Comment by Animats

> Somebody has to come up with an idea first.

There are lots of ideas. Some may work.

The space in which people seem to be looking is deep learning on something other than text tokens. Yet most successes punt on feature extraction / "early vision" and just throw compute at raw pixels. That's the "bitter lesson" approach, which seems to be hitting the ceiling of how many gigawatts of data center you can afford.

Is there a useful non-linguistic abstraction of the real world that works and leads to "common sense"? Squirrels must have something; they're not verbal and have a brain the size of a peanut. But what?