Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…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? Well, yeah. When we talk about more or less intelligence, it's just that they have more compute in order to do search over more Turing machines for longer. I don’t think there's anything else other than that. So from any learned brain you could extract small solutions to specific problems, because all the large brain is doing with the compute is finding it. That's why you never find any “IQ gland”. There is nowhere in the brain where, if you hit it, you eliminate fluid intelligence. This doesn’t exist. Because what your brain is doing is a lot of learning of individual specialized problems. Once those individual problems are learned, then they get recombined for fluid intelligence. And that's just, you know… intelligence. Typically with a large neural network model, you can always pull out a small model which does a specific task equally well. Because that's all the large model is. It's just a gigantic ensemble of small models tailored to the ever-escalating number of tiny problems you have been feeding them.…

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