Comment by famouswaffles
12 hours ago
All intelligence is jagged. Human intelligence is jagged, so is Cetacean intelligence, so is Ape intelligence, so is Corvid intelligence. You could re-orient that statement for any species of intelligence relative to the other, or even individuals within a species. The big problem here is people being so convinced of their specialness they'll just keep sticking their heads in the sand, until we essentialy create God, and by then none of this useless pedantry will even matter. If you can't see we've already learnt to walk then there's nothing more to discuss here.
I'm not sure it's accurate to call human intelligence jagged - it seems (perhaps largely thanks to language) that we're able to make progress on anything we set our minds to, and of course we're now in process of building AI that will eventually be able to do things that we ourselves couldn't, whether due to computational demands, or memory capacity, or having sensory inputs that we don't have, etc. But at the end of the day, AI is a tool we've built, so maybe it will make us less jagged, and certainly more capable.
In any case, human intelligence as a goal is special since we live in a human world, and one of the prime goals of AI is to be able to do human jobs. If a human can do something and AI can't then that is a limitation, while if a human can't and AI can't either, that doesn't matter for the time being.
Yeah, I shouldn't have said AI can't walk yet, but most of what it can do is just due to scale - we're still just building big transformers, basically using the same 10 year old architecture that accidentally set us off on this path. I'm not sure we're really progressing towards human/animal type intelligence, just learning how much of our own capability can be realized by automating language.
I'm not sure it's meaningful to compare across different types of intelligence--but I don't think human intelligence is so special that we can pretend it's much less jagged than all other animals for sure. Our scales of models are also not far off biological, probably less efficient but not like astronomically so i would guess.
But anyhow I agree that inference-time learning doesn't exist and it's a big issue still I think.