0:00The following is a conversation with Francois Chalet, his second time on the podcast. He's both a world-class engineer and a philosopher in the realm of deep learning and artificial intelligence. This time we talk a lot about his paper titled on the measure of intelligence that discusses how we might define and measure general intelligence in our computing machinery. Quick summary of the sponsors Babel Masterclass and Cash App. Click the
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5:05[music] What philosophers, thinkers or ideas had a big impact on you growing up and today? So one author that had a big impact uh on me when I I read the his
5:32books as a teenager was Jean P who is a Swiss psychologist is considered uh to be the father of developmental psychology and he has a large body of work about um basically how intelligence uh develops uh in children and so uh it's really old work like most of it is from the 1930s 1940s uh so it's not quite up to eight it's actually superseded by many newer developments in
6:00developmental psychology but to me it was it was very uh very interesting very striking and actually shaped the early ways in which I started to think about the mind and the development of intelligence as a teenager his actual ideas or the way he thought about it or just the fact that you could think about the developing mind at all I guess both Jean Pa is the author that really introduced me to the notion that intelligence and the mind is something that you construct through throughout your life and that you uh that children
6:29uh uh construct it in stages and I thought that was a very interesting idea which is you know of course very relevant uh to AI to building artificial minds.
6:39Another book that I read around the same time that had a big impact on me uh and and there was actually a little bit of overlap with John P as well and I read it around the same time uh is Jeff Hawkins on intelligence which is a classic and he has this vision of the mind as a multiscale hierarchy of temporal prediction modules and these ideas really resonated with me
7:06like the the notion of a module hierarchy um of you know potentially um of compression functions or prediction functions. I thought it was really really interesting and it really shaped uh uh the way I started thinking about how to build minds the the hierarchical nature the which aspect also he's a neuroscientist so he was thinking actual he was basically talking about how our
7:36mind works yeah the notion that cognition is prediction was an idea that was kind of new to me at the time and that I really loved at the time and yeah and the notion that yeah there are multip multiple scales of processing uh in the brain.
7:51The hierarchy, yes, this is before deep learning.
7:55These ideas of hierarchies in AI have been around for a long time, even before intelligence. I mean, they've been around since the 1980s. Um, and yeah, that was before deep learning. But of course, I think these ideas really found uh their practical implementation in deep learning.
8:14What about the memory side of things? I think he was talking about knowledge representation. Do you think about memory a lot? One way you can think of neural networks as a kind of memory.
8:25You're memorizing things, but it doesn't seem to be the kind of memory that's in our brains or it doesn't have the same rich complexity long-term nature that's in our brains. Yes, the brain is more of a sparse access memory so that you can actually retrieve um very precisely like bits of your experience. The retrieval aspect you can like introspect, you can ask yourself questions again.
8:52Yes, you can program your own memory and language is actually uh the tool you use to do that. I think language is a kind of a operating system for the mind and you use language uh well one of the uses of language is as a query that you run over your own memory. You use words as keys to retrieve specific experiences or specific concepts, specific thoughts like language is a way you store thoughts not just in writing in the in the physical world but also in your own
9:22mind. And it's also how you retrieve them. Imagine if you didn't have language. Then you would have to you would not have really have a a self internally triggered uh way of retrieving past thoughts. You would have to rely on external experiences. For instance, you you see a specific site, you smell a specific smell and that brings up memories, but you would not really have a a way to deliberately deliberately access these memories without language. Well, the interesting thing you mentioned is you can also
9:51program the your memory. You can change it and probably with language.
9:56Yeah. Using language. Yes.
9:58Well, let me ask you a Chsky question which is like first of all, do you think language is like fundamental?
10:05Like uh there's turtles. What's at the bottom of the turtles? They don't go it can't be turtles all the way down. Is language at the bottom of cognition of everything? Is like language the fundamental aspect of like what it means to be a thinking thing?
10:27No, I don't think so. I think language you disagree with Norm Chowski.
10:31Yes. I think language is a layer on top of cognition. So it it is fundamental to cognition in the sense that to to use a computing metaphor, I see language as the operating system uh of the brain of the human mind.
10:45Yeah. And the operating system, you know, is a layer on top of the computer. The computer exists before the operating system, but the operating system is how you make it truly useful.
10:56And the operating system is most likely Windows, not not Linux, cuz it's um language is messy.
11:02Yeah, it's messy and it's uh it's um pretty difficult to uh uh inspect it, introspect it.
11:09How do you think about language? Like we use actually sort of human interpretable language, but is there something like deeper? It's closer to like like logical type of statements. Um like Yeah. What is the nature of of language do you think? Like is there something deeper than like the syntactic rules we construct? Is there something
11:36that doesn't require utterances or writing or so on?
11:42Oh, you're asking about the possibility that there could exist uh languages for thinking that are not made of words.
11:50Yeah. I think so. I think so. Uh the mind is layers, right? And language is almost like the the outermost the uppermost layer. Um but before we think in words, I think we think in in terms of uh emotion in space and we think in terms of uh physical actions and I think uh babies in particular probably express his thoughts in terms of um the actions uh that they've seen of that or that
12:19they can perform and in terms of the in terms of motions of objects in their environment before they start thinking in terms of words. It's amazing to think about that as the building blocks of language. So like the kind of actions and ways the babies see the world as like more fundamental than the beautiful Shakespearean language you construct on top of it. And we we probably don't have any idea what that looks like right like
12:48what because it's important for then trying to con engineer it into AI systems. I think visual analogies and motion is a fundamental building block of the mind and you you actually see it reflected in language like language is full of special metaphors and when you think about things I consider myself very much as as a visual thinker. you you often express his thoughts um by using things like uh visualizing concepts
13:22um in in 2D space or like you solve problems by imag imagining yourself navigating uh a concept space I don't know if if you have this sort of experience [snorts] you said visualizing concept space so like so I certainly think about I [snorts] certainly ma I certainly visualize mathematical ical concepts.
13:44But you mean like in concept space?
13:49Visually, you're embedding ideas into some into a threedimensional space. You can explore with your mind essentially.
13:55You should more like 2D, but yeah, 2D. [laughter] You're a flat lander. You're um [clears throat] Okay. No, I I I do not. I always have to uh before I jump from concept to concept, I have to put it back down on paper and it has to be on paper. I can only travel on 2D paper, not inside my mind.
14:20You're able to move inside your mind.
14:21But even if you're writing like a paper for instance, don't you have like a spatial representation of your paper?
14:28like you you visualize where ideas lie topologically in relationship to other ideas kind of like a subway map of the ideas in your paper.
14:39Yeah, that's true. I mean there there is um in papers I don't know about you but there feels like there's a destination um there's a there's a key idea that you want to arrive at and a lot of it is in in the fog and you're trying to kind of it's almost like um um what's that called when um you do a path planning search from both directions
15:06from the start and from the end and then you find you do like shortest path but like uh you know in game playing you do this with like a star from both sides and you see where where they join.
15:20Yeah. So you kind of do as at least for me I think like first of all just exploring from the start from like uh first principles what do I know uh what can I start proving from that right and then from the destination if uh you start backtracking like if if I want to show some kind of sets of ideas what would it take to show them and you kind of backtrack but like yeah I don't think I'm doing all that in my mind though like I'm putting it down on paper. Do
15:50you use mind maps to organize your ideas? No. Yeah, I like mind maps. I'm that kind of person.
15:54Let's get into this because it's I' I've been so jealous of people. I haven't really tried it. I've been jealous of people that seem to like they get like this fire of passion in their eyes cuz everything starts making sense.
16:06It's like uh Tom Cruz in the movie. He's like moving stuff around. Some of the most brilliant people I know use mind maps. I haven't tried really. Can you explain what the hell a mind map is? I guess a mind map is a way to make kind of like the mess inside your mind to just put it on paper so that you gain more control over it. It's a way to organize things on paper and as as kind of like a consequence of organizing things on paper, it start being more
16:35organized inside inside your own mind.
16:36So what what does that look like? You put like do you have an example like what what do what do you what's the first thing you write on paper? What's the second thing you write? I mean typically uh you you draw a mind map to organize the way you think about a topic. So you would start by writing down like the the key concept about that topic like you would write intelligence or something and then you would start adding uh associative connections like what do you think about when you think about intelligence? What do you think
17:05are the key elements of intelligence? So maybe you would have language for instance and you have motion and so you would start drawing notes with these things and then you would see what do you think about when you think about motion and so on and and you would go like that like a tree.
17:17It's it's a a tree or a a tree mostly or is it a graph to like a tree?
17:22Oh it's it's more of a graph than a tree and um and it's not limited to just you know writing down words. You can also uh uh draw things and it's not it's not supposed to be purely hierarchical, right? Like you can um the point is that you can start once once you start writing it down, you can start reorganizing it so that it makes more sense so that it's connected in a more effective way. See, but I I'm so OCD that you just mentioned intelligence and
17:52language emotion. I would start becoming paranoid that the categorization isn't perfect like that I would become paralyzed with the mind map that like this may not be so like the even though you're just doing associative kind of connections there's an implied hierarchy that's emerging and I would start becoming paranoid that it's not the proper hierarchy so you're not just one
18:20way to see mind maps is you're putting thoughts on paper. It's like stream of consciousness. But then you can also start getting paranoid. Well, if is this the right hierarchy?
18:31Sure. Which but it's a mind map. It's your mind map. You're free to draw anything you want. You're free to draw any connection you want and you can just make a different mind map if you think the central node is not the right node.
18:42Yeah. So I suppose there's a fear of being wrong. If if you want to if you want to organize your ideas by writing down what you think which I think is is is very effective like how do you know what you think about something if you if you don't write it down right uh if you do that the thing is that it imposes much more uh syntactic structure over your ideas which is not required with a mind map. So mind map is kind of like a
19:09lower level more freehand way of organizing your thoughts and once you've drawn it then you can start uh uh actually voicing your thoughts in terms of you know paragraphs and the two dimensional aspect of layout too right yeah [clears throat] and it's it's a kind of flower I guess you start there's usually you want to start with a central concept yes you move out typically it ends up more like a subway map so it ends up more like a graph a topological ical graph
19:38without a root note.
19:40There are so like in a subway map, there are some nodes that are more connected than others and there are some nodes that are more important than others, right? So there are destinations, but it's it's not going to be purely like a tree for instance. Yeah, it's fascinating to think of that if there's something to that about our about the way our mind thinks. By the way, I just kind of remembered obvious thing that I have probably thousands of documents in Google Doc at this point that are bulletoint lists.
20:10Uh, which is you can probably map to a bullet point list. It's the same. It's a No, it's not. It's a tree. It's a tree. Yeah. So, I I create trees, but also they don't have the visual element.
20:26Mhm. Mhm. like um I guess I'm comfortable with the structure. It feels like it the narrowness the constraints feel more comforting. If you have thousands of documents with your own thoughts in Google Docs, why don't you write uh some kind of search engine like maybe a mind map um a piece of software mind mapping software where you write down a concept and then it gives you sentences or paragraphs from your
20:54thousand Google docs document that match this concept. that the problem is it's so deeply unlike mind maps uh it's so deeply rooted in natural language so it's not um it's not semantically searchable I would say cuz the categories are very you kind of mentioned intelligence language and motion they're very strong semantic like it feels like the mind map forces you to be
21:23semantically clear and specific the bullet points list I have are are are sparse desperate thoughts that uh poetically represent a category like motion as opposed to saying motion.
21:42So unfortunately it's that's the same problem with the internet. That's why the idea of semantic web is difficult to get. It's um most language on the internet is a is a giant mess of natural language that's hard to interpret which So do you think uh do you think there's something to mind maps as um you actually originally brought it up as when we're talking about [sighs] kind of cognition and language. Do you think there's something to mind maps
22:11about how our brain actually deals like think reasons about things?
22:18It's possible. I think it's reasonable to assume that there is some level of topological processing in the brain that the brain is u very associative in nature and I also believe that uh a topological space uh is a better medium um to encode thoughts than a a geometric space then so I think what's the difference between a
22:45topological and a geometric space? Well, um if you're talking about topologies, uh then points are either connected or not. So the topology is more like a subway map and uh geometry is when you're interested uh in the distance between things. And in subway map, you don't really have the concept of distance. You only have the concept of whether there is a train going from station A to station uh B. Um and what we do in deep learning is that we we're actually dealing with uh geometric spaces. we are dealing with concept
23:15vectors, word vectors uh that have a a distance between expressed in terms of dot product.
