Tim Scarfe: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think so. Yeah. I mean, I've actually never asked David that question. We we disagree on a lot of things AI related, but I I think he would acknowledge that this is a phase change and that it is an example of emergence. Yes. I think he would, because he he has a bunch of criteria, but 1 of them is is a fundamental coarse graining and reorganization of the micro substrate such that the new phenomena can be described with with a, you know, with within, you know, simple new variable. And this seem this seems to to to match that description. Is it possible that there's some kind of design bias or, you you know, like when we design machine learning architectures, there's so much information in the architecture. And and in this case, there's so much information in the brain fuck language and and and the terms and and so on. Could that have kind of influenced it to emerge in a certain way? Yes. Yes. And and the structure of those programs does change depending on the language. We have tried this with other languages. We've tried it with z 80 assembly language, which is the the the assembly language of these Zilog chips that I I that were were invented sometime in the seventies and and just got discontinued last year, a very long running microprocessor architecture. It's so the phenomenon is very generic. What those programs look like is is shaped by by the specifics of the language, but the reason that those programs emerge, the reason that they develop purpose is actually thermodynamic. So, you know, that that might seem puzzling because you would think thermodynamics is about things becoming more random and the apparently, the exact opposite is happening here. You start with randomness and you get order and, you know, how could that be? Well, I I think the answer was actually well characterized by a chemist, by an organic chemist, Adi Pross, who at the at the University of the Negev in Israel, who is now emeritus and he did a lot of work on so called dynamic kinetic stability. The idea being that it's an extension of the second law that says things seek their most stable state, their most stable form. You know, usually we think about those stabilities as only being fixed points, but those stabilities can be cycles too. So if something dynamically makes itself, if something forms more copies of itself, that's more stable than something that just settles. You know, it's the old joke about DNA being the stablest molecule in the universe. Obviously, DNA is fragile, But at the same time, if the DNA makes more DNA, then, you know, it will be around a long time after granite, you know, which can only erode.…

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