Francois Chollet

And it's not just some semantic difference.

The big difference is that you can never...

pre-trained on everything that you might see at test time, right?

Because the world changes all the time.

So it's not just the fact that the space of possible tasks is infinite.

And even if you're trained on millions of them, you've only seen zero percent of the total space.

It's also the fact that the world is changing every day, right?

This is why we, the human species, has developed intelligence in the first place.

If there was such a thing as a distribution for the world, for the universe, for our lives, then we would not need intelligence at all.

In fact, many creatures, many insects, for instance, do not have intelligence.

Instead, what they have is they have in their connectome

in their genes, hard-coded programs, behavioral programs that map some stimuli to appropriate response.

And they can actually navigate their lives, their environment in a way that's very evolutionary fits that way without needing to learn anything.

And while if our environment was static enough, predictable enough, what would have happened is that evolution would have found the perfect behavioral program, a hard-coded static behavioral program would have

written it into our genes, we would have a hard-coded brain connectome, and that's what we would be running on.

But no, that's not what happened.

Instead, we have general intelligence.

So we are born with extremely little knowledge about the world, but we are born with the ability to learn very efficiently and to adapt in the face of things that we've never seen before.

And that's what makes us unique.

And that's what is really, really challenging to recreate in machines.