23:22Um we are not we are not really building topological models usually.
23:27I think you're absolutely right like distance is a a fundamental importance in deep learning. I mean it's it's the continuous aspect of it too.
23:36Yes. Because everything is a vector and everything has to be a vector because everything has to be differentiable. If your space is discrete it's no longer differentiable. you cannot do deep learning in it anymore. Well, you could, but you can only do it by embedding it in a bigger continuous space. So, if you do topology in the in the context of deep learning, you have to do it by embedding your topology in a geometry, right?
23:58Yeah. Well, let me uh let me zoom out for a second. Uh let's get into your paper on the measure of intelligence that uh did you put out 2019?
24:14Yeah. Remember 2019? That was uh it was a different time.
24:17Yeah, I remember. I still remember.
24:20[laughter] It feels like a different different world.
24:26You could travel. You could, you know, actually go outside and see friends.
24:31Yeah. Let me ask the most absurd question. I think um there's some non-zero probability there'll be a textbook one day like 200 years from now on artificial intelligence or it'll be called like just intelligence cuz humans will already be gone. It'll be your picture with a quote. This, you know, one of the early uh biological systems would consider the nature of intelligence. And there'll be like a definition of how they thought about
25:00intelligence, which is one of the things you do in your paper on measure intelligence is to ask like well what is intelligence and and uh how to test for intelligence so on. So is there a spiffy quote about what is intelligence? What is the definition of intelligence according to France washi?
25:23Yeah. So do do you think the the super intelligent AIs of the future will want to remember us the way we remember humans from the past and do you think they will be you know they won't be ashamed of having a biological origin?
25:38Uh no I I think it'll be a niche topic.
25:41It won't be that interesting, but it'll be it'll be like the people that study in certain contexts like historical civilization that long longer exist, the Aztecs and so on. That that's how it'll be seen. And it'll be studied in the also the context on social media. There will be hashtags about the atrocity committed to human beings um when when the when the robots finally got rid of them
26:10like it was a mistake. It'll be seen as a as a giant mistake. But ultimately in the name of progress and it created a better world because humans were uh over consuming the resources and they were not very rational and were destructive in the end in terms of productivity and uh putting more love in the world. And so within that context there'll be a chapter about these biological systems.
26:34Seems to have a very detailed vision of that future. You should write a sci-fi novel about it. I I'm I'm working I'm uh I'm working on on a sci-fi novel currently. Yes.
26:44Yeah. So self-published. Yeah.
26:46The definition of intelligence. So intelligence is the efficiency with which uh you acquire new skills at tasks that you did not previously uh know about that you did not prepare for. All right. So it is not intelligence is not skill itself. It's not what you know. It's not what you can do. It's how well and how efficiently you can learn new things.
27:12The idea of newness there seems to be fundamentally important.
27:17Yes. So you would see intelligence uh on display for instance uh whenever you see uh a human being or you know an AI a creature adapt to a new environment that did it has not seen before that its creators did not anticipate. uh when you see adaptation, when you see improvisation, when you see generalization, that's intelligence. Uh in reverse, if you have a system that when you put it in a slightly new environment, it cannot adapt. It cannot
27:46improvise. It cannot deviate from what it's hardcoded to do or um what uh what it has uh been trained to do. Um that is a system that is not intelligent. So there's actually a quote from Einstein that captures this idea which is the measure of intelligence is the ability to change. I I like that quote. I think it uh captures at least part of this idea.
28:11You know there might be something interesting about the difference between your definition and Einstein's. I mean he's just being Einstein and clever but acquisition of um new ability to deal with new things versus ability to just change. What's the difference between those two things? So just change in itself. Do you think there's something to that? Just being able to change.
28:43Yes. Being able to adapt. So not not change but certainly uh changes direction being able to adapt yourself to your environment whatever the environment.
28:55That's a big part of intelligence. Yes.
28:57And intelligence is more precisely you know how efficiently you're able to adapt how efficiently you're able to basically master your environment how efficiently uh you can acquire new skills. And I think there's a there's a big distinction to be drawn between uh intelligence which is a process and the output of that process which is a skill.
29:20Um so for instance if you have a very smart human programmer uh that considers the game of chess and that writes down uh a static program that can play chess then the intelligence is the process of developing that program. But the program itself is just encoding um the output artifact of that process. The program itself is not intelligent.
29:46And the way you tell it's not intelligent is that if you put it in a different context, you ask it to play go or something, it's not going to be able to perform well without human involvement. Because the source of intelligence, the entity that is capable of that process is the human programmer.
30:01So we should uh um be able to tell the difference between the process and its output. We should not confuse uh the output and the process. It's the same as you know do not confuse uh a road building company and one specific road because one specific road takes you from point A to point B but a road building company can take you from can make a path from anywhere to anywhere else. Yeah, that's beautifully put. But it's also
30:28to play devil's advocate a little bit, you know. Um it's possible that there's something more fundamental than us humans. So you kind of said the programmer creates uh the difference between the the choir of the skill and the skill itself. There could be something like you could argue the universe is more intelligent like the the deep the base intelligence of um that we should be trying to measure is something that created humans.
31:03We should be measuring God or what the source of the universe as opposed to like there's there could be a deeper intelligence. Sure. There's always deeper intelligence. I guess you can argue that but that does not take anything away from the fact that humans are intelligent and you can tell that because they are capable of adaptation and and generality.
31:24Um and you see that in particular in the fact that uh humans are capable of handling uh uh situations and tasks that are quite different from anything that any of our evolutionary ancestors has ever encountered. So we're capable of generalizing very much out of distribution. If you consider our evolutionary history as being in a way altering data, of course, evolutionary biologists would argue that we're not going too far out
31:53of the distribution. We're like mapping the skills we've learned previously, desperately trying to like jam them into like these new situations.
32:03I mean there's definitely a little bit a little bit of that but it's pretty clear to me that we're able to uh you know most of the things we do uh any given day in our modern civilization are things that are very very different from what you know our ancestors a million years ago would have been doing in in a given day and your environment is very different. So I agree that um everything we do we do it with cognitive building blocks that we acquired uh over the
32:33course of evolution right and that anchors um our cognition to certain context which is the human condition very much.
32:41Uh but still our mind is capable of a pretty remarkable degree of generality far beyond anything we can uh create in artificial systems today. like the the degree in which the mind can generalize from its evolutionary history uh can generalize away from its evolutionary history is much greater than the degree to which a deep learning system today can generalize away from it train data and like the key point you're making which I think is quite beautiful
33:10is like we shouldn't measure if we're talking about measurement we shouldn't measure the skill we should measure like the creation of the new skill, the ability to create that new skill.
33:23But there it's tempting like it's weird because the skill is a little bit of a small window into the into the system. So whenever you have a lot of skills, I mean it's tempting to measure the skills.
33:37Yes. I mean the skill is the uh only thing you can objectively uh measure. But yeah, so the the thing to keep in mind is that when you see skill uh in a human um it gives you a strong signal that that human is intelligent because you know they weren't born with that skill typically like you see a very you see a very strong chess player maybe you're a very strong chess player yourself I think you're you're saying that cuz
34:07I'm Russian and now now you're you're prejudiced you assume all Russians are good at biased I'm biased Well, your cultural bias. [laughter] Um, so if you see a very strong chess player, you know, they weren't born uh knowing how to play chess. So they had to acquire that skill with their limited resources, with their limited lifetime.
34:27And you know, they did that because they are generally intelligent and so they they may as well have acquired any other skill. You know, they have this potential. And on the other hand, if you see a a computer playing a chess, you cannot make the same assumptions because you cannot, you know, just assume the computer is general intelligent. The computer may be born uh knowing how to play chess in the sense that it may have been programmed by a human that has
34:55understood chess for the computer and and that that's just encoded um the output of that understanding in a static program and that program uh is not intelligent. So let let's zoom out just for a second and say like what is the goal of the on the measure of intelligence paper like what do you hope to achieve with it? So the goal of the paper is to clear up some long-standing misunderstandings about the way we've been uh
35:23conceptualizing intelligence in the AI community and uh in the way we've been evaluating progress in AI. Um there's been a lot of progress recently in machine learning and people are are you know extrapolating from that progress that we're about to solve general intelligence and if you want to be able to evaluate these statements you need to precisely define what you're talking about when you're talking about general
35:51intelligence and you need um a formal way a reliable way to measure how much uh intelligence how much general intelligence a system processes And ideally this measure of intelligence should be actionable. So it should not just describe uh what intelligence is. It should not just be a binary indicator that tells you the system is intelligent or it isn't. Um it should be actionable. It
36:20should have explanatory power, right? So you could use it as a feedback signal. It would show you uh the way towards building more intelligent systems. So at the first level you draw a distinction between two divergent views of intelligence of um as we just talked about intelligence is a collection of task task specific skills and a general learning ability.
36:46So what's the difference between kind of this memorization of skills and a general learning ability? We talked about it a little bit but can you try to linger on this topic for a bit? Yes. So the first part of the paper uh is uh an assessment of the different ways uh we've been thinking about intelligence and the different ways we've been evaluating progress in AI and uh the history of cognitive sciences has been
37:14shaped by two views of the human mind and one view is the evolutionary psychology view in [clears throat] which the mind is uh a collection of fairly static uh special purpose ad hoc mechanisms. They've been hardcoded by evolution uh over our our history as a species over a very long time. And um
37:42early uh uh AI researchers, people like uh Marvin Minsky for instance, they clearly subscribed to this view and they saw they saw the mind as a kind of you know collection of static programs uh uh similar to the programs they would they would run on like mainframe computers and in fact they I think they very much understood the mind uh through the metaphor of the mainframe computer because that was the tool they they were working with, right? And so you had
38:10these static programs, this collection of very different static programs operating over a database- like memory.
38:16And in this picture, learning was not very important. Uh learning was considered to be just memorization. And in fact, uh uh learning is basically not featured in AI textbooks until uh uh the 1980s uh with the the rise of machine learning. It's kind of fun to think about that learning was the outcast like the the weird people working on learning like the mainstream AI world
38:44was um I mean I don't know what the best term is but it's non-learning. It it was seen as like reasoning. Yes. Would not be learning based.
38:54Yes. It was seen it was considered that the mind was a collection of programs that were uh u primarily logical in nature and that all you needed to do to create a mind was to write down these programs and they would operate over knowledge which would be stored in some kind of database. And as long as your database would encompass you know everything about the world and your logical rules were uh um uh comprehensive then you would have a mind. So the other view of the mind is
39:23the brain as a sort of blank slate. Right? This is a very old idea. You find it in uh John Lock's writings. This is the the tabulaza. Um and this is this idea that the mind is some kind of like information sponge um that starts uh uh empty that starts blank and that absorbs uh uh knowledge and skills from
39:50experience right so it's a it's a sponge that reflects the complexity of the world the complexity of of your life experience essentially that everything you know and everything you can do is a reflection of something you found in the outside world essentially. So this is an idea that's very old uh that was not very popular for instance in the in the 1970s but that had gained a lot of vitality recently with the rise of connectionism
40:18in particular deep learning and so today deep learning is the dominant paradigm in AI and uh I feel like lots of AI researchers are conceptualizing the mind uh via a deep learning metaphor like they see uh the mind as a kind of randomly initialized neural network that starts blank when you're born and then that uh gets trained via exposure to train data that acquires knowledge and skills exposure to train data. By the
40:47way, it's a small tangent.
40:50I feel like people who are thinking about intelligence are not conceptualizing it that way. I actually haven't met too many people who believe that a neural network will be able to reason who who seriously think that rigorously cuz I think it's an actually interesting worldview and and we'll we'll talk about it more but it it's been impressive what the uh what neural networks have been able to accomplish and it's I to me I don't know you might
41:20disagree but it's an open question whether like like scaling size eventually might lead to incredible results to us. Mere humans will appear as if it's general.
41:33I mean if you if you ask people who are seriously thinking about intelligence, they will definitely not say that all you need to do is is like the mind is just in your network. Uh however, it's actually a view that's that's very popular I think in the deep learning community that many people are kind of conceptually you know intellectually lazy about it.
