I might be confused here, but it seems to me that it’s easy to interpret the arguments in this post as evidence in the wrong direction.
I see the following three questions as relevant:
1. How much sets human brains apart from other brains?
2. How much does the thing that humans have and animals don’t matter?
3. How much does better architecture matter for AI?
Questions #2 and #3 seem positively correlated – if the thing that humans have is important, it’s evidence that architectural changes matter a lot. However, holding #2 constant, #1 and #3 seem negatively correlated – the less stuff there is that makes humans special, the smaller the improvements to architecture that are required to achieve greater performance.
Since this post is arguing primarily about #1, the way it affects #3 is potentially confusing.
Questions #2 and #3 seem positively correlated – if the thing that humans have is important, it’s evidence that architectural changes matter a lot.
Not necessarily. For example, it may be that language ability is very important, but that most of the heavy lifting in our language ability comes from general learning abilities + having a culture that gives us good training data for learning language, rather than from architectural changes.
I might be confused here, but it seems to me that it’s easy to interpret the arguments in this post as evidence in the wrong direction.
I see the following three questions as relevant:
1. How much sets human brains apart from other brains?
2. How much does the thing that humans have and animals don’t matter?
3. How much does better architecture matter for AI?
Questions #2 and #3 seem positively correlated – if the thing that humans have is important, it’s evidence that architectural changes matter a lot. However, holding #2 constant, #1 and #3 seem negatively correlated – the less stuff there is that makes humans special, the smaller the improvements to architecture that are required to achieve greater performance.
Since this post is arguing primarily about #1, the way it affects #3 is potentially confusing.
Not necessarily. For example, it may be that language ability is very important, but that most of the heavy lifting in our language ability comes from general learning abilities + having a culture that gives us good training data for learning language, rather than from architectural changes.