flâneur

Armaan Goel

10 followers · 13 following · 436 views

on the atlas — 21

highlights — 17

  • Generative Anthropology
    Introduction to Center Study | Center Study Center
  • We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered
    The Bitter Lesson
  • instead we should build in only the meta-methods that can find and capture this arbitrary complexity
    The Bitter Lesson
  • Modern deep-learning neural networks use only the notions of convolution and certain kinds of invariances, and perform much better.
    The Bitter Lesson
  • Again, the statistical methods won out over the human-knowledge-based methods.
    The Bitter Lesson
  • Learning by self play, and learning in general, is like search in that it enables massive computation to be brought to bear. Search and learning are the two most important classes of techniques for utilizing massive amounts of computation in AI research.
    The Bitter Lesson
  • These researchers wanted methods based on human input to win and were disappointed when they did not.
    The Bitter Lesson
  • general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin
    The Bitter Lesson
  • I hope we eventually come up with a new term for this sort of black-box prediction method, not because it’s better or worse than science, but because it’s different.
    The third magic - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  • f you have enough data, you can create a model (or, if you prefer, an “AI”) that can encode many (all?) of the fantastically complex rules of human language, and apply them to conversations that have never existed before.
    The third magic - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  • He demonstrated that in a number of domains, what he calls “algorithmic” models (early machine learning techniques) were yielding consistently better predictions than what he calls “data models”, even though the former were far less easy, or even impossible, to interpret.
    The third magic - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  • Collapsing observed phenomena to simple, generalizable laws and then expanding these laws again in some other domain to allow you to control other phenomena is fundamental to the awesome power of science.
    The third magic - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  • Wigner goes so far as to postulate that some domains of human knowledge might never be described by such simple, generalizable principles.
    The third magic - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  • Some hoped that all complex phenomena would be governed by emergent properties — that simplicity would emerge at higher levels of complexity, allowing us to discover simple laws for things like psychology and economics even without connecting those laws to the underlying physics. Indeed, this idea is implicit (or, occasionally, explicit) in the way economists try to write down simple mathematical laws of collective human behavior.
    The third magic - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  • “Science", by contrast, is about figuring out generally applicable principles about how the world works.
    The third magic - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  • History, especially written history, is what allows tinkering to stick — it means that when one human finds an ingenious new way of doing something, there’s a good chance that many other humans, and eventually all humans, will know how to do it.
    The third magic - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  • The most important of these are the things we call “general purpose technologies”. But I think that at a deeper level, there are more profound and fundamental meta-innovations that underlie even those things, and these are ways of learning about the world.
    The third magic - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion