Pascal Kaufmann

Neuro scientist-turned-entrepreneur & founder of @Starmind and @mindfire_global. Pushing the limits of the unknown, devoted to the creation of man-like AI.

[Pascal Kaufmann @PascalKaufmann]

Interview from New York about Starmind International AG , #AI, Mindfire Foundation and the #BrainCode - talents must unite. https://t.co/tzRUr0waoR

[China Xinhua News @XHNews]

At the just concluded Europe-Asia Economic Summit (EAES) in Davos, Switzerland, many European tech leaders hailed China's advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and expected closer collaboration with China in AI innovation and application. #GLOBALink

[The Humanoid Hub @TheHumanoidHub]

New video of Protoclone by Clone Robotics – a synthetic human with over 200 degrees of freedom and over 1,000 artificial muscles.

It’s gonna look wild once it starts walking.

[Pascal Kaufmann @PascalKaufmann]

We will. #mindfire

[François Chollet @fchollet]

Intelligence is not some ineffable mystery, nor will it spontaneously emerge if you pray awhile to a big enough datacenter. We can understand it, and we will.

[Pascal Kaufmann @PascalKaufmann]

Well said @fchollet

[François Chollet @fchollet]

I believe that a clear understanding of intelligence at the level of fundamental principles is not just possible, but necessary for the development of AGI.

[Pascal Kaufmann @PascalKaufmann]

Meet me tonight at Switzerland’s national TV Arena @SRF discussing about the future of AI. @mindfire_global
https://t.co/F5qMGM1BJD

[Pascal Kaufmann @PascalKaufmann]

@fchollet crisp and clear - I can only second @fchollet - well said.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

My views on nature vs nurture:

1. Humans are intelligent from the very beginning. From the first year of their life, they have a high ability to adapt to new situations and efficiently acquire new skills.

2. Almost all knowledge is acquired. Humans are born with very little prior knowledge about the world. They don't have a pre-trained visual system -- they must learn to see. They don't have a pre-trained gait-generation program -- they must learn to walk. Etc.

3. Early knowledge/skills acquisition is strongly guided by metacognitive priors, which is why everyone acquires essentially the same Core Knowledge foundations, under roughly the same timeline, despite experiencing very different environments.

4. How intelligent you are is largely determined by your genes -- it's how your brain is wired. Environmental factors (pollutants, malnutrition, sensory deprivation, trauma...) can lower your intelligence but cannot meaningfully increase it.

5. Intelligence decreases with age. My 3 year old is smarter than me. Which makes perfect sense, because as you age you can trade-off fluid intelligence for crystallized skills. The less you know the more valuable intelligence is.

[Pascal Kaufmann @PascalKaufmann]

@fchollet couldn’t agree more -> https://t.co/zwTgS1QIJb

[François Chollet @fchollet]

Before eventually morphing into a mystical quest to create the Philosopher's Stone, Alchemy started in Hellenistic Egypt as a collection of chemical recipes for creating fake gold and fake gemstones.

Besides the parallels between later-days Alchemy and the modern quest for AGI, I'm stuck by the parallels between early Alchemy and the Turing test.

"Can we engineer our way towards fooling at least some people into believing they're holding a chunk of real gold?" vs "can we engineer our way towards fooling at least some people into believing they're talking to a human?"

[Pascal Kaufmann @PascalKaufmann]

https://t.co/WJDppgwjUL @ylecun playing the cow bells during Global Swiss AI Award Ceremony at WEF in Davos

[Pascal Kaufmann @PascalKaufmann]

@fchollet well said @fchollet 👍

[François Chollet @fchollet]

When you talk to young folks, they think that the belief in imminent AGI was caused by the rise of LLMs. In reality, this belief is axiomatic and long predates LLMs. DeepMind, Vicarious were founded in 2010 based on this belief. OpenAI in 2015. Interest in LLMs only began in 2019.

In 2015, when deep learning was in its infancy and LLMs were years away, many folks were just as convinced that AGI was around the corner as they are today. The only thing that changed is that people are now anchoring these beliefs on LLMs, whereas in 2015 they were looking to Deep RL, LSTMs, and Neural Turing Machines.

[Polynomial C @PolynomialXYZ]

@DeepMind When #Singularity comes I would prefer to stay away from here😅

[Pascal Kaufmann @PascalKaufmann]

https://t.co/NYjQgIvZAF

[Pascal Kaufmann @PascalKaufmann]

@fchollet Love it 😂 - well said @fchollet

[Pascal Kaufmann @PascalKaufmann]

Interesting discussion on ChatGPT-4‘s failure on solving some of the simplest programmer tasks - with a great comment by @fchollet ;) @Lab42_global

[François Chollet @fchollet]

When I was a student, my performance would also increase significantly when I was able to procure the exam questions and their answers the week before.

[Pascal Kaufmann @PascalKaufmann]

@shafayat_sheikh @fchollet checkout https://t.co/Ehl5wp452h

[yonatan @zozuar]

float i,e,R,s,x,y,z;vec3 a,q,p,d=.5-FC.rgb/r.y;for(q.yz--,a=q;i++<1e2;i>76.?e+=1e-4,d=a:d){e*=R;p=q+=d*e*.5;o+=log(++e+cos(z/6.+vec4(0,1,2,0))*.3)/1e2;p=vec3(log(R=length(p))-t*.5,e=-p.z/R,atan(p.x,p.y));for(z=s=1.;s<1e2;s+=s)e+=exp(x=sin(y=PI*(dot(cos(p*s),p/p)))-1.4)/s,z+=x/y;}

[François Chollet @fchollet]

It's hard to take seriously someone who talks about how "AGI" is imminent yet cannot give you a precise definition of what they mean by "intelligence" or tell you how it works in principle

[Pascal Kaufmann @PascalKaufmann]

@demishassabis arrived at #WorldEconomicForum in Davos, speaking about AI to accelerate science. #Winner_global_AI_award @mindfire_global @Lab42_global