Tom Griffiths

is that it's going to not only make it possible for those neural networks to learn from less data.

And so some of the energy concerns and so on that are involved in training those models might get better.

And maybe they'll actually be able to learn even more impressive things when you give them the 5,000 years of data.

But it also means that those systems are going to make more sense to humans.

The two things I would say are the big differences that we see between human minds and our current AI systems are, one of these is about an inductive bias, ability to learn from small amounts of data.

And the other is about generalizability, where you can have an AI system that's very good at solving one problem and then fails quite spectacularly on a problem that's right next to it.

I think we've all had that experience of the AI system seems very smart and then does something very weird.

And this has been called jagged intelligence by various people, and that's

a interesting frontier for AI researchers trying to figure out is how do we understand what those jagged boundaries look like and how do we make our systems better?

I think cognitive science is actually a really good tool for trying to answer those kinds of questions.

But one thing that might happen is that

If we create AI systems that have inductive biases that are more similar to people, then the solutions that they're going to find when they're trained on the data that they get would be more like the kinds of solutions that humans find too, right?

So you can kind of think about it as your AI system is your blank slate.

Okay, it takes 5,000 years of speech to get it to the point where your five-year-old gets to.

But that might not actually be the same point.

It might, from the outside, look similar in that they're both doing a good job of using and producing language.

But on the inside, it might be quite different.

And there's some weird path that it's found that gets it to the point where it's able to do a good job of using language.

But it's just a very weird solution from our perspective.

And in fact, some of the analyses we've done in my lab suggest that that's the case.