I agree that VPT is (very plausibly) better at playing Minecraft than a trained cat would be, but to me that only demonstrates narrow intelligence (though, to be clear, farther along the spectrum of narrow-to-general than AI used to be). LLMs seem like the clearest demonstration of generality so far, for one thing because of their strength at few-shot and zero-shot, but their abilities are so qualitatively different from animal abilities that it’s hard to compare.
A cat-sim sounds like a really interesting idea. In some ways it’s actually unfair to the AI, because cats are benefiting from instincts that the AI wouldn’t have, so if an AI did perform well at it, that would be very impressive.
After some of this feedback I’ve extended the initial comparison section to focus more on the well grounded BNN vs ANN comparisons where we can really compare the two systems directly on the level of their functional computations and say “yes, X is mostly just computing a better version of Y.”
So you can compare ANN vision systems versus the relevant subset of animal visual cortex that computes classification (or other relevant tasks), or you can compare linguistic cortex neural outputs vs LLM, and the results of those experiments are—in my opinion—fairly decisive against any idea that brains are mysteriously superior. The ANNs are clearly computing the same things in the same ways and even training from the same objective now (self-supervised prediction), but just predictably better when they have more data/compute.
I agree that VPT is (very plausibly) better at playing Minecraft than a trained cat would be, but to me that only demonstrates narrow intelligence (though, to be clear, farther along the spectrum of narrow-to-general than AI used to be). LLMs seem like the clearest demonstration of generality so far, for one thing because of their strength at few-shot and zero-shot, but their abilities are so qualitatively different from animal abilities that it’s hard to compare.
A cat-sim sounds like a really interesting idea. In some ways it’s actually unfair to the AI, because cats are benefiting from instincts that the AI wouldn’t have, so if an AI did perform well at it, that would be very impressive.
After some of this feedback I’ve extended the initial comparison section to focus more on the well grounded BNN vs ANN comparisons where we can really compare the two systems directly on the level of their functional computations and say “yes, X is mostly just computing a better version of Y.”
So you can compare ANN vision systems versus the relevant subset of animal visual cortex that computes classification (or other relevant tasks), or you can compare linguistic cortex neural outputs vs LLM, and the results of those experiments are—in my opinion—fairly decisive against any idea that brains are mysteriously superior. The ANNs are clearly computing the same things in the same ways and even training from the same objective now (self-supervised prediction), but just predictably better when they have more data/compute.