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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

  > That is wishful thinking popularised by Ilya Sutskever

Ilya and Hinton have claimed even crazier things

  | to understand next token prediction you must understand the casual reality

This is objectively false. It's a result known in physics to be wrong for centuries. You can probably reason a weaker case yourself, that I'm sure you can make accurate predictions about some things without fully understanding them.

But the stronger version is the entire difficulty of physics and causal modeling. Distinguishing a confounding variable is very very hard. But you can still make accurate predictions without access to the underlying causal graph

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Hinton and Sutskever are victims of their own success: they can say whatever they like and nobody dares criticise them, or tell them how they're wrong.

I recently watched a video of Sutskever speaking to some students, not sure where and I can't dig out the link now. To summarise he told them that the human brain is a biological computer. He repeated this a couple of times then said that this is why we can create a digital computer that can do everything a brain can.

This is the computational theory of mind, reduced to a pin-point with all context removed. Two seconds of thought suffice to show how that doesn't work: if a digital computer can do everything the brain can do, because the brain is a biological computer, then how come the brain can't do everything a digital computer can do? Is it possible that two machines can be both computers, and still not equivalent in every sense of the term? Nooooo!!! Biological computers!! AGI!!

Those guys really need to stop and think about what they're talking about before someone notices what they're saying and the entire field becomes a laughing stock.

> Two seconds of thought suffice to show how that doesn't work: if a digital computer can do everything the brain can do, because the brain is a biological computer, then how come the brain can't do everything a digital computer can do? Is it possible that two machines can be both computers, and still not equivalent in every sense of the term? Nooooo!!! Biological computers!! AGI!!

Another two seconds of thought would suffice to answer that: because you can freely change neither hardware or software of the brain, like you can with computers.

Obviously, Angry Birds on the phone can't do everything digital computers can do, but that doesn't mean a smartphone isn't a digital computer.

Another 2 seconds of thought might have told you only a magic genie can "freely" change hardware and software capability.

Humans have to work within whatever constraints accompany being physical things with physical bodies trying to invent software and hardware in the physical world.

I'm fine with calling the brain a computer. A computer is a very vague term. But yes, I agree that the conclusion does not necessarily follow. It's possible, not not necessarily

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