41:53Right. It's a but what I guess what I'm saying exactly right it's uh I I haven't met many people and I think it would be interesting to meet a person who is not intellectually lazy about this particular topic and still believes that neural networks will go all the way. I think Y is probably closest to that with there are definitely people who argue that uh current deeply planning techniques are already the way to
42:22general artificial intelligence and that all you need to do is to scale it up to all the available train data and that's if you look at the the waves that open AAI's GPT stream model has made you see echoes of this idea. So on that topic, GPT3 similar to GPT2 actually have captivated some part of the imagination of the public. There's just a bunch of hype of different kind
42:52that's I would say it's emergent. It's not artificially manufactured. It's just like people just get excited for some strange reason. And in the case of GPT3, which is funny that there's I believe a couple months delay from release to hype. Maybe I'm not um uh historically correct on that, but it feels like there was a little bit of a uh lack of hype and then there's a phase
43:19shift into into hype. But nevertheless, there's a bunch of cool applications that seem to captivate the imagination of the public about what this language model that's trained in unsupervised way without any fine-tuning is able to achieve. So, what do you make of that?
43:37What are your thoughts about GBT3?
43:39Yeah, so I think what's interesting about GPT3 is the idea that it may be able to learn new tasks in after just being shown a few examples. So I think if it's actually capable of doing that, that's novel and that's very interesting and that's something we should investigate. Uh that said, I must say I'm not entirely convinced that we have shown it's it's capable of doing that.
44:03uh it's very likely given the amount of data that the model is trained on that what it's actually doing is pattern matching uh a new task you give it with a task that it's been exposed to in it train data it's just recognizing the task instead of just developing a model of the task right but there's um sorry to interrupt there there's a parallels to what you said before which is it's possible to see GPT3 as like the prompts it's given as a
44:32kind of SQL query into this thing that it's learned similar to what you said before which is languages used to query the memory.
44:40So is it possible that neural network is a giant memorization thing but then it if it's gets sufficiently giant it'll memorize sufficiently large amounts of thing of the world where it becomes where intelligence becomes a querying machine.
44:56Mhm. I think it's possible that uh a significant chunk of intelligence is this giant associative memory. Uh I definitely don't believe that intelligence is just a giant associative memory but it may well be a big component. So do you think GPT3 4 5 GPT 10 will eventually like what do you think where's the ceiling? Do you think you'll be able to reason? Um, no.
45:28That's a bad question. Uh, like what is the ceiling is the better question.
45:34How well is it going to scale? How good is GPTN going to be?
45:38So, I believe GPTN is going to GPTN is going to improve on the strength uh of GPT2 and three which is it will be able to generate you know ever more plausible text uh in context. does monotonic increasing performance.
45:57Um yes, if you train if you train a bigger model on more data, then uh your text will be increasingly more uh context aware and increasingly more uh plausible in the same way that GPD3 it is much better at generating plausible text compared to GPD2.
46:14Um, but that said, I don't think just scaling up uh the model to more transformer layers and more train data is going to address the flaws of GPT3, which is that it can generate plausible text, but that text is not constrained by anything else other than plausibility. So, in particular, it's not constrained by uh factualness uh or even consistency, which is why it's very easy to get GP3 to to generate statements that are factually untrue. uh
46:44or to general statements that are even self-contradictory, right? Uh because it's uh it's its only goal is plausibility and it has no other constraints. It's not constraint to be self-consistent for instance, right? And so for this reason, one thing that I thought was very interesting with GBD3 is that you can predetermine the answer it will give you by asking the question in a specific way because it's very responsive to the way you ask the
47:12question since it has no understanding of the content of the question, right? it and if you if you ask the same question in two different ways that are basically adversarily uh engineered to produce certain answer you will get two different answers to contractor answers it's very susceptible to adversarial attacks essentially potentially yes so in in general the problem with these models these generative models is that they they're
47:41very good at generating plausible text but that's just that's just not enough right um uh you need uh I think one one avenue that would be very uh interesting to make progress is to make it possible uh to write programs over the latent space that these models operate on that you would rely on these uh uh self-supervised models to generate a sort of like pool uh of knowledge and
48:10concepts and common sense and then you would be able to write explicit uh uh reasoning programs over it. uh because the current problem with GPD3 is that you it's it's it can be quite difficult to get it to do what you want to do. Uh if you want to uh turn GPD3 into products, you need to put constraints on it. Uh you need to um force it to obey certain rules. So you need a way to program it explicitly.
48:39Yeah. So if you look at its ability to do program synthesis, it generates like you said something that's plausible.
48:45Yeah. So if you if you try to make it generate programs, it will perform well uh for any program that that it has seen it in its training data but because uh program space is not interpolative, right? Um uh it's not going to be able to generalize to problems it hasn't seen before. Now that's currently do you think sort of an absurd but I think useful
49:13um I guess intuition builder is uh you know the the GPT3 has 175 billion parameters. Human brain has 100 has about a thousand times that or or more in terms of number of synapses.
49:33Do you think um obviously very different kinds of things but there is some degree of uh similarity. Do you think what what do you think GPT will look like when it has 100 trillion parameters?
49:51You think our conversation might be in nature different like cuz you've criticized GPT3 very effectively now. Do you think?
50:02No, I don't think so. So the to begin with the bottleneck with scaling up GP3 GPT models uh generative pre transformer models is not going to be the size of the model or how long it takes to train it. The bottleneck is going to be the train data because OpenI is already training GP3 on a crawl of basically the entire web, right? And that's a lot of data. So you could imagine training on more data than that. Like Google could train on more data than that, but it
50:31would still be only incrementally more data. And I I don't recall exactly how much more data GP3 was trained on compared GPT2, but it's probably at less like 100 or maybe even a thousand x. Don't have the exact number. Uh you're not going to be able to train a model on 100 more data than what what you what you're already doing.
50:50So that's that's brilliant. So it's not, you know, it's easier to think of compute as a bottleneck and then arguing that we can remove that bottleneck. But we can remove the compute bottleneck. I don't think it's a big problem. If you look at the at the pace at which we've uh uh uh improved the efficiency of deep learning models uh uh in the past uh few years uh I'm not worried about uh training time bottlenecks or model size bottlenecks. uh the the bottleneck in the case of these uh generative
51:19transformer models is absolutely the train data.
51:22What about the quality of the data? So so yeah, so the quality of the data is is an interesting point. The thing is, if you're going to want to use these models uh in real products, um then you you want to fit them uh data that's as high quality, as factual, I would say as unbiased as possible. But, you know, there's there's not really such a thing as unbiased data in the first place. But you probably don't want to to train it uh uh on Reddit, for instance. Sounds
51:51like sounds like a bad plan. So from my personal experience working with large scale deep learning models. So at some point I was working on a model at Google that's trained uh on uh like 350 million uh labeled images. It's an image classification model. That's a lot of images. That's like probably most publicly available images on the web at the time.
52:17And it was a very uh noisy data set because the labels were not originally annotated by hand by humans. They were uh automatically derived from like tags on social media uh or just keywords uh in in the same page as the image respon and so on. So it was very noisy and it turned out that you could uh easily get a better model uh not just by training like if you train on more uh of the noisy data you get an incrementally
52:47better model but you you you you very quickly hit diminishing returns. On the other hand, if you try on smaller data set with higher quality annotations, quality that are uh uh annotations that are actually u made by humans, you get a better model and it also takes, you know, less time to train it.
53:06Oh yeah, that's fascinating. It's the self-supervised learning if there's a way to get better doing the automated labeling.
53:15Yeah. So you can enrich or refine your labels uh in an automated way. That's correct. Do you have a hope for um I don't know if you're familiar with the idea of a semantic web is a semantic web just for people who are not familiar and is uh is the idea of be able to convert the internet or or be able to attach like semantic meaning to the words on the internet.
53:44this the sentences, the paragraphs to be able to contra convert information on the internet or some fraction of the internet into something that's interpretable by machines. That was kind of a dream for um I think the the semantic web paper was in the '9s.
54:04It's kind of the dream that you know the internet is full of rich exciting information. Even just looking at Wikipedia, we should be able to use that as data for machines.
54:14So information is not is not really in a format that's available to machines. So no, I don't think the semantic web will ever work simply because it would be a lot of work, right, to make uh to provide that information in structured form and there's not really any incentive for anyone to provide that work. Uh so I think the the way forward to make um the knowledge on the web available to machines is actually uh uh something closer to unsupervised deep
54:45Yeah. So GBD3 is actually a bigger step in the direction of making the knowledge of the web available to machines than the semantic web was.
54:53Yeah. Perhaps in a humanentric sense, it it feels like GPT3 hasn't learned anything that could be used to reason, but uh that might be just the early days. Yeah, I I think that's correct. I think the forms of reasoning that you that you see it perform are basically just reproducing patterns that it has seen in string data. So of course if
55:19you're trained on uh the entire web then you can produce an illusion of reasoning in many different situations but it will break down if it's presented with a novel uh situation.
55:31That's the open question between the illusion of reasoning and actual reasoning. Yeah.
55:35Yes. the power to adapt to something that is genuinely new. Because the thing is even imagine you had uh um you could train on every bit of data ever generated uh in the history of humanity.
55:51uh it remains so that that model would be capable of of uh anticipating uh many different possible situations but it remains that the future is going to be something different like um for instance if you train a GPT3 model uh on on data from the year 2002 for instance and then you use it today it's going to be missing many things it's going to be missing many common sense facts about the world it's even going to be missing
56:20in vocabulary and so on.
56:22Yeah, it's interesting that uh GPT3 even doesn't have I think any information about the corona virus.
56:30Yes, [laughter] which is why you know uh a system that's uh you you tell that the system is intelligent when it's capable to adapt. So intelligence is going to require uh some amount of continuous learning but it's also going to require some amount of improvisation. Like it's not enough to assume that what you're going to be asked to do is something that you've seen before or something that is a simple interpolation of things you've seen before.
56:59In fact, that model breaks down for uh even even very tasks that look relatively simple from a distance like L5 self-driving for instance. Google had a had a paper a couple of years back showing that something like 30 million uh different road situations were actually completely insufficient to train a driving model. It wasn't even L2, right? And that's a lot of data.
57:29That's a lot more data than the the 20 or 30 hours of driving that a human needs uh to learn to drive given the the knowledge they've already accumulated.
57:38Well, let me ask you on that topic.
57:41Uh Elon Musk, Tesla Autopilot, it's one of the only companies I believe is really pushing for a learning based approach. Are you skeptical that that kind of network can achieve level four?
57:56L4 uh is probably achievable. L5 is probably not.
58:01What's the distinction there is? L5 is completely you can just fall asleep.
58:06Yeah, L5 is basically human level. Well, with driving, we have to be careful saying human level because like that's drivers.
58:13Yeah, that's the clearest example of like, you know, cars will most likely be much safer than humans in situ in many situations where humans fail. It's the vice versa.
58:25So I I'll tell you you know the thing is the the amount of train data you would need to anticipate for pretty much every possible situation you you encounter in the real world uh is such that it's not entirely unrealistic to think that at some point in the future we'll develop a system that's training on enough data especially uh uh provided that we can simulate a lot of that data. We don't necessarily need actual actual cars on the road uh for everything. Uh but it's
58:54a massive effort and it turns out you can create a system that's much more adaptative uh that can generalize much better if you just add um uh explicit models of the surroundings of the car.
59:10Uh and if you use deep learning for what it's good at which is to provide perceptive information. So in general deep learning is is a a way to encode perception and a way to encode intuition but it is not a good medium for uh any sort of uh explicit reasoning and uh in AI systems today uh strong generalization tends to come from um explicit models tend to come from
59:39abstractions in the human mind that are encoded in program form uh by a human engineer. Right.
59:46These are the abstractions that can actually generalize not the sort of uh weak abstraction that is learned by a neural network.
59:51Yeah. And the question is how much uh how much reasoning how much strong abstractions are required to solve particular tasks like driving that's that's the question or human life existence. How much how much strong abstractions does existence require? But more specifically on on driving that's that seems to be that seems to be a coupled question about intelligence is
1:00:17like uh how much intelligence like how do you build an intelligence system and uh the coupled problem? How hard is this problem? How much intelligence does this problem actually require? So we're um we get to cheat, right? because we get to look at the problem. Like it's not like you get to close our eyes and completely new to driving. We get to do what we do as human beings which is uh for the
1:00:45majority of our life before we ever learn quote unquote to drive. We get to watch other cars and other people drive.
