Andrej Karpathy: commitment

Transcript context

…I’m going to take a second to digest that because there are a lot of different ideas. Here’s one clarifying question I can ask to understand the perspective. You suggest that evolution is doing the kind of thing that pre-training does in the sense of building something which can then understand the world. The difference is that evolution has to be titrated in the case of humans through three gigabytes of DNA. That’s very unlike the weights of a model. Literally, the weights of the model are a brain, which obviously does not exist in the sperm and the egg. So it has to be grown. Also, the information for every single synapse in the brain simply cannot exist in the three gigabytes that exist in the DNA. Evolution seems closer to finding the algorithm which then does the lifetime learning. Now, maybe the lifetime learning is not analogous to RL, to your point. Is that compatible with the thing you were saying, or would you disagree with that? I think so. I would agree with you that there’s some miraculous compression going on because obviously, the weights of the neural net are not stored in ATCGs. There’s some dramatic compression. There are some learning algorithms encoded that take over and do some of the learning online. I definitely agree with you on that. I would say I’m a lot more practically minded. I don’t come at it from the perspective of, let’s build animals. I come from it from the perspective of, let’s build useful things. I have a hard hat on, and I’m just observing that we’re not going to do evolution, because I don’t know how to do that. But it does turn out we can build these ghosts, spirit-like entities, by imitating internet documents. This works. It’s a way to bring you up to something that has a lot of built-in knowledge and intelligence in some way, similar to maybe what evolution has done. That’s why I call pre-training this crappy evolution. It’s the practically possible version with our technology and what we have available to us to get to a starting point where we can do things like reinforcement learning and so on. Just to steelman the other perspective, after doing this Sutton interview and thinking about it a bit, he has an important point here. Evolution does not give us the knowledge, really. It gives us the algorithm to find the knowledge, and that seems different from pre-training. Perhaps the perspective is that pre-training helps build the kind of entity which can learn better. It teaches meta-learning, and therefore it is similar to finding an algorithm. But if it’s “Evolution gives us knowledge, pre-training gives us knowledge,” that analogy seems to break down.…

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