Adam Marblestone: evaluation

Transcript context

…But if you can see all the neurons, if you have the connectome, why does that teach you what the learning algorithm is? Well, I guess there are a couple different views of it. So it depends on these different parts of this portfolio. On the totally bottom-up, we-have-to-simulate-everything portfolio, it kind of just doesn’t. You have to make a simulation of the zebrafish brain or something and then you see what are the emergent dynamics in this and you come up with new names and new concepts and all that. That’s the most extreme bottom-up neuroscience view. But even there the connectome is really important for doing that biophysical or bottom-up simulation. But on the other hand you can say, “Well, what if we can actually apply some ideas from AI?” We basically need to figure out, is it an energy-based model or is it an amortized VAE-type model? Is it doing backprop or is it doing something else? Are the learning rules local or global? If we have some repertoire of possible ideas about this, just think of the connectome as a huge number of additional constraints that will help to refine, to ultimately have a consistent picture of that. I think about this for the Steering Subsystem stuff too, just very basic things about it. How many different types of dopamine signal or of Steering Subsystem signal or thought assessor or so on… How many different types of what broad categories are there? Like even this very basic information that there’s more cell types in the hypothalamus than there are in the cortex, that’s new information about how much structure is built there versus somewhere else. How many different dopamine neurons are there? Is the wiring between prefrontal and auditory the same as the wiring between prefrontal and visual? The most basic things, we don’t know. The problem is learning even the most basic things by a series of bespoke experiments takes an incredibly long time. Whereas just learning all that at once by getting a connectome is just way more efficient. What is the timeline on this? Presumably the idea of this is, first, to inform the development of AI. You want to be able to figure out how we get AIs to want to care about what other people think of its internal thought pattern. But interp researchers are making progress on this question just by inspecting normal neural networks. There must be some feature……

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