1:00:52We get to be in cars. We get to watch we get to get see movies about cars. We get to, you know, we get to observe all that stuff. And that's similar to what neural networks are doing. It's getting a lot of data. And the the the question is yeah, how much is uh how many leaps of reasoning genius is required to be able to actually effectively drive?
1:01:16I think it's example of driving. I mean sure um uh you've seen a lot of cars uh in your life before you learn to drive.
1:01:24But let's say you've learned to drive in Silicon Valley and now uh you rent a car in Tokyo. Well, now everyone is driving on the other side of the road and the signs are different and the roads are more narrow and so on. So it's a very very different environment and uh a smart human even an average human should be able to just zero shot it to just be operational in this in this very different environment
1:01:50right away despite having had no contact with the novel complexity that is contained in this environment right and that is novel complexity is not just um interpolation uh over the situations that you've encountered previously like learning to drive in the US, right? I I would say the reason I ask is one of the most interesting tests of intelligence we
1:02:16have today actively which is driving in terms of having an impact on the world like when do you think we'll pass that test of intelligence? So I I don't think driving is that much of a test in intelligence because again there is no task for which ski at that task demonstrates intelligence unless uh it's a kind of meta task that involves acquiring uh new skills. So I don't think I think you can actually solve
1:02:45driving without having uh uh any any real amount of intelligence. For instance, if you really did have infinite training data, um you could just literally train an end to end deep learning model that does driving provided infinite training data. The only problem uh with the whole idea is um collecting a data set that's sufficiently comprehensive that covers the very long tale of possible situations you might encounter and it's
1:03:14really just a scale problem. So I think the there's nothing fundamentally wrong uh uh with this plan with this idea.
1:03:23It's just that um it strikes me as a fairly inefficient thing to do because you run into this uh this uh uh scaling issue with diminishing returns. Whereas if instead you took a more uh manual engineering approach where you uh uh use deep learning modules uh in combination uh with um engineering an explicit model of the surrounding of the cars and you and you bridge the two in a clever way,
1:03:52your model will actually start generalizing much earlier and more effectively than the end to end deep learning model. So why would you not go with the more manual engineering oriented approach like even if if you created uh that system either the end to end deep learning model system that's infinite data or uh the slightly uh uh more human system I I don't think achieving L5 would demonstrate uh general intelligence or intelligence of
1:04:21any generality at all. Again, the only possible test uh of generality in AI would be a test that looks at skill acquisition over unknown tasks.
1:04:31For instance, you could take your L5 uh driver and ask it to to learn to to pilot a commercial airplane, for instance, and then you would look at how much human involvement is required and how much training data is required uh for the system to learn to pilot an airplane. And uh that that gives you a measure of how intelligent the system really is.
1:04:52Yeah. Well, I mean that that's a big leap. I get you. But the I'm more interested as a problem. I would see to me driving is a black box that can generate novel situations at some rate. Like what people call edge cases like so it does have newness that keeps being like we're confronted let's say once a month. It is a very long tail. Yes, long tail.
1:05:18That doesn't mean you cannot solve it uh just by by training a statistical model of data.
1:05:25Huge amount of data.
1:05:26It's it's really a matter of scale. But I guess what I'm saying is if you have a vehicle that achieves level five, it is going to be able to deal with new situations or I mean the data is so large that the rate of new situations is very low.
1:05:48Yes, that's not intelligence. So uh if we go back to your kind of definition of intelligence, it's the efficiency with which you can adapt to new situations to truly new situations. Not situations you've seen before, right?
1:06:02Not situations that could be anticipated by your creators by the creators of the system, but truly new situations. The efficiency with which you acquire new skills. If you require if in in order to pick up a new skill, you require um a very extensive training data set of most possible situations that can that can occur in the practice of that skill, then the system is not intelligent. It is mostly just a um a lookup table.
1:06:33Likewise, if uh in order to acquire a skill, you need a human engineer to write down uh a bunch of rules that cover most or every possible situation.
1:06:43Likewise, the system is is not intelligent. The system is merely the output artifact uh of uh a process that that happens happens in the minds uh of of the engineers that are creating it, right? It is encoding uh an abstraction that's produced by the human mind and intelligence would would actually be uh the process of producing of autonomously producing this abstraction.
1:07:13Yeah. Not like if you take an abstraction and you encode it on a piece of paper or in a computer program that abstraction itself is not intelligent.
1:07:22What's intelligent is the the agent that's capable of producing these abstractions, right?
1:07:28Yeah. It feels like there's a little bit of a gray area like cuz you're basically saying that deep learning forms abstractions too, but those abstractions do not seem to be effective for generalizing far outside of the things it's already seen. But generalize a little bit.
1:07:48Yeah, absolutely. No, deep learning does generalize a little bit. Like generalization is not is not a binary. It's more like a spectrum.
1:07:54Yeah. And there's a certain point it's a gray area, but there's a certain point where there's an impressive degree of generalization that happens. No, like the I guess exactly what you were saying is uh intelligence is um how efficiently you're able to generalize far outside the distribution of things you've seen already.
1:08:20Yes. So it's both like the the distance of how far he can like how new how radically new something is and how efficiently able to deal with that.
1:08:29So you you can think of uh intelligence as a measure of an information conversion ratio like imagine uh a space of possible situations and um you've covered some of them. Uh so you have some amount of information uh about your space of possible situations that's provided by the situations you already know and that's on the other hand also provided by um the prior knowledge that the system brings to the table the prior knowledge
1:08:58that's embedded in the system. So the system starts with some information right about the problem about the task and it's about going from that information to a program what we would call a skill program a behavioral program that can cover a large area of possible situation space. Um and essentially the ratio between that area and the amount of information you start with uh is intelligence.
1:09:26So a very smart agent uh can make efficient uses of very little uh information about a new problem and very little prior knowledge as well to cover a very large area of of potential situations in that problem without uh knowing what this future new situations are going to be.
1:09:47So one of the other big things you talk about in in the paper we've talked about a little bit already but let's talk about it some more is uh actual tests of intelligence.
1:09:57So if we look at like humans and machine intelligence do you think tests of intelligence should be different for humans and machines or how we think about testing of intelligence?
1:10:11are these fundamentally the same kind of uh intelligences that we're after and therefore the test should be similar. So if your goal is to create uh uh AIS that are uh more humanlike then it will be super valuable obviously to have a test uh that's uh that's universal that applies to both uh AIs uh and humans so that you can you could establish a comparison uh between the two that you
1:10:40could tell exactly how uh intelligent in terms of human intelligence uh a given system is. So that said, the constraints uh that apply to artificial intelligence and to human intelligence are very different and your test should uh account for this difference. Um because if if you get artificial systems, it's always possible uh for an experimentter
1:11:07to buy uh arbitrary levels of skill at arbitrary tasks either by um injecting hard-coded prior knowledge uh into the system via [clears throat] rules uh and so on uh that come from the human mind, from the minds of the programmers. and also um buying uh higher levels of skill just by training on more data.
1:11:32Uh for instance, you could generate an infinity of different go games and you could train a a go playing system uh that way but you could not directly compare it to human go playing skills because a human that plays go had to develop that skill in a very constrained environment. They had a limited amount of time. their the limited amount of energy. Uh and of course uh this started from a different set of prior. This
1:11:59started from uh um you know innate uh human prior. Um so I think if you want to compare the intelligence of two systems like the intelligence of an AI and the intelligence u of a human, you have to um control for prior. you have to uh start from the the the same set of knowledge prior about the task and you have to control for for experience uh that is to say for training data.
1:12:27So prior what's prior?
1:12:31So prior is whatever information uh you have about a given task before you start learning about this task.
1:12:39And how's that difference from experience?
1:12:42Well, experience is acquired, right? So for instance, if you're if you're trying to play Go, uh your experience with Go is all the Go games you've played or you've seen or you've simulated in your mind, let's say, and uh your priors are things like well Go is a game on on a 2D grid uh and we have lots of hard-coded uh priors about uh uh the organization
1:13:08of 2D space and so rules of how the the dynamics of this the physics of this game in this 2D space.
1:13:17And the idea that you have what winning is.
1:13:21So like and all other board games can also share some similarities with go and if you've played these board games then uh with respect to the game of go that would be part of your priors about the game.
1:13:32Well, it's interesting to think about the game of go is how many priors are actually brought to the table. [sighs] When you look at u selfplay reinforcement learning based mechanisms that do learning, it seems like the number of prizes is pretty low.
1:13:48But you're saying you should be there is a 2D special prize in the covenant, right? But you should be clear at making those prior explicit.
1:13:57Yes. uh so in particular I think if you if your goal is to measure a humanlike form of intelligence then you should clearly establish that you want uh the AI you're testing to start from uh the same set of prior that humans start with right so I mean to me personally but I think to a lot of people the human side of things is very interesting so testing intelligence for humans what um what do
1:14:26you think is a good test of human intelligence.
1:14:31Well, that's the question that psychometric is is interested in and there's an entire sub field of psychology uh that deals with this question.
1:14:40So what's psychometric?
1:14:41So psychometric is the sub field of psychology that that tries to uh measure quantify aspects of the human mind. So in particular cognitive abilities, intelligence and personality threats as well. So uh like what are might be a weird question but what are like the first principles of the of psychometrics that is operates on the you know what what are the priors it
1:15:10brings to the table.
1:15:12So it's a field with a with a fairly long history. Um it's so you know psychology sometimes gets a bad reputation for not having very reproducible uh results and so on. Psychometrics has actually some fairly solidly reproducible results. So the ideal goals uh of the field is you know test should be be reliable which is an ocean troducibility.
1:15:39it should be valid. Uh meaning that it should actually measure what you says what you say it measures. Um so for instance, if you're if you're saying that you're measuring intelligence, then your test results should be correlated with things that you expect to be correlated with intelligence like success in school or success in the workplace and so on should be standardized meaning that uh you can administer your test to many different people in the same conditions. Uh and it should be free from bias.
1:16:09meaning that for instance if your if if your test involves uh the English language then you have to [clears throat] be aware that this creates a bias against people who have English as their second language or people who can't speak English at all.
1:16:23Um so of course these uh these principles for creating psychometric tests are um very much nal. I don't think every psychometric test is is really either reliable uh um valid or or free from bias. But at least the the field is aware uh of these weaknesses and is is trying to address them.
1:16:44So it's kind of interesting. Um, ultimately you're only able to measure, like you said previously, the skill, but you're trying to do a bunch of measures of different skills that correlate as you mentioned strongly with some general concept of cognitive ability.
1:17:00So what's the G factor?
1:17:03So right there are many different kinds of of tests tests of intelligence and uh each of them is interested in in uh different aspects of intelligence. you know, some of them will deal with language, some of them will deal with uh uh uh special vision, maybe mental rotations, numbers and so on. When you run these very different tests at scale, what you start seeing is that there are clusters of correlations among test results. So for instance, if you look at
1:17:32uh homework at school, um you will see that people who do well at math are also likely statistically to do well in physics. M and what's more uh there they also people do well at math and physics are also statistically likely to do well in things that sound completely unrelated like writing an an English essay for instance.
1:17:55And so when you see clusters of correlations uh in in statical statistical terms you would explain them with a laten variable. And the latent variable that would for instance explain uh the relationship between being good at math and being good at physics would be uh cognitive ability, right? And the G factor is the the latent variable that explains uh the fact that every test of intelligence that you can come up with
1:18:24results on that on on this test end up being correlated. So there is some uh single uh uh unique variable uh that that explains this correlation. That's the G factor. So it's a statistical construct. It's not really something you can directly measure for instance in a in a person. Um but it's there. It's there. It's there at scale. And that's also one thing I want to uh mention about psychometrics.
1:18:50like you know when when you talk about measuring intelligence in in humans for instance some people get a little bit worried they will say you know that sounds dangerous maybe that sounds potentially discriminatory and so on and they're not wrong and the thing is so personally I'm not interested in psychometrics as a way to characterize one uh individual person like if uh if I get your psychometric personality assessment or your IQ I don't think that
1:19:18actually tells me much uh about you as a person. I think psychometrics is most useful uh as a statistical tool. So it's most useful at scale. Uh it's most useful when you start getting test results for a large number of people and you start uh crosscorrelating these test results because that gives you information about the structure uh of the human mind in particular about the structure of human cognitive abilities.
