Comment by solid_fuel
5 days ago
> We have an existence proof for intelligence that can improve AI: humans.
I don't understand what you mean by this. The human brain has not meaningfully changed, biologically, in the past 40,000 years.
We, collectively, have built a larger base of knowledge and learned to cooperate effectively enough to make large changes to our environment. But that is not the same thing as recursive self-improvement. No one has been editing our genes or performing brain surgery on children to increase our intelligence or change the fundamental way it works.
Modern brains don't work "better" than those of ancient humans, we just have more knowledge and resources to work with. If you took a modern human child and raised them in the middle ages, they would behave like everyone else in the culture that raised them. They would not suddenly discover electricity and calculus just because they were born in 2025 instead of 950.
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And, if you are talking specifically about the ability to build better AI, we haven't matched human intelligence yet and there is no indication that the current LLM-heavy approach will ever get there.
I just mean that the existence of the human brain is proof that human-level intelligence is possible.
Yes it took billions of years all said and done, but it shows that there are no fundamental limits that prevent this level of intelligence. It even proves it can in principle be done with a few tens of watts a certain approximate amount of computational power.
Some used to think the first AIs would be brain uploads, for this reason. They thought we'd have the computing power and scanning techniques to scan and simulate all the neurons of a human brain before inventing any other architecture capable of coming close to the same level of intelligence. That now looks to be less likely.
Current state of the art AI still operate with less computational power than the human brain, and they are far less efficient at learning that humans are (there is a sense in which a human intelligence takes a merely years to develop - i.e. childhood - rather than billions, this is also a relevant comparison to make). Humans can learn from far fewer examples than current AI can.
So we've got some catching up to do - but humans prove it's possible.
Culture is certainly one aspect of recursive self-improvement.
Somewhat akin to 'software' if you will.