“Learning” is another one of those abstract concepts which reveals significant complexity upon further examination. In the context of people, learning represents our ability to incorporate experience in a beneficial way; we can learn facts, skills, or social norms (among countless other things) through repeated (or one-time) exposure. The exact mechanics underlying the learning process …
With the massive degree of progress in AI over the last decade or so, it’s natural to wonder about its future – particularly the timeline to achieving human (and superhuman) levels of general intelligence. Ajeya Cotra, a senior researcher at Open Philanthropy, recently (in 2020) put together a comprehensive report seeking to answer this question …
Examining Evolution as an Upper Bound for AGI Timelines Read More »
I’m often torn between the competing ideas that: Understanding the brain, with its repeating structures and distinct modules, will be relatively easy (i.e. within the short-term grasp of humanity) Understanding the brain, with its structures crafted through millions of years of random evolution, will be relatively hard (i.e. will not happen for multiple generations) For …
A Circuit-Level View of Evolutionary Interpretability Read More »
Humans (and all other brain-having organisms) interact with the world in a hierarchical manner, starting from the top and working down. When we decide to engage in an action, we make the decision at the highest level (for example, deciding to write a blog post), and then break up that action into its lower level …
A number of other posts so far have touched on what it is that brains do – and for the most part, it’s been summarized as “creating a model of the world”. By this, we’ve meant that certain patterns of neural activity can be understood as representing or standing for some observed pattern of material …
Dedicated to Sam Rendall – you and your ideas are greatly missed. What is intelligence? What does it mean to be intelligent? A starting point for a very high level definition might be an ability of an agent to accomplish its goals in its environment. From this definition, we can see three pieces to assessing …