident.
This is one of the main reasons I believe that LLMs aren't unrelated to how our own brains work. We tried to make a simple yet generic system, somewhat emulating what we see in nature, and then we kept scaling it up, until it surprised us with suddenly gaining capabilities we consider to be advanced cognitive functions. Just how many such structures could be there in nature, so that evolution and AI researchers stumbled on two entirely unrelated ones? It's too much of a coincidence.
Here is an interesting corollary: the same is the case with humans. Evolution being what it is, whatever makes the mouse brain tick, and whatever makes our brains tick, must have been relatively easy for evolution to stumble upon and scale up, and it must have been delivering continuous improvements to survival. Otherwise, natural selection wouldn't be able to home in on the solution.
In short: the fundamentals of intelligence have to be something simple enough to be discoverable by accident.
This is one of the main reasons I believe that LLMs aren't unrelated to how our own brains work. We tried to make a simple yet generic system, somewhat emulating what we see in nature, and then we kept scaling it up, until it surprised us with suddenly gaining capabilities we consider to be advanced cognitive functions. Just how many such structures could be there in nature, so that evolution and AI researchers stumbled on two entirely unrelated ones? It's too much of a coincidence.