Yeah, I agree—I’d rather have a blackbird than AlphaZero. For one thing, it’d make our current level of progress in AI much clearer. But on your second and third points, I think of ML training as somewhat analogous to evolution, and the trained agent as analogous to an animal. Both the training process and evolution are basically blind but goal-directed processes with a ton of iterations (I’m bullish on evolution’s ability to transmit information through generations) that result in well-adapted agents.
If that’s the right analogy, then we can compare AlphaZero’s superhuman board game abilities with a blackbird’s subhuman-but-general performance. If we’re not meaningfully compute-constrained, then the question is: what kinds of problems will we soon be able to train AI systems to solve? AI research might be one such problem. There are a lot of different training techniques out in the wild, and many of the more impressive recent developments have come from combining multiple techniques in novel ways (with lots of compute). That strikes me as the kind of search space that an AI system might be able to explore much faster than human teams.
My pleasure!
Yeah, I agree—I’d rather have a blackbird than AlphaZero. For one thing, it’d make our current level of progress in AI much clearer. But on your second and third points, I think of ML training as somewhat analogous to evolution, and the trained agent as analogous to an animal. Both the training process and evolution are basically blind but goal-directed processes with a ton of iterations (I’m bullish on evolution’s ability to transmit information through generations) that result in well-adapted agents.
If that’s the right analogy, then we can compare AlphaZero’s superhuman board game abilities with a blackbird’s subhuman-but-general performance. If we’re not meaningfully compute-constrained, then the question is: what kinds of problems will we soon be able to train AI systems to solve? AI research might be one such problem. There are a lot of different training techniques out in the wild, and many of the more impressive recent developments have come from combining multiple techniques in novel ways (with lots of compute). That strikes me as the kind of search space that an AI system might be able to explore much faster than human teams.