What are the errors in this essay? As I’m reading through the Brain-like AGI sequence I keep seeing this post being referenced (but this post says I should instead read the sequence!)
I would really like to have a single reference post of yours that contains the core ideas about phasic dopamine rather than the reference being the sequence posts (which is heavily dependent on a bunch of previous posts; also Post 5 and 6 feels more high-level than this one?)
I think that if you read the later Intro to Brain-Like AGI Safety series, then the only reason you might want to read this post (other than historical interest) is that the section “Dopamine category #2: RPE for “local” sub-circuit rewards” is talking about a topic that was omitted from Intro to Brain-Like AGI Safety (for brevity).
For example, practically everything I said about neuroanatomy in this post is at least partly wrong and sometimes very wrong. (E.g. the “toy loop model” diagrams are pretty bad.) The “Finally, the “prediction” part of reward prediction error” section has a very strange proposal for how RPE works; I don’t even remember why I ever believed that.
The main strengths of the post are the “normative” discussions: why might supervised learning be useful? why might more than one reward signal be useful? etc. I mostly stand by those. I also stand by “learning from scratch” being a very useful concept, and elaborated on it much more later.
What are the errors in this essay? As I’m reading through the Brain-like AGI sequence I keep seeing this post being referenced (but this post says I should instead read the sequence!)
I would really like to have a single reference post of yours that contains the core ideas about phasic dopamine rather than the reference being the sequence posts (which is heavily dependent on a bunch of previous posts; also Post 5 and 6 feels more high-level than this one?)
I think that if you read the later Intro to Brain-Like AGI Safety series, then the only reason you might want to read this post (other than historical interest) is that the section “Dopamine category #2: RPE for “local” sub-circuit rewards” is talking about a topic that was omitted from Intro to Brain-Like AGI Safety (for brevity).
For example, practically everything I said about neuroanatomy in this post is at least partly wrong and sometimes very wrong. (E.g. the “toy loop model” diagrams are pretty bad.) The “Finally, the “prediction” part of reward prediction error” section has a very strange proposal for how RPE works; I don’t even remember why I ever believed that.
The main strengths of the post are the “normative” discussions: why might supervised learning be useful? why might more than one reward signal be useful? etc. I mostly stand by those. I also stand by “learning from scratch” being a very useful concept, and elaborated on it much more later.