Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedAdam Brown: belief
26 Dec 2024 Dwarkesh Podcast Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT
“Ah, you know, I think maybe we need to back up to in what sense the humans do or don't think natively in higher dimensions.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Adam Brown
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 26 Dec 2024
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…Do you think AI mathematicians, AI physicists will have advantages over humans just because they can by default think in terms of weird dimensions and manifolds in a way that doesn't natively come to humans? Ah, you know, I think maybe we need to back up to in what sense the humans do or don't think natively in higher dimensions. Obviously, it's not our natural space. There was a technology that was invented to think about these things, which was, you know, notation, tensor notation, various other things that allows you to much using just even writing, as Einstein did 100 years ago, allows you to sort of naturally move between dimensions. And then you're thinking more about manipulating these mathematical objects than you are about thinking in higher dimensions. I don't think there's any sense, I mean, in which large language models naturally think in higher dimensions more than humans do. You could say, well, this large language models have billions of parameters. That's like a billion-dimensional space. But you could say the same about the human brain, that it has all of these billions of parameters and is therefore billion-dimensional. Whether that fact translates into thinking in billions of spatial dimensions, I don't really see that in the human. And I don't think that applies to an LLM either. Yeah, I guess you could imagine that if you were just seeing like a million different problems that rely on doing this weird tensor math, then in the same way that maybe even a human gets trained up through that to build better intuitions, the same thing would happen with AI. It just sees more problems. It can develop better representations of these kinds of weird geometries or something.…
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