The space of minds | karpathy

The space of intelligences is large and animal intelligence (the only kind we've ever known) is only a single point (or a little cloud), arising from a very specific kind of optimization that is fundamentally distinct from that of our technology. Above: humorous portrayals of human vs. AI intelligences can be found on X/Twitter, this one is among my favorites. Animal intelligence optimization pressure: Meanwhile, LLM intelligence optimization pressure: The computational substrate is different (transformers vs. brain tissue and nuclei), the learning algorithms are different (SGD vs. ???), the present-day implementation is very different (continuously learning embodied self vs. an LLM with a knowledge cutoff that boots up from fixed weights, processes tokens and then dies). But most importantly (because it dictates asymptotics), the optimization pressure / objective is different. LLMs are shaped a lot less by biological evolution and a lot more by commercial evolution. It's a lot less s

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• Kevin Xu