Ilya Sutskever: evaluation

Transcript context

…That’s the thing I was planning on asking you. There’s something really interesting about emotions of the value function, which is that it’s impressive that they have this much utility while still being rather simple to understand. I have two responses. I do agree that compared to the kind of things that we learn and the things we are talking about, the kind of AI we are talking about, emotions are relatively simple. They might even be so simple that maybe you could map them out in a human-understandable way. I think it would be cool to do. In terms of utility though, I think there is a thing where there is this complexity-robustness tradeoff, where complex things can be very useful, but simple things are very useful in a very broad range of situations. One way to interpret what we are seeing is that we’ve got these emotions that evolved mostly from our mammal ancestors and then fine-tuned a little bit while we were hominids, just a bit. We do have a decent amount of social emotions though which mammals may lack. But they’re not very sophisticated. And because they’re not sophisticated, they serve us so well in this very different world compared to the one that we’ve been living in. Actually, they also make mistakes. For example, our emotions… Well actually, I don’t know. Does hunger count as an emotion? It’s debatable. But I think, for example, our intuitive feeling of hunger is not succeeding in guiding us correctly in this world with an abundance of food. People have been talking about scaling data, scaling parameters, scaling compute. Is there a more general way to think about scaling? What are the other scaling axes?…

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