Dwarkesh

Right now, AI is much less data efficient than humans.

I think of superintelligence, I mean, there are different ways you could achieve it, but I would think of superintelligence as partly like when they become so much more data efficient than humans that they are able to build on...

cultural evolution more quickly.

And I mean, partly they do this just because they have the higher serial speed.

Partly they do it because they're in this hive mind of hundreds of thousands of copies.

But yeah, I think if you have this data efficiency such that, like, you can learn things more quickly from fewer examples, and like this good research taste where you can decide what things to look at to get these examples, then you are still going to start off much worse than

an Australian aborigine who has the advantage of, let's say, 50,000 years of doing these experiments and collecting these examples, but you can catch up quickly.

You can distribute the task of catching up over all of these different copies.

You can learn quickly from each mistake, and you can build on those mistakes as quickly as anything else.

Yeah, so I mean, I think a limit to the fakeness is that there is different intelligence among humans.

It does seem that intelligent humans can do things that unintelligent humans can't.

So I think it's worth then addressing this from the question of like, what is the difference between...

I don't know, becoming a Harvard professor, which is something that intelligent humans seem to be better at than unintelligent humans versus... You don't want to open that can of worms.

...versus surviving in the wilderness, which is something where it seems like intelligence doesn't help that much.

First of all, maybe intelligence does help that much.

Maybe, like...

Henrik is talking about this very unfair comparison where these guys have a 50,000-year head start, and then you put this guy in, and you're like, oh, I guess this doesn't help that much.

Okay, yeah, it doesn't help against the 50,000-year head start.

I don't really know what we're asking of ASI that's equivalent to competing against someone with a 50,000-year head start.

Yeah, so I think that if you were to send a team of ethnobotanists into Australia and ask them, using all the top technology and all of their intelligence, to figure out which plants are safe to eat now, that team of ethnobotanists would succeed in fewer than 50,000 years.