The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise

My primary concern is the generalization to manmade things that couldn’t possibly be in the evolutionary “training data.” As a thought experiment, it seems very plausible that you can train a transformer ANN on spiderwebs between trees, rocks, bushes, etc, and get “superspider” performance (say in a computer simulation). But I strongly doubt this will generalize to building webs between garages and pantries like actual spiders, no matter how many trees you throw at it, so such a system wouldn’t be ASI.

This extends to all sorts of animal cognitive experiments: crows understand simple pulleys simply by inspecting them, but they couldn’t have evolved to use pulleys. Mice can quickly learn that hitting a button 5 times will give them a treat: does it make sense to say that they encountered a similar situation in their evolutionary past? It makes more sense to suppose that mice and crows have powerful abilities to reason causally about their actions. These abilities are more sophisticated than mere “Pavlovian” associative reasoning, which is about understanding stimuli. With AI we can emulate associative reasoning very well because we have a good mathematical framework for Pavlovian responses as a sort of learning of correlations. But causal reasoning is much more mysterious, and we are very far from figuring out a good mathematical formalism that a computer can make sense of.

I also just detest the evolution = training data metaphor because it completely ignores architecture. Evolution is not just glomming on data, it’s trying different types of neurons, different connections between them, etc. All organisms alive today evolved with “billions of years of training,” but only architecture explains why we are so much smarter than chimps. In fact I think the “evolution” preys on our misconception that humans are “more evolved” than chimps, but our common ancestor was more primitive than a chimp.

I don't think "humans/animals learn faster" holds. LLMs learn new things on the spot, you just explain it in the prompt and give an example or two.

A recent paper tested both linguists and LLMs at learning a language with less than 200 speakers and therefore virtually no presence on the web. All from a few pages of explanations. The LLMs come close to humans.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16575

Another example is the ARC-AGI benchmark, where the model has to learn from a few examples to derive the rule. AI models are closing the gap to human level, they are around 55% while humans are at 80%. These tests were specifically designed to be hard for models and easy for humans.

Besides these examples of fast learning, I think the other argument about humans benefiting from evolution is also essential here. Similarly, we can't beat AlphaZero at Go, as it evolved its own Go culture and plays better than us. Evolution is powerful.

It’s all in the architecture. Also, biological neurons are orders of magnitude more complex than NN’s. There’s a plethora of neurotransmitters and all kinds of cellular machinery for dealing with signals (inhibitory, excitatory etc.).

Evolution is the heuristic search for effective neural architectures. It is training data, but for the meta-search for effective architectures, which gets encoded in our DNA.

Then we compile and run that source code and our individual lived experience is the training data for the instantiation of that architecture, e.g. our brain.

It's two different but interrelated training/optimization processes.