Tim Scarfe: belief

Transcript context

…I'm still fairly sceptical when I see video generation models. You know, we went through a phase where you could detect them because of the number of fingers on somebody's hand. Right? And, yes, with more data, with more compute, with better training tricks, okay, they submit, and now they usually do have 5 fingers. But did we fix the problem, or did we just use more brute force to just, you know, force the the neural network to know it's 5 fingers, where something that actually had a much better kind of representation space it's almost mad that it's controversial to say that we should represent a spiral like a spiral. But, you know, something that could do that generally, that if it if it represented a human hand the way that, you know, maybe I represent a human hand, then maybe it would be much easier to count how many fingers are on a on a hand. It's unfortunate that they work so well. It's unfortunate that scaling works so well, because it's too easy for people to just sweep these problems under the carpet. You guys have possibly created what I think might be the best paper of of the year. This could actually be the innovation, which takes us to the next step. And you did did you get the spotlight in Europe's as well? Yeah. This year. And congratulations on that. So I think that's testament to how amazing this paper is. The CTM, the continuous thought machine, it's actually not that far out side of the local minimum that we're stuck in. Right? It's not as if we went and found this completely new technology. Right? We took quite a a simple biologically inspired idea, right, of these of of the fact that neurons synchronize. And not even necessarily in a biologically plausible way. Right? Brains don't literally have all their neurons wired together in a way that they work out their synchronization. But it's it's the sort of research that I wanna encourage people to do, and the way to sell it is quite easy, I think. At no point did we have to worry about being scooped. Right? That stress was taken away from us completely. So and there was so there was no pressure to sort of rush hour with this with this idea, because we're like, well, there's probably somebody else working on exactly this. And I think the reason that we, you know, we were able to get a spotlight is because we were able to create such a polished paper. We took the time to do the science properly, to get the the base the baselines that we wanted, and do all the the the the tasks that we wanted to try. Encouraging researchers to take a little bit more of a of a risk, right, to try these slightly more speculative long term ideas. I think is is the sad thing is I don't think it's necessarily a very difficult thing to sell, and I want to have the CTM as like a poster child of it works. Right? It was a bit of a risk. We, you we didn't know if we were gonna find something interesting, But, you know, it was our first shot, and we did find something interesting, and it became a successful paper.…

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