Comment by godelski

3 months ago

I think a lot of people are really bad at evaluating world models. Feifei is right here that they are multimodal but really they must codify a physics. I don't mean "physics" but "a physics". I also think it's naïve to think this can be done through data alone. I mean just ask a physicist...[0].

But why people are really bad at evaluating them is because the details dominate. What matters here is consistency. We need invariance to some things and equivariance to others. As evaluators we tend to be hopeful so the subtle changes frame to frame are overlooked though thats kinda the most important part. It can't just be similar to the last frame, but needs be exactly the same. You need equivariance to translation, yet that's still not happening in any of these models (and it's not a limitation of attention or transformers). You're just going to have a really hard time getting all this data even though by doing that you'll look like you're progressing because you're better fitting it. But in the end the models will need to create some compact formulation representing concepts such as motion. Or in other words, a physics. And it's not like physicists aren't know for being detail oriented and nitpicky over nuances. That is breed into then with good reason

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hV41QEKiMlM

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godelski

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ontouchstart  3 months ago

The YouTube video tells a fascinating story. Who would be our Fermi today who can tell the truth and save five years of work, billions of dollars and careers of Ph.D. students?

We wouldn’t expect LLM to review a paper and tell us the truth like Fermi did. That is super-intelligence.

Thanks for sharing.

  • godelski  3 months ago

    My problem with the current environment is that we are too rushed. I think in today's culture no one would have told Dyson to not continue. Or just not care. You got to publish, or perish.

    Hard things take time and deep thought. But in our age we seem to not want to think deep. The environment discourages it because it takes longer. It's incredibly difficult to have both speed and quality. They are always in contention.

    Mind you, there are a number of Nobel laureates who have claimed they wouldn't have succeeded in today's environment because of this[0]. I'm confident we're so concerned with finding the best that we hinder our ability to.

    [0] https://www.sciencealert.com/peter-higgs-says-he-wouldn-t-ha...

    • ontouchstart  3 months ago

      Thanks for the link to Higgs story.

      I was trained as a Physicist but went to software engineering. These days I would describe my job as a digital plumber. There are two kinds of holes we are dealing with: rabbit holes and potholes. We tend to get into the rabbit holes because of the love of tools and fall into potholes because of not paying attention.

      It turned out the industry might do the same. But the cost would be billions of dollars and decades of work of young talented people.

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