1:19:46So at scale psychometric paints a certain picture of the human mind and that's interesting and that's what's relevant to AI the structure of human cognitive abilities. Yeah, G gives you an insight into I mean to me I remember when I learned about G factor it seemed um it it seemed like it would be impossible for it even it to be real even as a statistical variable like it felt uh kind of like astrology like it's like
1:20:16wishful thinking among psychologists but uh the more I learned I realized that there's some I mean I'm not sure what to make about human beings the fact that the G factor is a thing that there's There's a commonality across all of human species that there does seem to be a strong correlation between cognitive abilities.
1:20:33That's kind of fascinating.
1:20:35Yeah. So, human cognitive abilities have uh a structure like the the most mainstream theory of the structure of cognitive abilities is called CHC theory. So, cattle, horn, carol, it's named after the the three psychologists who contributed key pieces of it. And it describes uh cognitive abilities as a hierarchy with three levels. And at the top you have the G factor. Then you have broad cognitive abilities. Uh for instance fluid intelligence, right? Um
1:21:05that that encompass um a broad set of possible uh kinds of tasks that are all related. And then you have uh narrow cognitive abilities at the last level which is uh closer to task specific skill. And there are actually different theories uh of the structure of connectibilities. They just emerge from different statistical analysis of IQ test results. Uh but they all describe a hierarchy with a kind of G factor uh at the top.
1:21:37And you're right that the G factor is it's not quite real in the sense that it's not something you can observe and measure like your height for instance but it's real in the sense that you you see it in in a statistical analysis of the data right one thing I want to mention is that the fact that there is a G factor does not really mean that human intelligence is general in a strong sense does not mean human intelligence can can be applied to any problem at all
1:22:06and that someone who has a high IQ is going to be able to solve any problem at all. That's not quite what it means. I think um one uh one uh popular analogy to understand it is the sports analogy. Uh if you consider the concept of physical fitness, it's a concept that's very similar to intelligence because it's a useful concept. It's something you can intuitively understand. Some people are are fit uh maybe like you.
1:22:34Some people are not as fit, maybe like me. Um but none of us [clears throat] can fly.
1:22:40Constraint to a specific even if you're very fit, that doesn't mean you can do uh uh anything at all in any environment. You you obviously cannot fly, you cannot survive at the bottom of of the ocean and so on. And if if you were a scientist and you want you wanted to precisely define and measure physical fitness in humans, then you would come up with a battery uh of tests uh like you would you know have running 100 meter uh playing soccer, playing
1:23:08table tennis, swimming and so on. And uh if you run these tests over many different people, you would start seeing correlations [clears throat] in test results. For instance, people who are good at soccer are also good at at sprinting, right?
1:23:22And uh you would explain these correlations with uh physical abilities that are uh strictly analogous to cognitive abilities, right? And then you would start also observing uh correlations between uh biological uh uh characteristics like maybe lung volume is correlated with being a fast runner for instance. Uh in the same way that there there are neurophysical uh correlates uh of cognitive abilities,
1:23:49right? And at the top of the hierarchy of physical abilities that you would be able to observe, you would have a a G factor, a physical G factor, which would map to physical fitness, right? And uh as you just said, that doesn't mean that uh people with a with high physical fitness can fly. It doesn't mean uh human morphology and human physiology is universal. It's actually super specialized. We can only do the things
1:24:16um that we were evolved to do, right?
1:24:20Like we are not appropriate to to to you you could not exist on on Venus or Mars or in the void of space or the bottom of the ocean. So that said, one thing that's really striking and remarkable um is that uh uh our morphology uh generalizes far beyond the environments that we evolved for. Like in a way you could say we evolved to run after prey in the savannah, right?
1:24:49That's very much where our human morphology comes from. And that said, we we can we can do a lot of things that are that are completely unrelated to that. We can climb mountains. We can we can swim across lakes. Uh we can play table tennis. I mean table tennis is very different from what we were evolved to do. Right? Uh so our morphology, our bodies, our our senses are have a degree of generity that is
1:25:16absolutely remarkable, right? And I think cognition is very similar to that.
1:25:21Our cognitive abilities have a degree of generality that goes far beyond what the mind was initially supposed to do, which is why we can, you know, play music and write novels and and and go to Mars and do all kinds of crazy things. Uh, but it's not universal in the same way that human morphology and our body uh is not appropriate for actually most of the universe by volume. In the same way you could say that the human mind is not really appropriate for most of problem space potential problem space uh by
1:25:51volume. So we have very strong uh cognitive biases actually that mean that there are certain types of problems that we handle very well and certain certain types of problem that we are uh completely inadeed for. So that that's really how I would interpret uh the G factor. It's not a sign of strong generality.
1:26:12uh um it's it's really just a broader the broadest cognitive ability. uh but our abilities whether we are talking about sensory motor abilities uh or cognitive abilities they they still they remain very specialized in the human condition right within the constraints of the human cognition they're general yes absolutely so but the constraints as you're saying are very limited what's I think yeah limiting
1:26:40so we we evolved our cognition and our body evolved in in very specific environments because our environment was so variable, fast changing and so unpredictable. Part of the constraints that that drove our evolution is generality itself. So we were in a way evolved to to be able to improvise in all kinds of of physical or cognitive environments. Right.
1:27:03Um and for this reason it turns out that uh the the minds and bodies that we ended up with uh can be applied to much much broader scope than what they were evolved for. Right? And that's truly remarkable and that goes that's a degree of generalization that is far beyond anything you can see in artificial systems today. Right. Um that's said it it does not mean that that uh human intelligence is anywhere universal.
1:27:33Yeah. It's not general. You know it's a kind of exciting topic for people even you know outside of artificial intelligence is IQ tests there. I think it's Mensah, whatever.
1:27:45There's different degrees of difficulty for questions. We talked about this offline a little bit too about sort of difficult questions. You know, what makes a question on an IQ test more difficult or less difficult, do you think?
1:28:00So, the the thing to keep in mind is that there's no such thing as a question that's intrinsically difficult. It has to be difficult to suspect to the things you already know and the things you can already do. Right? So in in terms of an IQ test question, typically you would have uh it would be structured for instance as a set of demonstration input and output pairs, right? And then
1:28:28you would be given a test input, a prompt, and you you you would need to recognize or produce the corresponding output. And in that narrow context, you could say a difficult question uh is a question where um the input prompt is very surprising and unexpected given the the training examples.
1:28:53Just even the nature of the patterns that you're observing in the input problem. For instance, let's say you have a a rotation problem. You must rotate the shape by 90 degrees. If I give you two examples and then I give you one one uh prompt which is actually one of the two training examples, then there is zero generalization difficulty for the task. It's actually a trivial task. You just recognize that it's one one of the training examples and you probably the same answer. Now if it's a if it's a more complex shape there is
1:29:22you know a little bit more generalization but it remains that you are still doing the same thing at test time as you were uh being demonstrated at at training time. A difficult task is task that will require some amount of uh uh test time adaptation, some amount of uh improvisation, right? So, uh consider I don't know uh you you're teaching a class on like quantum physics or something. Um
1:29:50if uh if you wanted to kind of test the understanding that students have of the material, you would come up with uh an exam uh that's very different from anything they've seen like on the internet when they were cramming. Uh on the other hand, if you wanted to make it easy, you would just give them something that's uh very similar to the the mock exams that that they've taken, something
1:30:19that's just a simple interpolation of questions that they've they've already seen. And so that would be an easy exam. It's very similar to what you've been trained on. And a difficult exam is one that really probes your understanding because it forces you uh to improvise.
1:30:35it forces you to do things uh that are different from what you were exposed to before. So that said, it doesn't mean that the exam that requires improvisation is intrinsically hard, right? Because maybe you're you're quantum physics expert. So when you take the exam, this is actually stuff that despite being new to the students, it's not new to you, right? uh so it can only be difficult with respect to what the
1:31:03test taker already knows and with respect to the information that the test taker has about the task. So that's what I mean by controlling for prior what you the information you bring to the table and the experience and experience which is the training data. So in in the case of the the quantum physics exam that would be uh all the the the course material itself and all the mock exams that students might have taken online. Yeah, it's interesting because um so I've also I I
1:31:33sent you an email and I asked you like I've been this just this curious question of um you know what's a really hard IQ test question and I've been talking to also people who have designed IQ tests there's a few folks on the internet it's like a thing people are really curious about it first of all most of the IQ tests they designed they like religiously
1:31:59protect against the correct answers like you can't find the correct answers anywhere. In fact, the question is ruined once you know even like the approach you're supposed to take.
1:32:10So they're very that's said the the approach is implicit in in the training examples. So if you release the train examples, it's over.
1:32:18Well, which is why in ARC for instance, there's a test set that is private and no one has seen it. No, for really tough IQ questions, it's not obvious. It's not because the ambiguity like it's uh I you have to look through them, but like some number sequences and so on, it's not completely clear.
1:32:41Mhm. So like you can get a sense but there's like some you know when you look at a number sequence I don't know uh uh like your Fibonacci number sequence if you look at the first few numbers that sequence could be completed in a lot of different ways.
1:32:59And you know some are if you think deeply are more correct than others. Like there's a kind of um intuitive simplicity and elegance to the correct solution. Yes, I am personally not a fan of ambiguity in in test questions actually. But I think you can have difficulty uh without requiring ambiguity simply by making the test uh require a lot of extrapolation over the training examples.
1:33:26But the the beautiful question is difficult but gives away everything when you give the training example.
1:33:33Basically yes. meaning that so the the the tests I'm I'm interested in in creating are not necessarily difficult uh for humans because uh human intelligence is the benchmark uh they're supposed to be difficult uh for machines in ways that are easy for humans like I think an ideal uh test of human and machine intelligence is a test that is uh actionable uh that highlights uh the
1:34:03need for progress And that highlights the direction in which you should be making progress.
1:34:08I I I think we we'll talk about the arc challenge and the test you've constructed. You have these elegant examples. I think that highlight like this is really easy for us humans. Uh but it's really hard for machines. But on the you know the designing an IQ test for IQ's of like higher than 160 and so on, you have to say you have to take that and put it on steroids, right? You have to think like what is hard for humans.
1:34:35Mhm. And that's a fascinating exercise in in itself I think and it was an interesting question of what it takes to create a really hard question for humans because um you again have to do the same process as you mentioned which is uh you know something um basically where the experience that you have likely to have encountered
1:35:03throughout your whole life even even if you've prepared for IQ tests which is a big challenge that this will still be novel for you.
1:35:12Yeah, I mean novelty is a requirement.
1:35:14Uh you should not be able to practice for the questions that you're going to be tested on. That's important because otherwise what you're doing is not exhibiting intelligence. What you're doing is just retrieving uh what you've been exposed before. It's it's the same thing as a deep learning model. If you train a deep learning model on uh all the possible answers, then it will ace your test. In the same way that uh um you know uh a a stupid student uh can
1:35:43still ace the test if they cram for it.
1:35:46Uh they memorize uh you know 100 uh different possible mock exams and then they hope that the actual exam will be a very simple uh interpolation of the mock exams and that soon could just be a deep learning model at that point. But you can actually do that without any understanding of the material. And in fact, many students pass the exams in exactly this way. And if you want to avoid that, you need an exam that's unlike anything they've seen that really
1:36:13probes uh their understanding.
1:36:16So how do we design an IQ test for machines, an intelligent test for machines?
1:36:24All right. So in the paper I outline uh a number of requirements uh that you expect of such a test. Uh and in particular we should start by acknowledging the priors that we expect to be required in order to perform the test. So we should be explicit about the prior right. uh and if the goal is to compare machine intelligence and human intelligence then we should assume uh
1:36:51human cognitive bias right and uh secondly we should make sure that we have testing for skill acquisition ability uh skill acquisition efficiency in particular and not for skill itself meaning that every task featured in your test should be novel and should not be something that you can anticipate so for instance it should not be possible possible to uh brute force the space of possible questions, right? Uh to
1:37:19pre-generate every possible question and the answer. Um so it should be tasks that cannot be anticipated not just by the system itself but by the creators of the system. Right. Yeah. You know what's fascinating? I mean, one of my favorite aspects of the paper and the work you do with the arc challenge is um the the process of making priors explicit.
