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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   31909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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I think the problem is that we still lack a fundamental theory about what intelligence is, and quantifiable ways to measure it and apply theoretical bounds. Personally, I have a few suspicions:

  • "Human intelligence" will end up being poorly quantified by a single "IQ" value, even if such a model probably works as a simplest-possible linear fit. Modern "AI" does well on a couple new axes, but still is missing some parts of the puzzle. And I'm not quite sure what those are, either.
  • Existing training techniques are tremendously inefficient: while they're fundamentally different, humans can be trained with less than 20 person-years of effort and less than "the entire available corpus of English literature." I mean, read the classics, man, but I doubt reading all of Gibbon is truly necessary for the average doctor or physicist, or that most of them have today.
  • There are theoretical bounds to "intelligence": if the right model is, loosely, "next token predictor" (and of that I'm not very certain), I expect that naively increasing window size helps substantially up to a point, and at some point your inputs become "the state of butterfly wings in China" and are substantially less useful. How well can (generally) "the next token" be predicted from a given quantity (quality?) of data? Clearly five words won't beget the entirety of human knowledge, but neither am I convinced that even the best models are very bright as a function of how well read they are, even if they have read all of Gibbon.

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