Gwern: belief

Transcript context

…What is the grand parsimonious theory of intelligence going to look like? It seems like you have all of these trends across different fields—like scaling laws in AI, like the scaling of the human brain when we went from primates to humans, the uniformity of the neocortex—and basically many other things which seem to be pointing towards some grand theory that should exist which explains what intelligence is. What do you think that will look like? The 10,000 foot view of intelligence, that I think the success of scaling points to, is that all intelligence is is search over Turing machines. Anything that happens can be described by Turing machines of various lengths. All we are doing when we are doing “learning,” or when we are doing “scaling,” is that we're searching over more and longer Turing machines, and we are applying them in each specific case. Otherwise, there is no general master algorithm. There is no special intelligence fluid. It's just a tremendous number of special cases that we learn and we encode into our brains. I don’t know. When I look at the ways in which my smart friends are smart, it just feels more like a general horsepower kind of thing. They've just got more juice. That seems more compatible with this master algorithm perspective rather than this Turing machine perspective. It doesn’t really feel like they’ve got this long tail of Turing machines that they’ve learned. How does this picture account for variation in human intelligence?…

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