1:37:45Just even that act alone is a really powerful one of like what are it's a it's a really powerful question to ask of us humans. What are the priors that we bring to the table? H so the the next step is like once you have those priors how do you use them to uh solve a novel task but like just even making the priors explicit is a really difficult and really powerful step and and that that's like visually
1:38:14beautiful and conceptually philosophically beautiful part of the work you did with uh uh and I guess continue to do uh probably with the with the paper and the arc challenge. Can you talk about some of the priors that we're talking about here? Yes. So a researcher that has done a lot of work on what exactly uh um are the knowledge priors that that are innate to humans is Elizabeth Spelki from Harvard. Uh so uh
1:38:43she developed the core knowledge uh theory which uh outlines four different uh core knowledge systems. Uh so systems of knowledge that we are basically either born with or that we are um hardwired to acquire very early on in our development. And there's no uh there's no strong um distinction between the two. Like if you are
1:39:10um primed to acquire a certain type of knowledge uh in just a few weeks, you might as well just be born with it. It's just it's just part of of who you are. And so there are there are four different core knowledge systems. Like the first one is the notion of objectness and uh basic physics. Uh like you recognize that um something that moves uh corantly for
1:39:38instance is an object. So we intuitively naturally innately divide the world into objects based on this notion of coherence physical current and in terms of filamentary physics there's the the fact that uh uh you know objects can bump uh against uh uh each other and the fact that they can occlude uh each other. These are uh things that we are uh essentially born with or at least that we are going to be acquiring
1:40:07extremely uh early because we already hardwired to acquire them.
1:40:12So a bunch of points pixels that move together object are partly the same object.
1:40:19Yes. I mean it uh I mean that like I don't I don't smoke weed but if I did that's something I could sit like all night and just like think about. I remember when I first in your paper just objectness I wasn't self-aware I guess of how that particular prior that that's such a fascinating prior that like that's that's the most basic one but
1:40:47objectness just identity I just yeah objectness I it's it's very basic I suppose but it's so fundamental it is fundamental to human cognition and uh uh the second prior that's also fundamental is agentness which is not a real world a real world but so agentness the fact that some of these objects uh that you that you segment your environment into some of these objects
1:41:14are agents. So what's an agent? It's uh basically it's an object that has goals.
1:41:21Um so for instance that has goals this is capable of pursing goals. So for instance, if you see two dots um moving in a in a roughly synchronized fashion, you will intuitively infer that one of the dots is pursuing the other. So that one of the dots is uh and and one of the dots is an agent and its goal is to avoid the other dot and one of the dots the other dot is also an agent and its
1:41:49goal is to catch the first dot. Peli has shown that babies you know as young as as three months identify agentness and goal directedness uh in their environment. Another prior is uh basic uh you know geometry and topology uh like the notion of distance the ability to uh navigate uh uh in your environment and so on. This is something that is fundamentally hardwired
1:42:17uh into our brain. It's in fact backed by uh very specific neural mechanisms like for instance uh grid cells and plate cells. So it's it's something that's uh literally hardcoded at the at the neural level uh in our in our hypo campus. And the last prior uh would be the notion of numbers like numbers are not actually a cultural construct. we
1:42:43are intuitively innately able to do some basic counting and to compare quantities. Uh so it doesn't mean we can do arbitrary arithmetic uh uh counting the actual counting counting like counting one two threeish then maybe more than three. Uh you can also compare quantities if I give you uh u three dots and five dots you can tell the the the side with five dots has more dots. Uh so this is actually an innate
1:43:12uh prior. Um so that said the list may not be exhaustive. Uh so Spellelki is still uh uh uh you know pursuing uh uh the the potential existence of new knowledge systems for instance uh knowledge systems that would deal uh with social uh relationships.
1:43:34Yeah. Yeah. I mean and there could be which is which is much much less relevant uh uh to something like arc or IQ test in general right there could be stuff that's uh like like you said rotation or symmetry is a really interesting it's very likely that there is uh speaking about rotation that there is uh in the brain a hard-coded system that is capable of performing rotations.
1:43:58uh one one famous experiment uh that people did in the I don't remember uh who it was exactly but in the in the ' 70s uh was that people found that if you asked people if you give them uh two different shapes and one of the shapes is a rotated version of the first shape and you ask them is is that shape a rotated version of first shape or not.
1:44:23uh what you see is that the time it takes people to answer is linearly proportional right uh to the angle of rotation. So, it's almost like you have in somewhere in your brain like a a turntable um with a fixed speed and if you want to know if two two objects uh are orientated version of each other, you put the object on the turntable, you you let it move around a little bit and then you and then you stop when you have a
1:44:53match and and that that's really interesting.
1:44:56So, what's the arc challenge?
1:44:59So in in the paper I outline you know all these principles that a good test of machine intelligence and human intelligence should follow and the arc challenge is one attempt uh to embody as many of these principles as possible. So I don't think it's it's anywhere near uh a perfect attempt uh right it it does not actually follow every principle but it is uh what I was able to do given the given the constraints. So the format of
1:45:28uh ARC is very similar to classic IQ tests in particular Raven's progressive matrices.
1:45:34Raven yeah Raven's progressive matrices.
1:45:37I mean if if you've done IQ test in the past you know what it is probably or at least you've seen it even if you don't know what it's called. And so um you have a set of uh tasks. That's what they're called. And for each task you have um uh training data which is a set of input and output pairs. So uh an an input or output pair is a grid of colors. Basically the grid the size of the grids is variables is the size of
1:46:05the grid uh is variable [snorts] and um you're given an input and you must transform it into the proper output right and so you're shown uh a few demonstrations of a task in the form of existing input output pairs and then you're given a new input and you must provide you must produce um the correct uh output and Um the uh assumptions
1:46:34uh uh uh in ARC is that every task should only require uh core knowledge prior should not require any outside knowledge. So for instance uh no language uh no English nothing like this uh no concepts uh taken from uh uh our human experience like trees, dogs, cats and so
1:47:00on. So only uh uh tasks that are reasoning tasks that are built on top of core knowledge prior and some of the tasks are um actually explicitly trying to probe uh specific forms of abstraction right uh part of the reason why I wanted to create arc is I'm a big believer in you know
1:47:27when you're faced with uh a problem as murky as understanding how to autonomously generate abstraction in a machine, you have to co-evolve the solution and the problem. And so part of the reason why I designed art was to clarify my ideas about the nature of abstraction, right? And some of the tasks are actually designed to to probe uh bits of that theory. And there are
1:47:57things that are turn out to be very easy for humans to perform including young kids, right? But turn out to be near impossible for machines. So what have you learned from the nature of abstraction uh from from designing that like what can you clarify what you mean? One of the things you wanted to try to understand was this uh idea of abstraction.
1:48:22Yes. So clarifying uh my own ideas about abstraction by forcing myself to produce tasks that would require uh the ability to produce that form of abstraction in order to solve them. Got it. Okay. So, and by the way, just to I mean people should check out I'll probably overlay if you're watching the video part, but the the grid input output with the different colors on the grid.
1:48:50That's it. test. I mean it's a very simple world but it's kind of beautiful.
1:48:54It's it's very similar to classic IQ test like it's not very original in that sense. The main difference with IQ tests is that we make the prior explicit which is not usually the case in IQ test. So we make it explicit that everything should only be built on top of core knowledge prior. I also think it's generally uh more more diverse uh than IQ test in general. uh and it's it perhaps requires a bit more manual work to produce solutions because you have to
1:49:22to click around on a grid uh for a while. Sometimes the grids can be as large as 30 by 30 cells.
1:49:28So how did you come up um if you can reveal uh with the questions like what's the process of the questions? Was it mostly you that came up with the questions?
1:49:39What uh how difficult is it to come up with a question? like is this um scalable to a much larger number? If you think you know with IQ tests you might not not necessarily want it to or need it to be scalable.
1:49:53With machines it's possible you would could argue that it needs to be scalable.
1:49:58So there there are thousand questions tasks in yes wow including the test set the private test set. I think it's fairly difficult in the sense that a big requirement is that every task should be uh novel uh and unique and unpredictable, right? Like you don't want to create your your own little world that is uh simple enough that it would be possible for a human to
1:50:26reverse engineerate and write down an algorithm that could generate every possible arc task and their solution. for instance, that would completely invalidate the test. So, so you're constantly coming up with new stuff.
1:50:38You need Yeah, you need a source of novelty of u unfable novelty. And one thing I found is that as a human uh you are not a very good source of uh unfable novelty and so you have to pace the creation of these tasks quite a bit. There are only so many unique tasks that you can do in a given day.
1:51:02So that means coming up with truly original new ideas. Um did uh psychedelics help you at all? No, I'm just kidding. [laughter] But I mean that's fascinating to think about like so you would be like walking or something like that. You are you constantly thinking of something totally new?
1:51:19Yes. [laughter] I mean this is hard. This is hard.
1:51:24Yeah. I I I mean I I'm not saying I've done anywhere near perfect job at it.
1:51:29there is some amount of redundancy and there are many imperfections in arc. So that said you should you should consider arc as a work in progress. It is not uh the definitive state uh where the the arc tasks today are not definitive state of the test. I want to keep refining it um in the future. I also think uh it should be possible to open up the creation of tasks to a broad audience to do crowdsourcing.
1:51:57um that would involve several levels of filtering obviously but I think it's possible to apply crowd sourcing to to develop a much bigger uh and much more diverse arc data set that would also be free of potentially you know some of my own personal biases is there always need to be a part of arc that's uh the test like it's hidden yes absolutely it is imperative that uh the test set that you're using to
1:52:26actually benchmark algorithms is not accessible to the people developing these algorithms because otherwise what's going to happen is that uh the human engineers are just going to solve the tasks themselves and and encode their solution in program form. But that again what you're seeing here is the process of intelligence happening in the mind of the human and and then you're just uh capturing its crystallized output. But that crystallized output is not the same thing as the process that
1:52:55generated. So it's not intelligent in itself.
1:52:58So what uh by the way the idea of crowdsourcing it is fascinating. I think I think the creation of questions is really exciting for people. I think it I think there's a lot of really brilliant people out there that love to create these kinds of stuff.
1:53:12Yeah. Uh, one thing that uh that kind of surprised me that I wasn't expecting is that lots of people seem to actually enjoy ARC as a as a kind of game and I was really seeing it as as a test as a benchmark uh of uh of fluid general intelligence and lots of people just including kids just you know enjoying it as a game. So I think that's that's encouraging.
1:53:37Yeah, I'm I'm fascinated by there's a world of people who create IQ questions. Uh I think I think that's a cool uh that's a cool activity for machines and for humans and people humans are themselves fascinated by taking the questions like you know measuring their own intelligence. I mean that's just really compelling.
1:54:01It's really interesting to me too. It helps. One of the cool things about ARC, you said it's kind of uh inspired by IQ tests or whatever follows a similar process, but because of its nature, because of the context in which it lives, it immediately forces you to think about the nature of intelligence as opposed to just a test of your own like it forces you to really think there's I don't know if it's if it's within the question inherent in the question or just the fact that it lives in a test that's supposed to be a test
1:54:30of machine intelligence.
1:54:31Yes, absolutely. As you as you solve arc tasks as a human, uh you will uh be forced to basically introspect.
1:54:41How you how you come up with solutions and that forces you to reflect on uh the human problem solving process and the way your own mind uh generates uh uh abstract representations of the problems uh it's exposed to. uh I I think it's due to the fact that the set of core knowledge prior uh that arc is built upon is so small. It's all a re
1:55:10combination of a very very uh small set um of assumptions. Okay. So what's the future of ARC? So you you held ARC as a challenge as part of like a kegle competition. Yes.
1:55:23Kaggle competition.
1:55:25And u what do you think? Do you think this is something that continues for 5 years, 10 years, like just continues growing?
1:55:34Yes, absolutely. So, ARC itself uh will keep evolving. So, I've talked about crowdsourcing. I think that's a that's a a good avenue. Uh another thing I'm starting is um I'll be collaborating with folks uh from the psychology department at NYU uh to do human testing uh on ARC. And I think there are lots of interesting questions you can start asking especially as you uh start correlating um u machine solutions to
1:56:02arc tasks and uh and uh the human characteristics of solutions like for instance you can try to see if there's a a relationship between the human perceived difficulty of a task uh and the machine perceived yes and the and exactly some measure of machine perceived difficulty. Yeah, it's a nice play playground in which to explore this very difference. It's the same thing as we talked about all the autonomous vehicles.
