Hacker News Reader

Comment by leptons | Hacker News Reader

Reading this reinforces that a lot of what makes up current "AI" is brute forcing and not actually intelligent or thoughtful. Although I suppose our meat-minds could also be brute-forcing everything throughout our entire lives, and consciousness is like a chat prompt sitting on top of the machinery of the mind. But artificial intelligence will always be just as soulless and unfulfilling as artificial flavors.

View on HN

Guessing you’re a physicist based on the name. You don’t think automatically doing RG flow in reverse has beauty to it?

There’s a lot of “force” in statistics, but that force relies on pretty deep structures and choices.

Are you familiar with the "Bitter Lesson" by recent Turing Award winner Rich Sutton? http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

Always is a long time. It may get better.

Intelligence is the manifold that these brute-force algorithms learn.

Of course we don’t brute-force this in our lifetime. Evolution encoded the coarse structure of the manifold over billions of years. And then encoded a hyper-compressed meta-learning algorithm into primates across millions of years.

Learning a manifold is not intelligence as it lacks the reasoning part.

Leaning the manifold is understanding. Reasoning, which takes place on the manifold, is applying that understanding.

I am not sure what you definition of "understanding" is that you apply here.

I mean understanding physics and the universe of natural possibilities; what can happen. Then comes why.

Fitting a manifold to a bunch of samples does not allow you to understand what can happen in the universe. For example, if you train a regular diffusion model on correct sudokus, it will produce sudokus with errors because it does not understand the rules.

You raise a good point for the diffusion case, which trains only on positive examples, but generally speaking negative examples will warp the manifold appropriately.

Sure, but you show a few correct examples to a human it will quickly pick up the correct rules. And this is understanding.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com