Andrej Karpathy: belief

Transcript context

…There’s a couple of interesting follow-ups. If you buy the Sutton perspective that the crux of intelligence is animal intelligence… The quote he said is “If you got to the squirrel, you’d be most of the way to AGI.” We got to squirrel intelligence right after the Cambrian explosion 600 million years ago. It seems like what instigated that was the oxygenation event 600 million years ago. But immediately the intelligence algorithm was there to make the squirrel intelligence. It’s suggestive that animal intelligence was like that. As soon as you had the oxygen in the environment, you had the eukaryote, you could just get the algorithm. Maybe it was an accident that evolution stumbled upon it so fast, but I don’t know if that suggests that at the end it’s going to be quite simple. It’s so hard to tell with any of this stuff. You can base it a bit on how long something has existed or how long it feels like something has been bottlenecked. Nick Lane is very good about describing this very apparent bottleneck in bacteria and archaea. For two billion years, nothing happened. There’s extreme diversity of biochemistry, and yet nothing grows to become animals. Two billion years. I don’t know that we’ve seen exactly that kind of an equivalent with animals and intelligence, to your point. We could also look at it with respect to how many times we think certain intelligence has individually sprung up. That’s a really good thing to investigate.…

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