Demis Hassabis: evaluation

Transcript context

…What do other AI researchers not understand about human intelligence that you have some sort of insight on, given your neuroscience background? I think neuroscience has added a lot, if you look at the last 10-20 years that we’ve been at it. I’ve been thinking about this for 30+ years. In the earlier days of the new wave of AI, neuroscience was providing a lot of interesting directional clues, things like reinforcement learning and combining that with deep learning. Some of our pioneering work we did there were things like experience replay and even the notion of attention, which has become super important. A lot of those original inspirations came from some understanding about how the brain works, although not the exact specifics of course. One is an engineered system and the other one’s a natural system. It’s not so much about a one-to-one mapping of a specific algorithm, but more so inspirational direction. Maybe it’s some ideas for architecture, or algorithmic ideas, or representational ideas. The brain is an existence proof that general intelligence is possible at all. I think the history of human endeavors has been such that once you know something’s possible it’s easier to push hard in that direction, because you know it’s a question of effort, a question of when and not if. That allows you to make progress a lot more quickly. So I think neuroscience has inspired a lot of the thinking, at least in a soft way, behind where we are today. As for going forward, I think there’s still a lot of interesting things to be resolved around planning. How does the brain construct the right world models? I studied how the brain does imagination, or you can think of it as mental simulation. How do we create very rich visual spatial simulations of the world in order for us to plan better? Actually, I’m curious how you think that will interface with LLMs. Obviously, DeepMind is at the frontier and has been for many years with systems like AlphaZero and so forth, having these agents which can think through different steps to get to an end outcome. Is there a path for LLMs to have this tree search kind of thing on top of them? How do you think about this?…

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