Machine Learning Street Talk / episode intelligence
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18 published records
01 / recommendation
“Yes. I I love Douglas Hofstadter. So so there's this kind of self modeling and then second order self modeling and third order self modeling which could be applied to other agents and of course, know, in in the real world, we are computationally bounded.”
02 / belief
“The the that that RSV example that I gave, you know, the the ability to fuse cell membranes together came from a, you know, a virus whose original purpose had nothing to do with building placentas, but, you know, it gets incorporated and repurposed, you know, and this is the kind of bricolage that that life is made out of. So so yeah, I think I think that that kind of, you know, not only replacement, but, you know, parallel pathing, etcetera, you know, it it it doesn't just happen when we make artificial kidneys, it's you know, all the time in nature and is the very hallmark of life.”
03 / disagreement
“We we disagree on a lot of things AI related, but I I think he would acknowledge that this is a phase change and that it is an example of emergence.”
04 / belief
“There's there's this term that I learned from Dan Brown's book, The Boys in the Boat, swing, which is when when the the 6 horsemen, or 8 horsemen, sorry, you know, all achieve this kind of state where they're in perfect sync with each other and and, you know, you know it when you when you when you experience it, the the boat acquires a soul as it were, you know, you all feel like you're like you're you're pulling as 1 and boats with that property go a lot faster than than boats where people haven't quite achieved that sync.”
05 / belief
“We already have swing in the sense that we are I we identify what we think of as our intelligence with something that is actually in a bunch of other people and a bunch of other stuff around us, you know, and and and we do that kind of unconsciously.”
06 / belief
“We we believe in those, but we also think that we have to sort of refill the bucket with with new insights and new ideas as well.”
07 / belief
“I think if if anything, the biggest gap between transformer based models and what we do is actually narrative memory, right, or being able to form long term memories and and and that way have a kind of persistence of a self over over long periods of time.”
08 / belief
“You're pointing to this universal representation hypothesis. I think Chris Ola popularized it with some of his visualization experiments.”
09 / evaluation
“In other words, you have to have a computer inside yourself as a cell in order to make another cell, and DNA is in this very literal sense a Turing tape. So, you know, it's it's a very profound insight because, you know, basically he's saying, you cannot be a living organism without literally being a computer, a universal computer.”
10 / evaluation
“Great question. So I think that the idea of philosophical zombies, you know, David Chalmers has talked about, right, that maybe something could behave just like you or me, but be dead on the inside, you know, not not not have any experiences, not feel anything, is is actually a lot less coherent than it sounds.”
11 / evaluation
“The the point is that the moment you have life, meaning that you have something that can build a copy of itself, you have a general computer, which allows you to do anything.”
12 / prediction
“You know, you you put 2 things together, you now have a you have something more complex than the parts. And and if if this if this idea that symbiosis or symbiogenesis is is an essential part of evolution is correct, then you absolutely get more sophisticated things coming about later in evolution because they're being put together from pre existing parts.”
13 / evaluation
“We went into a very strict materialist kind of perspective, where everything is just physics. And, you know, I I mean, I was trained as a physicist, you know, I think I I believe in physics fully, but I also think that there is more to life in the sense that, you know, if everything is just physics, then you have no way of saying what it means for you or me to be alive.”
14 / evaluation
“I think he would, because he he has a bunch of criteria, but 1 of them is is a fundamental coarse graining and reorganization of the micro substrate such that the new phenomena can be described with with a, you know, with within, you know, simple new variable.”
15 / evaluation
“Those are very clearly steps upward in complexity and and the reason that that it's trivial to prove that there are steps upward is because if you have a which is reproducing and can make more of itself, and you have b, which is reproducing and can make more of itself, think of them each as having a tape, right, that says how to make a me, then when they come together, the result has to both know how to make a and how to make b and how to put them together.”
16 / evaluation
“You know, putting Chomsky aside though, what what you're saying about merge or as I would see it composition, functional composition, I think is absolutely fundamental.”
17 / prediction
“You know, you might once in a while see 1 bite somewhere change. But, after a few million interactions, something apparently magical happens, which is that, suddenly the entropy of the soup drops dramatically, so it goes from being incompressible because it's all random bytes to being very highly compressible and programs emerge on those tapes.”
18 / evaluation
“You know, in the good old fashioned AI world, you would say, you've got a circle detector, you know, and and a, you know, and a line detector that will detect, you know, the the lines that make up the frame of the bike and and so on, and you'll write you'll handwrite code for all of those things. And and of course, the problem is that, you know, there are many ways of looking at a bike where you're not you're not gonna see the the wheels at once or maybe the bike is of a weird design, you know, there are those funny bikes that have shoes instead of wheels, you know.”