1:56:25The things that could be difficult for humans might be very different than the things that absolutely and uh formalizing or making explicit that difference and difficulty will teach us something may teach us something fundamental about intelligence. So one thing I think we did well uh with ARC um is that it's proving to be a very uh actionable test in the sense that uh machine performance on ARC started at very much zero initially.
1:56:55Mhm. uh while you know humans found actually the the tasks very easy and that that alone was like a big red flashing light saying that something is going on and that we are missing something [snorts] and at the same time uh machine performance did not stay at zero for very long actually within two weeks of of the carol competition we started having uh an nonzero number and now the state-of-the-art is around uh
1:57:2220% of the test set uh solved Um and so ARC is actually a challenge where uh our our capabilities start at zero which indicates the need for progress but it's also not an impossible challenge. It's not accessible. You can start making progress uh basically right away. At the same time, uh we are still very far from having solved it. And that's actually uh a very positive outcome of the competition is that the
1:57:50competition has has proven that uh there was no obvious shortcut to solve these tasks, right?
1:57:58Yeah. So the test held up.
1:57:59Yeah. Exactly. It held up. That was the primary reason to do the Kaggle competition is to check if some some you know clever person was was going to hack uh the benchmark and that did not happen right like people who are solving the task are essentially doing it uh uh well in a way they they're actually exploring some flaws of ARC that we will need to address in the future especially they're essentially anticipating what sort of uh
1:58:27tasks may be contained in the test set right Right. Which is is kind of Yeah, that's the kind of hacking. It's it's human hacking of the test.
1:58:36Yes. That that said, you know, uh with the state of the art, it's like at 20%, we're still very very far uh from human level, which is closer to 100%. And so and I I do believe that you know it will it will take a while until we we reach human parity on ARC and that by the time we have human par we will have AI systems that are probably pretty close
1:59:04to human level in terms of general fluid intelligence which is I mean it's they're not going to be necessarily humanlike. They're not necessarily uh you would not necessarily recognize them as you know being an AGI uh but they would be capable of a degree of generalization uh that matches the generalization uh performed by human fluid intelligence.
1:59:28Sure. I mean this is a good point in terms of uh general flu intelligence to mention in your paper you describe different kinds of generalizations uh local broad extreme and there's a kind of a hierarchy that you form so when we say generalizations what what are we talking about what kinds are there right so uh generalization is is a very old idea I mean it's even older than machine learning in the context of
1:59:56machine learning you a uh a system generalizes if it can uh make sense of an input it has it has not yet seen uh and that's what I would call uh system ccentric uh generalization you generalization uh with respect to novelty uh for the specific system you're considering so I think a good test of intelligence should actually uh deal with uh developer aware generalization
2:00:26which is slightly stronger stronger than systemcentric generalization. So developer generalization, developer aware generalization would be uh uh the ability to generalize to novelty or uncertainty that not only the system itself has not access to but the developer of the system could not have access to either. That's that's a fascinating that's a fascinating meta definition. So like the system is uh it's it's basically the edge case thing we're talking about with
2:00:54autonomous vehicles. Yes. Yes, neither the developer nor the system know about the edge cases it might encounter. [laughter] So it's up to the g the system should be able to generalize the thing that that uh nobody expected neither the designer of the training data [snorts] nor obviously the contents of the training data. That's a fascinating definition.
2:01:17So you can see generalization degrees of generalization as a spectrum.
2:01:20Yeah. And the lowest level is uh what machine learning is trying to do is the assumption that uh any new situation is going to be sampled from a static distribution of possible situations and that you already have a representative sample of that distribution. That's your training data. And so in machine learning you generalize to a new sample from a known distribution. And the ways in which your new sample will be new or
2:01:49different uh are ways that are already understood by the developers of the system. So you are generalizing to known unknowns for one specific task. That's uh what you would call robustness. You are robust to things like noise, small variations and so on. um for one uh fixed known uh distribution that that you know through your training data and [snorts]
2:02:17um a higher degree would be uh flexibility in machine intelligence. So flexibility would be something like an L5 self-driving car or maybe a robot that can uh uh you know pass the the coffee cup test which is the the notion that you would be given a random kitchen [clears throat] uh somewhere in the country and you would have to you know go make a cup of coffee in that kitchen. Um all right so
2:02:45flexibility would be the ability to deal with unknown unknowns. So things that could not uh dimensions of variability that could not have been possibly foreseen uh by the creators of of the system within one specific task. So generalizing to the longtail of situations uh in self-driving for instance would be flexibility. So you have robustness, flexibility and finally we have extreme generalization which is basically flexibility but uh instead of
2:03:14just considering one uh specific domain like driving or domestic robotics, you're considering an open-ended range uh of possible domains. So um a robot would be capable of extreme generalization if let's say it's it's designed and trained [clears throat] uh to to for cooking for instance. Um and if I if I buy the robot and if I'm able uh if it's able uh to teach itself
2:03:43gardening in in a couple weeks it would be capable of extreme generalization for instance.
2:03:48So the ultimate goal is extreme generalization.
2:03:51Yes. So being uh creating a system that is so general that it could essentially achieve human skill parity over arbitrary task and arbitrary domains with the same level of you know improvisation and adaptation power as humans when when when it encounters new situations. and it would do so uh over basically the same range uh of possible domains and tasks uh as humans and using
2:04:19the essentially the same amount of of training experience of practice as humans would require that would be human level extreme generalization. So I I I don't actually think humans are are anywhere near uh the uh uh optimal intelligence bound if there is such a thing. Uh so I think for humans or in general in general I think it's it's quite likely you know that there is an a hard
2:04:47limit to how intelligent uh any system can be but at the same time I don't think humans are anywhere near that limit.
2:04:55Yeah. Last time I think we talked I think you had this idea that uh we're only as intelligent as the problems we face. sort of uh yes intelligence we are upper bounded by the problem. So in a way yes we are we are bounded by our environments and we are bounded by the problems we try to solve.
2:05:14Yeah. Yeah. What do you make of neural link and uh outsourcing some of the brain power like brain computer interfaces. Do you think we can expand our uh augment our intelligence?
2:05:30I am fairly skeptical. uh of uh neural interfaces because they're trying to fix one specific bottleneck in in human machine cognition which is [clears throat] the bandwidth bottleneck input and output of information uh in the brain and my perception of the problem is that bandwidth is not at this time a bottleneck at all. uh meaning that we
2:05:58already have senses that enable us to to take in far more information than what we can actually process. Well, to push back on that a little bit, uh to sort of play devil's advocate a little bit is if you look at the internet, Wikipedia, let's say Wikipedia, I would say that humans after the advent of Wikipedia are much more intelligent.
2:06:23I think that's a good one. But that that's also not about that's about um externalizing uh our intelligence via uh uh information processing systems external information processing systems which is very different from uh brain computer interfaces.
2:06:40Right? But the question is whether if we have direct access if our brain has direct access to Wikipedia without your brain already has direct access to Wikipedia. it's it's on your phone and you have your hands and your eyes and your ears and so on uh to access that information and the speed at which you can access it is bottleneck by the I think it's already close fairly close to optimal which is why speed reading for instance does not work
2:07:10the faster you read the less you understand but maybe it's because it uses the eyes so maybe um so I don't believe so I think you know the brain is very low um it typically operates you know at the fastest things that happen in the brain at the level of 50 milliseconds uh forming a conscious thought can potentially take entire seconds right and you can already read pretty fast so I think the speed at which you can uh uh
2:07:38take information in and even the speed at which you can output information can only be very incrementally improved maybe that's a I think if you're a very very fast typer If you're a very trained typer, the speed at which you can express your thoughts is already the speed at which you can form your thoughts. Right? So that's kind of an idea that that there are fundamental bottlenecks to the human mind. But it it's possible that the everything we have in the human
2:08:07mind is just to be able to survive in the environment and there's a lot more to expand. maybe you know you said this the speed of the thought so I I I think uh augmenting human intelligence is a very valid and very powerful avenue right and that's what computers are about in fact that's what you know all of culture and civilization is about they are uh culture is
2:08:35externalized cognition and we rely on culture to think constantly yeah yeah I mean that's that's another yeah that's not not just not just computers Not just phones and the internet. I mean all of culture like language for instance is a form of externalized cognition. Books are obviously externalized cognition.
2:08:54Yeah, that's a great and you you can scale uh that externalized cognition, you know, far beyond the capability of the human brain and you could see, you know, civil civilization itself is um it has capabilities that are far beyond any individual brain and we'll keep scaling it because it's not rebound by individual brains. It's a different kind of system.
2:09:18Yeah. And and that system includes nonhumans. First of all includes all the other biological systems which are probably contributing to the overall intelligence of the organism and then computers are part of it.
2:09:31Non-human systems probably not contributing much but AI are definitely contributing to that like Google search for instance is a big part of it.
2:09:42Yeah. A huge part a part we can't probably introspect like how the world has changed in the past 20 years. It's probably very difficult for us to be able to understand until of course whoever created the simulation we're in is probably doing metrics measuring the progress was there was probably a big spike in performance. Uh they're enjoying they're enjoying this.
2:10:08So what are your thoughts on um the touring test and the Lobna prize which is the you know one of the most famous attempts at the test of human intelligence uh sorry of artificial intelligence by uh doing a natural language open dialogue test that's test that's uh judged by humans as far as how well the machine did. So I'm I'm not a fan of the chunk
2:10:37test itself or any of its varants for two reasons. Uh so first of all it's um it's really copying out uh of trying to define and measure intelligence because it's entirely outsourcing that to a panel uh of human judges. And these human judges uh they may not themselves have have any proper methodology. They
2:11:06may not themselves have have any proper definition of intelligence. They may not be reliable. So the Trent is already failing uh one of the core psychometric principles which is reliability because you have uh biased uh uh human judges.
2:11:21Uh it's also violating the the standardization requirement uh and the freedom from bias requirement. And so it's really a coupout because you are outsourcing everything that matters which is precisely describing intelligence and finding a standalone test uh um to measure it. You're outsourcing everything to uh to people.
2:11:41So it's really a cool part. And by the way, uh we should keep in mind that uh when Turing proposed uh uh the imitation game, it was not meaning for the imitation game to be an actual uh goal for the field of AI, an actual test of intelligence. It was using uh it was using the imitation game as a uh thought experiment in a philosophical discussion in his in his uh 1950 paper. He was
2:12:10trying to argue that theoretically it should be possible uh for something very much like the human mind indistinguishable from the human mind to be encoded in a cheering machine. And at the time that was that was you know um u a very daring idea. It was stretching credul. But uh nowadays I think it's it's fairly well accepted that the the mind is an information processing system and that you could
2:12:39probably encode it into a computer. So another reason why I'm not a fan of this type of test is that it the incentives that it creates are incentives that are not conducive to proper uh scientific research. If your goal is to trick uh to convince a panel of human judges that they're talking to a human, then uh you
2:13:06have an incentive to rely on on tricks and preceditation.
2:13:12Um, in the same way that let's say you're doing physics and you want to solve teleportation and what if the test that you set out uh to pass is you need to convince a panel of judges that teleportation took place and and they're just sitting there and watching what you're doing. And that is uh uh something that you can achieve with you know David Copperfield could could achieve it in his in his show at Vegas, right? But is it and what it's doing is
2:13:40very elaborate but it's not actually it's not physics. It's not making any progress in our understanding of the universe. Right?
2:13:49To push back on that is possible. That's the hope with these kinds of subjective evaluations is that it's easier to solve it generally than it is to come up with tricks that convince a large number of objectives. That's the whole in practice. What it turns out that it's very easy to deceive people in the same way that you know you can you can do magic in Vegas. You can actually very easily convince people uh that they're talking to human when they're actually talking to an algorithm.
2:14:17I I just disagree. I disagree with that. I think it's easy. I I would I would push it's not easy. It's um it's doable.
2:14:25It's very easy because I wouldn't say it's very easy though.
2:14:27We are biased like we have theory of mind. We are constantly projecting emotions, intentions.
2:14:35Uh uh uh agentness. Agentness is one of our core in it prior, right? We are projecting these things on everything around us. Like if you if you paint a smiley on a rock, the rock becomes happy in our eyes. And because we have this uh extreme bias that permeates everything everything we see around us, it's actually pretty easy to trick people. I dis I so totally disagree with that.
