Adam Marblestone: belief

Transcript context

…But is the crux the data efficiency or…? I think part of it is just that it is weirdly different from all this brain stuff. So intuitively it’s just weirdly different than all this brain stuff and I’m kind of waiting for the thing that starts to look more like brain stuff. I think if AlphaZero, and model-based RL and all these other things that were being worked on 10 years ago, had been giving us the GPT-5 type capabilities, then I would be like, “Oh wow, we’re both in the right paradigm and seeing the results a priori. So my prior and my data are agreeing.” Now it’s like, “I don’t know what exactly my data is. Looks pretty good, but my prior is sort of weird so I don’t have a super strong opinion on it.” So I think there’s a possibility that essentially all other scientific research that is being done is somehow obviated. But I don’t put a huge amount of probability on that. I think my timelines might be more in the 10-year-ish range. If that’s the case, I think there is probably a difference between a world where we have connectomes on hard drives and we have an understanding of Steering Subsystem architecture. We’ve compared even the most basic properties of what are the reward functions, cost function, architecture, et cetera, of a mouse versus a shrew versus a small primate, et cetera. Is this practical in 10 years?…

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