Ilya Sutskever

And for things like vision, hearing, and locomotion, I think there's a pretty strong case that evolution actually has given us a lot.

So, for example, human dexterity far exceeds...

Robots can become dexterous too if you subject them to like a huge amount of training and simulation.

But to train a robot in the real world to quickly like pick up a new skill like a person does seems very out of reach.

And here you could say, oh yeah, like locomotion, all our ancestors needed great locomotion, squirrels like...

So locomotion may be like, we've got like some unbelievable prior.

You could make the same case for vision.

You know, I believe Yann LeCun made the point, oh, like children learn to drive after 10 hours of practice, which is true.

But our vision is so good.

At least for me, when I remember myself being five-year-old, I was very excited about cars back then.

And I'm pretty sure my car recognition was more than adequate for self-driving already as a five-year-old.

You don't get to see that much data as a five-year-old.

You spend most of your time in your parents' house.

So you have very low data diversity.

But you could say maybe that's evolution too.

But then language and math and coding, probably not.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.

What I meant to say is that language, math and coding, and especially math and coding, suggests that whatever it is that makes people good at learning is probably not so much a complicated prior, but something more, some fundamental thing.

So consider a skill that people exhibit some kind of great reliability or, you know... Yeah.

If the skill is one that was very useful to our ancestors for many millions of years, hundreds of millions of years, you could say, you could argue that maybe humans are good at it because of evolution, because we have a prior, an evolutionary prior that's encoded in some very non-obvious way that somehow makes us so good at it.