I don’t think they are better representations of general intelligence. I’m quite confident that much better representations of general intelligence exist and just have yet to be discovered. I’m just saying that these are closer to a proven path, and although they are inefficient and unwise, somebody would likely follow these paths if suddenly given huge amounts of compute this year. And in that imaginary scenario, I predict they’d be pretty effective.
My reasoning for saying this for the Blue Brain Project is that I’ve read a lot of their research papers, and understand their methodology pretty well, and I believe they’ve got really good coverage of a lot of details. I’m like 97% confident that whatever ‘special sauce’ allows the human brain to be an effective general intelligence, BBP has already captured that in their model. I think they’ve captured every detail they could justify as being possibly slightly important, so I think they’ve also captured a lot of unessecary detail. I think this is bad for interpretability and compute efficiency. I don’t recommend this path, I just believe it fulfills the requisites of the thought experiment on 12 OOMs of compute magically appearing.
I don’t think they are better representations of general intelligence. I’m quite confident that much better representations of general intelligence exist and just have yet to be discovered. I’m just saying that these are closer to a proven path, and although they are inefficient and unwise, somebody would likely follow these paths if suddenly given huge amounts of compute this year. And in that imaginary scenario, I predict they’d be pretty effective.
My reasoning for saying this for the Blue Brain Project is that I’ve read a lot of their research papers, and understand their methodology pretty well, and I believe they’ve got really good coverage of a lot of details. I’m like 97% confident that whatever ‘special sauce’ allows the human brain to be an effective general intelligence, BBP has already captured that in their model. I think they’ve captured every detail they could justify as being possibly slightly important, so I think they’ve also captured a lot of unessecary detail. I think this is bad for interpretability and compute efficiency. I don’t recommend this path, I just believe it fulfills the requisites of the thought experiment on 12 OOMs of compute magically appearing.