2:15:02You're brilliantly put. There's a huge it the anthropomorphization that we naturally do, the agentness. I love that word. Is that a real word? But no, it's not a real word.
2:15:12I like it, but it's a good word. It's useful word.
2:15:14It's a useful word. Let's make it real.
2:15:16It's a huge help. But I still think it's really difficult to convince uh if you do like the Alexa prize formulation where you know you talk for an hour like there's formulations of the test you can create where it's very difficult. So I like I like the enterprise better because it's more pragmatic. It's more practical. It's actually incentivizing developers to create something that's useful as as a a human uh machine interface. Uh
2:15:45so that's slightly better than just the imitation.
2:15:48So I like your your um your idea is like a test which hopefully help us in creating intelligent systems as a result. Like if you create a system that passes it, it'll be useful for creating further intelligence systems.
2:16:02Yeah. I I mean I'm just to kind of comment I'm a little bit surprised how little inspiration people draw from the touring test today. You know, the the media and the popular press might write about it every once in a while. The philosophers might talk about it, but like most engineers are not really inspired by it. And I know I know you don't like the touring test, but uh we'll have this argument another time.
2:16:30[laughter] You know, I there's something inspiring about it. I think that should as as a as a philosophical device in a philosophical discussion, I think there is something very interesting about it. I don't think it is in practical terms.
2:16:42I don't think it's it's conducive to to progress. And one of the reasons why is that you know I think being very human like being indistinguishable from a human is actually the very last step in the creation of machine intelligence that the first AIS that will show strong uh generalization uh uh in in that will actually uh implement human like broad cognitive abilities. They will not actually behave
2:17:11or look anything uh like humans. Human likeness is the very last step in that process. And so a good test is a test that points you towards the first step uh on the ladder, not towards the top of the ladder. Right.
2:17:25Okay. So to push back on that, so I guess I usually agree with you on most things, I remember you, I think at some point tweeting something about the touring test not being counterproductive or something like that. And I think a lot of very smart people agree with that. I uh uh a uh you know uh computation speaking not very smart person uh disagree with that cuz I think there's some magic to the interactivity interactivity with other humans. So to
2:17:53push to play devil's advocate on your statement, it's possible that in order to demonstrate the the generalization abilities of a system, you have to show your abil in conversation, show your ability to adjust, adapt to the conversation through not just like as a standalone system, but through the process of like the interaction like game theoretic where the you're you really are changing
2:18:23the environment by your actions. So in the arc challenge, for example, you're an observer. You can't you can't scare the test into uh into changing. You can't talk to the test. You can't play with it. So there's some aspect of that interactivity that becomes highly subjective, but it feels like it could be conducive to I think you make a great point. the interactivity is a very good setting to force a system to show adaptation to
2:18:52show generalization. Uh that that said you at the same time uh it's not something very scalable because you rely on human judges. It's not something reliable because the human judges may not may not.
2:19:06So you don't like human judges basically. Yes. And I think so I I I love the idea of interactivity. Um, I initially wanted an ARC test uh that had some amount of interactivity where your score on a task would not be one or zero if you can solve it or not, but would be the number um of attempts [snorts] uh that you can make before you hit the right solution. Which means that now you can start applying the scientific method
2:19:35as you solve arc task that you can start formulating hypothesis and and and probing the system to see whether the the hypothesis the observation would match the hypothesis or not. It would be amazing if you could also even higher level than that measure the quality of your attempts which of course is impossible but again that's gets subjective like how good was your thinking like it's the yeah how efficient was so one one thing that's interesting about this notion of
2:20:04scoring you as how many attempts you need is that you can start producing tasks that are way more ambiguous right right because you can with the pro with the with the different attempts you can actually probe that ambiguity. Right.
2:20:20Right. So that's in a sense which yeah it's how good can you uh adapt to the uncertainty and u reduce the uncertainty.
2:20:32Yes. It's how fast with is the efficiency with which you reduce uncertainty in in program space.
2:20:39Very difficult to come up with that kind of test though.
2:20:41Yeah. So, uh I would love to be able to create something like this in practice. It would be it would be very very difficult. Yes.
2:20:48But, uh I mean what you're doing, what you've done with the arc challenge is is uh brilliant. I'm also not I'm surprised that it's not more popular, but I think it's picking up.
2:20:58It does it niche. It does it niche.
2:21:00Yeah. What are your thoughts about another test that I talked with Marcus Hutter? He has the harder prize for compression of human knowledge and the idea is really sort of quant quantify like reduce the test of intelligence purely to just ability to compress.
2:21:16What what's your thoughts about this intelligence as compression?
2:21:21I mean it's a it's a very uh fun test because it's it's such a simple idea like uh you're given Wikipedia basically English Wikipedia and you must compress it. And so it stems from um the idea that cognition is compression that the brain is basically a compression algorithm. This is a very old idea. It's a very I think striking and beautiful idea. I used to believe it. Uh I
2:21:49eventually had to realize that it was it was very much a flawed idea. So I no longer believe that compression uh is like cognition is compression. So but uh I can tell you what's the difference. So it's very easy to believe that cognition and compression are the same thing because uh so Jeff Hawkins for instance says that cognition is prediction and of course prediction is basically uh the same thing as compression right it's
2:22:15just um including the temporal axis um and it's very easy to believe this because compression is something that we do all the time very naturally we are constantly you know compressing information we are um constantly trying we have this bias towards simplicity. We we're constantly trying to organize things in our mind and around us uh to be more regular. Right? So uh it's it's a beautiful idea. It's very easy to
2:22:44believe. Uh there is a big difference between uh what we do with our brains and and compression. So compression is actually kind of a tool in the human cognitive toolkit that is is used in many ways but it's just a tool. It is not it is a tool for cognition. It is not cognition itself. And the big fundamental difference is that cognition is about being able uh to operate in
2:23:12future situations uh that include uh fundamental uncertainty and novelty. So for instance consider a child uh at age 10 and so they have 10 years of life experience. they've gotten, you know, pain, [clears throat] pleasure, rewards, and and and punishment in a period of time. Uh, if you were to generate the shortest behavioral program that would
2:23:39have basically run that child over this 10 years in an optimal way, right? The shortest uh optimal behavioral program given the experience of that child so far. Well, that program that that compress program this is what you would get if the mind of the child was a compression algorithm. Essentially um would be utterly uh unable uh inappropriate to process the next 70
2:24:07years uh uh in the in the life of that child. So uh in the models we we build of the world we are not trying to make them actually optimally compressed. We are we are using compression uh as a tool to promote simplicity and efficiency in our models. But they are not perfectly compressed because they need to include things that are seemingly useless today that have
2:24:34seemingly been useless so far but that may turn out to be useful in the future because you just don't know the future.
2:24:42And that's that's the fundamental principle uh that cognition that intelligence arises from is that you need to be able to run appropriate behavioral programs except you have absolutely no idea what sort of context environment and situation they're going to be running in and you have to deal with that with that uncertainty with that future novelty. So an analogy uh an analogy that you can make is uh with investing for instance. Um if I look at
2:25:11the past uh uh you know 20 years of stock market data and I use a compression algorithm to figure out the best trading strategy, it's going to be you know you buy Apple stock then maybe the past few years you buy Tesla stock or something. Um but is that strategy still going to be true for the next 20 years? Well, actually, probably not. Uh, which is why if you're a smart investor, you're not you're not just going to be
2:25:39following uh the strategy that that corresponds to compression of the past. Uh you're going to be following uh uh you're going to have a balanced portfolio.
2:25:50Uh right. Because totally new things. I mean I guess in that same sense the compression is analogous to what you talked about which is like local or robust generalization versus extreme generalization. It's much closer to that side of uh being able to generalize in in the local sense. That's why you know as humans as uh when we are when we are children um in our education so a lot of it is driven by play it's driven by curiosity
2:26:20uh we we are not efficiently compressing things we're actually exploring we are um retaining all kinds of u uh uh things from our environment that that that seem to be completely useless because they might uh turn out to be eventually useful, right? And it's it's that's what cognition is really about and that what makes it antagonistic to compression is that it is about hedging for future
2:26:49uncertainty and that's to compression. [laughter] Yes, so cognition leverages compression as a tool to promote uh to promote efficiency, right? uh intensity in in our models.
2:27:04It's like Einstein said uh make it simpler but not however that quote goes but not too simple. So you want to compression simplifies things but you don't want to make it too simple.
2:27:16Yes. So uh a good model of the world is going to include all kinds of things that are completely useless actually just because just in case. Yes. Yes, because you need diversity in the same way that in your portfolio, you need all kinds of stocks that that may not have performed well so far, but you need diversity. And the reason you need diversity is because fundamentally you don't know what you're doing. And the same is true of the human mind is that it needs to to behave appropriately in a future and it has no idea what the future is going to be like. It's but
2:27:46it's not going to be like the past. So compressing the past is not appropriate because the past is not uh um is not predictive of the future. Yeah, history repeats itself but not perfectly. I don't think I asked you last time [clears throat] the most inappropriately absurd question. We've talked a lot about intelligence. Uh but you know the bigger question from intelligence is of meaning.
2:28:17you know, intelligent systems are kind of goal oriented. There's they're always optimizing for a goal. If you look at the hotter prize actually, I mean, there's always there's always a clean formulation of a goal. But um the natural questions for us humans since we don't know our objective function is what is the meaning of it all? So the absurd [snorts] question is what uh Francois do you think is the meaning of life?
2:28:42What's the meaning of life? Yeah, that's a that's a big question. Um and I think I can I can you know give you my answer or at least one of my answers. And so you know the one thing that's uh very important uh in understanding who we are is that everything that makes up uh uh that makes up ourselves that makes up who we are even even your most personal thoughts is not actually your own.
2:29:15Right? Like even your most personal thoughts are expressed in words that you did not invent and are built on concepts and images that you did not invent. We are very much uh cultural beings, right?
2:29:31We are we are made of culture. We're not that what makes us different from animals for instance, right? So we are everything about ourselves is an echo of the past, an echo of people who lived uh before us, right? That's who we are. And in the same way, if we manage to contribute something to the collective edifice of culture, um a new idea, maybe a beautiful piece
2:30:00of music, a work of art, a grand theory, uh a new words maybe, um that something is is going to become a part uh of the minds of future humans essentially forever. So everything we do creates ripples, right? That propagates into the future. And I I and that that's in a way this is this is our our path to
2:30:27immortality is that as we contribute things to culture, culture in turn in turn becomes uh future humans and we keep influencing people you know uh thousands of years from now. So our actions today create reports and these reports I think basically sum up the meaning of life. Like in the same
2:30:54way that we are the the sum um of the interactions between many different reports that came from our past. We are ourselves creating reports that will propagate into the future. And that's why, you know, we should be, this seems like perhaps an a thing to say, but we should be kind to others during our our time uh on earth because every act of kindness creates ripples and and in
2:31:22reverse, every act of violence also creates ripples and you want you want to carefully choose which kind of ripples you want to create and you want to propagate into the future. And in your case, first of all, beautifully put, but in your case, creating ripples into the future human and future AGI systems.
2:31:44Yes, it's fascinating.
2:31:45All six successes. [laughter] I don't think there's a better way to end it. Francois, as always, for a second time, and I'm sure many times in the future, it's been a huge honor. You're one of the most brilliant people in the machine learning, computer science, science world. Again, it's a huge honor. Thanks for talking today.
2:32:06It It's been a pleasure. Thanks a lot for having me. Really appreciate it.
2:32:10Thanks for listening to this conversation with Fran Swash Olay. And thank you to our sponsors, Babel, MasterClass, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
2:32:23If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freriedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Renee Deart in 1668, an excerpt of which Francois includes in his on the measure of intelligence paper. If there were machines which bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as possible for
2:32:51all practical purposes, we should still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not real men. The first is that they could never use words or put together signs as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others.
2:33:06For we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words and even utters words that correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs. But it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence as the dullest of men can do. Here Dart is anticipating the touring test and the argument still continues to this day.
2:33:35Secondly, he continues, even though some machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others, which would reveal that they're acting not from understanding, but only from the disposition of their organs.
2:33:53This is incredible quote. For whereas reason is a universal instrument which can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need some particular action. Hence, it is for all practical purposes impossible for machine to have enough different organs to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act. That's the debate between mimicry, memorization versus understanding.
2:34:23So, thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.