Tim Scarfe: evaluation

Transcript context

…First. So predict means that you say, I'm gonna do a thing. What am I gonna what will be this value of my machine? What will appear on my computer screen in the future? That is predict. Control is I want to measure this thing in the future, and I want it to come out 17. Right? That's control. Understand is a lot like predict, except there's a human in the loop. Understand means that I have such a small collection of facts that you will predict, and you will do it with facts that I can communicate to another human in kind of this compact fix fits on an index card. That's almost understand. And so I think these machines let us predict. They let us control. We have to derive our own understanding at this moment. Right? We can experiment now on the artifact. We can look at the 200,000,000 predicted structures, not just the 200,000 experimental structures in order to help us understand, but it doesn't do the act of understanding for us, it does the act of predict and maybe control. The problem is these 2 goals actually pull against each other. I think we're at this moment in science now because we have these tools like LLMs for language and convnets and visual neuroscience are being used as predictive models of neuronal responses which don't have that mathematical legibility that originally, so when I was trained in the field that people aspired to have. And so you have this possible conflict, you can either pursue that goal of understanding or you can pursue the goal of prediction but it seems like you can't have both at the same time.…

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