imo it’s important to note that the optical technique they used recovers the original text from recycled parchment (called a palimpsest). There are thousands of texts like that in libraries all over the world?? so imagine applying this technique to all those documents!

needs a snack and a shower

In english these are called savoury crepes.

you have the skills of the best dwarven craftsmen

love this

Yea eventually the emergent properties should be mostly contained in the self supervised training signal. So a question of how the model learns not necessarily its construction. As the bot learns more it can start to identify priority tasks to infer, and then this process just continues. The thing we’re taking for granted is the environment that supplies all the stimulus from which self awareness could be learned.

As others have stated I’d prefer to see land use vs. biomass or land use vs. nutritional output (caloric value). You can’t eat money.

it’s just a neural net. An assistant. Did you read the paper? It’s not coming for you, and I think it’s really selfish to try to stop research that could help so many. Machine learning in medicine is a big thing.

I have always considered something approaching sentience could be made by having a network operating on top of smaller task specific nets. Now operating on the activations of all these smaller nets could give the ‘sentient’ net a sense of of the world around it because it has access to information. It can modulate each of the smaller slave nets on the fly based on previous experiences to make a decision. It can also identify the most pressing to task to make a decision about in its surrounding environment. That’s what LeCun is suggesting in this scholarly op-ed, it’s not a new idea, more a question of computing power.

afaik we haven’t clearly defined what sentience is yet, if an ai bot can trick you into believing it’s sentient then what else is there? I guess this would just show we have an information processing limit and once another entity approaches that limit we are fooled. This is a question for the humanities to answer probably.