Comment by HarHarVeryFunny
8 hours ago
I don't think the focus is really on world models, rather than on animal intelligence based around predicting the real world, but to predict it you need to model it in some sense.
8 hours ago
I don't think the focus is really on world models, rather than on animal intelligence based around predicting the real world, but to predict it you need to model it in some sense.
IMO the issue is that animals can't have a specific "world model" system, because if you create a model ahead of time you will mostly waste energy because most of the model is not used.
And animals' main concern is energy conservation, so they must be doing something else.
There are many factors playing into "survival of the fittest", and energy conservation is only one. Animals build mental models to predict the world because this superpower of seeing into the future is critical to survival - predict where the water is in a drought, where the food is, and how to catch it, etc, etc.
The animal learns as it encounters learning signals - prediction failure - which is the only way to do it. Of course you need to learn/remember something before you can use that in the future, so in that sense it's "ahead of time", but the reason it's done that way because evolution has found that learning patterns will ultimately prove beneficial.
It doesn't necessarily need to model the world to learn how to perform actions though. That was the topic of this old GOFAI research:
https://aaai.org/papers/00268-aaai87-048-pengi-an-implementa...
It instead works by "doing the thing that worked last time".
As an example, you don't usually need to know what is in your garbage in order to take out the trash.