Dr. Jeff Beck

Yes, and that's why this as-if phrase comes up a lot, right?

I mean, it's important to remember that no matter how clever your model is and no matter how clever your approach is and how clever the words are that you use to describe it, a lot of this stuff is as-if, right?

This is the best model, right?

This is why I repeat this over and over again.

grind it into the students, right?

Is that, you know, science is about like prediction and data compression and like nothing else.

And the same thing is going on here, right?

You'll never, you know, just looking at behavior, you'll never know for sure in any meaningful way, like whether or not it's just doing a function transformation or whether it's engaged in planning and counterfactual reasoning.

But if your best model of it

If you sort of say, well, I tried to model as a function transfer agent, but God damn it, it had a lot of parameters, right?

But then I tried to model it as something that was just doing Monte Carlo tree search on the inside and giving the answer.

And that had like, you know, 40 parameters.

And it's like, well, that's the model I'm going to go with.

Oh, is this like if I uploaded my brain onto a computer and didn't connect it to the world, would it still be thinking even though it's doing all of those things?

Is that the idea here?

Because I'm the agent.

And if you upload it, no, I don't know.

So if you do a high-fidelity computer simulation and you put it in my body, then I think I would have to say it's an agent.

Yeah.

Right?