Hacker News Reader

Comment by _0ffh | Hacker News Reader

Uh, came here to make essentially the same remark, but as criticism. A mere world model, however perfect, is a really hollow definition of intelligence IMHO. It's the definition of a tool, at best. It's only with the introduction of goals that we get to things like taking action, planning, etc., which bring the whole thing to life.

So while I'd agree that a world model is necessary, I seriously doubt it's sufficient for anything that I'd call intelligence.

View on HN

Well, among tools conditional probability is kind of the one ring to rule them all. Just give me some samples from P(plan | goal) and “things like taking action, planning, etc” are trivial (or really, part of the sampling process).

You're trivialising planning given a model

Nope. In this definition of intelligence planning is part of the model. The model includes a probability distribution over all possible plans, just like GPT-3 includes a probability distribution over all possible news articles.

>planning is part of the model

Even if it was (which I doubt, except implicitly, which is not the same thing), there can be no planning without a goal.

It's a kind of mirrored Chinese Room fallacy: In that case, the complaint is that the performance of the system cannot be ascribed to any distinct part of the whole, concluding that the whole cannot perform. In this case, the performance of the system is falsely ascribed to one distinct part, ignoring the contribution of the other.

I think the world model is one step towards intelligence or one half of it. I've come to believe that the ability to _change_ your world model as new information comes into play is the other half.

Not sure what you mean by goals, because to a degree you don't need dynamic goals (eg. goals that change throughout lifetime of a system) for reactive behavior.

It may be necessary but not sufficient, that's somewhere to start at least.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com