Comment by GMoromisato

My premise is that pattern-matching unlocks human-level artificial intelligence. Just because LLMs haven't cured cancer yet doesn't mean that LLMs will never be as intelligent as humans. After all, humans haven't cured cancer yet either.

What is intelligence?

Is it reacting to the environment? No, a thermostat can do that.

Is being logical? No, the simplest program can do that.

Is it creating something never seen before? No, a random number generator can do that.

We can even combine all of the above into a program and it still wouldn't be intelligent or creative. So what's the missing piece? The missing piece is pattern-matching.

Pattern-matching is taking a concrete input (a series of numbers or a video stream) and extracting abstract concepts and relationships. We can even nest patterns: we can match a pattern of concepts, each of which is composed of sub-patterns, and so on.

Creativity is just pattern matching the output of a pseudo-random generator against a critique pattern (is this output good?). When an artist creates something, they are constantly pattern matching against their own internal critic and the existing art out there. They are trying to find something that matches the beauty/impact of the art they've seen, while matching their own aesthetic, and not reproducing an existing pattern. It's pattern-matching all the way down!

Science is just a special form of creativity. You are trying to create a model that reproduces experimental outcomes. How do you do that? You absorb the existing models and experiments (which involves pattern-matching to compress into abstract concepts), and then you generate new models that fit the data.

Pattern-matching unlocks AI, which is why LLMs have been so successful. Obviously, you still need logic, inference, etc., but that's the easy part. Pattern-matching was the last missing piece!