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Tim Scarfe: belief

6 Jul 2025 Machine Learning Street Talk The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis (Kenneth Stanley, Akarsh Kumar)

“We could easily discover something that what that wipes YouTube away. So it's about this epistemic gap between what we really want and what we think we want.”

— Tim Scarfe

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Speaker
Tim Scarfe
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
6 Jul 2025
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

Transcript context

…It's really fascinating on on so many on so many levels. I think, you know, I highly encourage people to to check out the neat paper and and Pick Breeder and a lot of related things. I think and you you pointed this earlier. The crux of the the difficulty is alright. Cool. We did pick breeder. We got a skull and a butterfly and lots of other things. But I don't need a skull and a butterfly. And I I actually I need something that that generates, you know, I don't know, knights helmets or or or dragonflies. Like not butterflies, dragonflies. And and therein is the crux of the problem because we did this open ended cool thing and I mean part of the, let's say, downside of an open ended search is you don't know where you're gonna end up. And I think in in the interview, you know, Kenneth referred to this, like, cone of inevitability. Right? Where where as as you progress further and further along the the, let's say, the the time dimension or the step dimension of evolution, where you end up becomes less and less certain. And the crux of the problem is how can we do open ended evolution, in such a way that we end up with the things that we need? Like, we need something that detects school buses and something that finds, you know, pedestrians in the crosswalk and something that can generate movies about samurai. And, you know, like, there are things we we need. And so there's this this this conflict, right, between we do have goals. Like, we do have certain goals. We need to protect pedestrians and and monitor school buses and like whatever else. So we do have these kind of goals and yet we wanna try and achieve them with open ended evolution. You know? I know. It's such a it's such a paradox that, you know, you you you find what you need when you're not looking for it. Even there are so many forms of deception in open ended search. This deception word is is very interesting. And it's it's all about what you think you want isn't actually what you want. Right? And even you just said now, we want school buses to be safer. And there are many discoveries in the search space that would make school buses obsolete. In fact, YouTube is now it's completely taken over Hollywood, you know, if if you're trying to be a a traditional filmmaker. You don't make any money anymore because everyone's watching it here on YouTube. But my god, YouTube could be out of business in in a few years. We could easily discover something that what that wipes YouTube away. So it's about this epistemic gap between what we really want and what we think we want. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. It's kind of like, why do we need all the kids to go to a physical location every day of the week? You know, maybe maybe there's some other pure virtual or or more local, you know, system. You know, you're totally right. I mean, and that's that's the the really the crazy thing about life and the universe and we need more variety. We need to not all our eggs in 1 basket. We need to explore alternate alternate methods, folks. GPUs were invented for, like, video games. They're also happen to work really well for a certain kind of machine learning. So let's just do that, you know?…

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