Dwarkesh Patel

Why not 50 years?

This is actually quite interesting.

I want to hear not only the history, but what people in the room felt was about to happen at various different levels.

breakthrough moments, what were the ways in which their feelings were either overly pessimistic or overly optimistic?

Should we just go through each of them one by one?

Interesting.

Yeah, I guess if I were to steel man the sort of sudden perspective would be that humans actually can just take on everything at once, right?

Even animals can take on everything at once, right?

Animals are maybe a better example because they don't even have the scaffold of language.

They just get thrown out into the world and they just have to make sense of everything without any labels.

And the vision for AGI then should just be something which just looks at sensory data, looks at the computer screen, and it just figures out what's going on from scratch.

I mean, if a human was put in a similar situation, that would be trained from scratch.

But I mean, this is like a human growing up or an animal growing up.

So why shouldn't that be the vision for AI rather than this thing where we're doing millions of years of training?

I think that's a really good question.

Can you repeat the last sentence?

A lot of that intelligence is not motor tasks, that's what, sorry?

I'm going to take a second to digest that because there's a lot of different ideas.

Maybe one clarifying question I can ask to understand the perspective.

So I think you suggest that, look, evolution is doing the kind of thing that pre-training does in the sense of building something which can then understand the world.