Pascal Kaufmann

My views on nature vs nurture: 1. Humans are intelligent from the very beginning. From the first year of their life, they have a high ability to adapt to new situations and efficiently acquire new skills. 2. Almost all knowledge is acquired. Humans are born with very little prior knowledge about the world. They don't have a pre-trained visual system -- they must learn to see. They don't have a pre-trained gait-generation program -- they must learn to walk. Etc. 3. Early knowledge/skills acquisition is strongly guided by metacognitive priors, which is why everyone acquires essentially the same Core Knowledge foundations, under roughly the same timeline, despite experiencing very different environments. 4. How intelligent you are is largely determined by your genes -- it's how your brain is wired. Environmental factors (pollutants, malnutrition, sensory deprivation, trauma...) can lower your intelligence but cannot meaningfully increase it. 5. Intelligence decreases with age. My 3 year old is smarter than me. Which makes perfect sense, because as you age you can trade-off fluid intelligence for crystallized skills. The less you know the more valuable intelligence is.

Before eventually morphing into a mystical quest to create the Philosopher's Stone, Alchemy started in Hellenistic Egypt as a collection of chemical recipes for creating fake gold and fake gemstones. Besides the parallels between later-days Alchemy and the modern quest for AGI, I'm stuck by the parallels between early Alchemy and the Turing test. "Can we engineer our way towards fooling at least some people into believing they're holding a chunk of real gold?" vs "can we engineer our way towards fooling at least some people into believing they're talking to a human?"

When you talk to young folks, they think that the belief in imminent AGI was caused by the rise of LLMs. In reality, this belief is axiomatic and long predates LLMs. DeepMind, Vicarious were founded in 2010 based on this belief. OpenAI in 2015. Interest in LLMs only began in 2019. In 2015, when deep learning was in its infancy and LLMs were years away, many folks were just as convinced that AGI was around the corner as they are today. The only thing that changed is that people are now anchoring these beliefs on LLMs, whereas in 2015 they were looking to Deep RL, LSTMs, and Neural Turing Machines.

It's hard to take seriously someone who talks about how "AGI" is imminent yet cannot give you a precise definition of what they mean by "intelligence" or tell you how it works in principle

Russian forces have yet to occupy Kyiv, but they're already occupying Moscow.