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0 pointseslaught1y ago0 comments

I never get this argument.

I've seen a deer on a road maybe once. I've seen a rabbit on a road zero times. But I know what to do if I see one.

Is that because the "video" of my perception has many "frames"? Even if that's true at some level, I think it's massively missing the point. Yeah, so I saw that one deer from a lot of angles. But current AI training is like the equivalent of taking every deer that has ever been on camera in the history of the human species.

Somehow I'm still dramatically better at generalization than the AI. Surely that's an algorithm difference.

0 comments

visarga1y ago

You might personally have seen a deer just once, but human evolution, and animal evolution prior to that have practiced this skill a lot. AI doesn't have the advantage of evolutionary priors baked in, so it needs explicit walking through many combinations to infer its structure from data, and is remarkably efficient. GPT-4 'only' trained on the amount of language that 30,000 humans use in their lifetime.

But we have seen from AlphaGo that when training data is extensive, it can rediscover strategy on its own and even surpass us. It's not inherently worse than human learning.

jaculabilis1y ago

> You might personally have seen a deer just once, but human evolution, and animal evolution prior to that have practiced this skill a lot.

Which pre-human animals evolved instincts for swerving a car to avoid a deer?

osigurdson1y ago

I'm pretty sure that evolution would select out anything that could not generalize pretty quickly.

RivieraKid1y ago

Human DNA is just 750 and only a fraction of it is something that may be called "brain pre-training".

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