A Brief History of Biological and Artificial Intelligence with Max Bennett

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
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**Nathan Labenz** (0:45)
Is there going to be an artificial general intelligence? Is there a single principle on which intelligence in general will emerge? Or are we actually going to wake up in a decade or two decades and realize that there really was no such thing as AGI? There's different degrees of generalization that occurs across tasks, sure. But all entities are specialized for a specific suite of tasks that they're going to face. The problem with fine-tuning is you very quickly get this overfitting issue where it ends up overfitting to the small fine-tuning data set and it loses its generalization. It's forgetting all tasks that it was able to do. This is it. I don't think this is a nuance edge case. I think this is a foundational problem of the way these models work. How does the mammal brain decide when to incorporate new information and how to add it to my model of the world without interfering with other information is a huge outstanding area of research that I think is a key difference between how mammal brains are sort of simulating and modeling the world and how existing AI systems are doing it. Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence.
Each week we'll explore their revolutionary ideas and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today I'm speaking with Max Bennett, co-founder of Bluecore and author of A Brief History of Intelligence, Evolution, AI, and The Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains.
I bought this book immediately upon seeing the title, because I've been asking myself for some time now, how many conceptual breakthroughs do we still need before AI systems will achieve functional parity with humans?
The answer, of course, is that I really don't know. I would be surprised, but not totally shocked, if it turned out that attention really is all we need and that hyperscaling resolves all practical problems with no major architectural innovations.
And on the other hand, I would again be very surprised if the number of breakthroughs needed turns out to be more than five.
My best guess would be two or three, but that leaves major follow-up questions, like what are the critical things that humans are doing which AI systems are not yet capable of?
Are physical embodiment and multimodal inputs necessary to our overall cognition, or are they just an artifact of our evolutionary history?
How is it that we represent memories so efficiently and so usefully such that even a single experience can shape our behavior for life?
How do we determine what new information to incorporate into our world models, what to reject, and what to remain uncertain about?
Where does theory of mind come from, and is it necessary for adversarial robustness?
And is some sort of hierarchical self-modeling needed for effective planning, and perhaps more importantly for subjective conscious experience?
These are huge questions, and as AI systems become more powerful and behave on the surface at least in more human-like ways, I believe it's also increasingly important to understand the key similarities and differences between human and AI cognition in the most literal, mechanistic terms possible.
For that purpose, this conversation and the book on which it's based are extremely valuable resources.
I definitely find myself referring back to the five breakthroughs that Max outlines as a lens through which to ponder new developments in AI.
Of course, biological systems are extremely messy and constrained in ways that engineered systems are not. Whereas life has to maintain homeostasis continuously, AI models are mostly decoupled from specific hardware, and humans maintain the data centers.
And whereas evolution can only select for incremental changes which improve inclusive genetic fitness, human engineers can and sometimes do discover discontinuous step change advances.