Adam Marblestone – AI is missing something fundamental about the brain
Episode publishedPodcast: Dwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Podcast
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The big million dollar question that I have that I've been trying to get the answer to through all these interviews with the AI researchers, how does the brain do it? Right? Like, we're throwing way more data at these LLMs and they still have a small fraction of the total capabilities that a human does. So what's going on?
Yeah. I mean, this might be the quadrillion dollar question or something like that. It's it's it's arguable you can make an argument this is the most important, you know, question in science. I don't claim to know the answer. I I also don't really think that the answer will necessarily come even from a lot of smart people thinking about it as much as they are. My my overall, like, meta level take is that we have to empower the field of neuroscience to just make neuroscience a a more powerful field technologically and otherwise to actually be able to crack a question like this. But maybe the th
You know, people will say, like, the cortex has got the universal human learning algorithm, the special science that humans have. What's up with that?
A huge question, and we don't know. I've seen models where what the cortex, you know, the cortex has typically this, like, six layered structure layers in a slightly different sense than layers of a neural net. It's like any one location in the cortex has six physical layers of tissue as you go in layers of the sheet. And then those areas then connect to each other, and that's more like the layers of a network. I've seen versions of that where what you're trying to explain is actually just how does it approximate back prop. Yeah. And what is the cost function for that? What is the network bein
Based on my higher level understanding of, like, I can match, somebody has told me there's a spider on my to this lizard part that would activate if I was like literally seeing a spider in front of me. And that you you learn to associate the two so that even just from somebody hearing you say, there's a spider on your back.
Yeah. Let's well, let's come back to this. And this this is partly having to do with with Steve Byrne's theories, which I'm recently obsessed about.
But Yeah.
But on your podcast with Ilya, he said, look. I'm not aware of any any good theory of how evolution encodes high level desires or intentions. I think this is, like, this is, like, very connected to to to all of these questions about the loss functions and the cost functions that the brain would use, and it's a really profound question. Right? Like like, let's say that I am embarrassed for saying the wrong thing on your podcast because I'm imagining that Young Lakun is listening, and he says, that's not my theory. You describe energy based models really badly. That's gonna enact activate in me
Differentiatory researchers are coming for you, Adam.
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