pratyush

awake & aware

[pratyush @impr4t]

@asha_shar nice

[pratyush @impr4t]

@RealBababanaras woah

[All day Astronomy @forallcurious]

🚨: Physicists prove the Universe isn’t a simulation after all─ mathematically proven

This discovery challenges the simulation hypothesis and reveals that the universe’s foundations exist beyond any algorithmic system.

New research from UBC Okanagan mathematically demonstrates that the universe cannot be simulated.

Using Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, scientists found that reality requires “non-algorithmic understanding,” something no computation can replicate.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Finally had a chance to listen through this pod with Sutton, which was interesting and amusing.

As background, Sutton's "The Bitter Lesson" has become a bit of biblical text in frontier LLM circles. Researchers routinely talk about and ask whether this or that approach or idea is sufficiently "bitter lesson pilled" (meaning arranged so that it benefits from added computation for free) as a proxy for whether it's going to work or worth even pursuing. The underlying assumption being that LLMs are of course highly "bitter lesson pilled" indeed, just look at LLM scaling laws where if you put compute on the x-axis, number go up and to the right. So it's amusing to see that Sutton, the author of the post, is not so sure that LLMs are "bitter lesson pilled" at all. They are trained on giant datasets of fundamentally human data, which is both 1) human generated and 2) finite. What do you do when you run out? How do you prevent a human bias? So there you have it, bitter lesson pilled LLM researchers taken down by the author of the bitter lesson - rough!

In some sense, Dwarkesh (who represents the LLM researchers viewpoint in the pod) and Sutton are slightly speaking past each other because Sutton has a very different architecture in mind and LLMs break a lot of its principles. He calls himself a "classicist" and evokes the original concept of Alan Turing of building a "child machine" - a system capable of learning through experience by dynamically interacting with the world. There's no giant pretraining stage of imitating internet webpages. There's also no supervised finetuning, which he points out is absent in the animal kingdom (it's a subtle point but Sutton is right in the strong sense: animals may of course observe demonstrations, but their actions are not directly forced/"teleoperated" by other animals). Another important note he makes is that even if you just treat pretraining as an initialization of a prior before you finetune with reinforcement learning, Sutton sees the approach as tainted with human bias and fundamentally off course, a bit like when AlphaZero (which has never seen human games of Go) beats AlphaGo (which initializes from them). In Sutton's world view, all there is is an interaction with a world via reinforcement learning, where the reward functions are partially environment specific, but also intrinsically motivated, e.g. "fun", "curiosity", and related to the quality of the prediction in your world model. And the agent is always learning at test time by default, it's not trained once and then deployed thereafter. Overall, Sutton is a lot more interested in what we have common with the animal kingdom instead of what differentiates us. "If we understood a squirrel, we'd be almost done".

As for my take...

First, I should say that I think Sutton was a great guest for the pod and I like that the AI field maintains entropy of thought and that not everyone is exploiting the next local iteration LLMs. AI has gone through too many discrete transitions of the dominant approach to lose that. And I also think that his criticism of LLMs as not bitter lesson pilled is not inadequate. Frontier LLMs are now highly complex artifacts with a lot of humanness involved at all the stages - the foundation (the pretraining data) is all human text, the finetuning data is human and curated, the reinforcement learning environment mixture is tuned by human engineers. We do not in fact have an actual, single, clean, actually bitter lesson pilled, "turn the crank" algorithm that you could unleash upon the world and see it learn automatically from experience alone.

Does such an algorithm even exist? Finding it would of course be a huge AI breakthrough. Two "example proofs" are commonly offered to argue that such a thing is possible. The first example is the success of AlphaZero learning to play Go completely from scratch with no human supervision whatsoever. But the game of Go is clearly such a simple, closed, environment that it's difficult to see the analogous formulation in the messiness of reality. I love Go, but algorithmically and categorically, it is essentially a harder version of tic tac toe. The second example is that of animals, like squirrels. And here, personally, I am also quite hesitant whether it's appropriate because animals arise by a very different computational process and via different constraints than what we have practically available to us in the industry. Animal brains are nowhere near the blank slate they appear to be at birth. First, a lot of what is commonly attributed to "learning" is imo a lot more "maturation". And second, even that which clearly is "learning" and not maturation is a lot more "finetuning" on top of something clearly powerful and preexisting. Example. A baby zebra is born and within a few dozen minutes it can run around the savannah and follow its mother. This is a highly complex sensory-motor task and there is no way in my mind that this is achieved from scratch, tabula rasa. The brains of animals and the billions of parameters within have a powerful initialization encoded in the ATCGs of their DNA, trained via the "outer loop" optimization in the course of evolution. If the baby zebra spasmed its muscles around at random as a reinforcement learning policy would have you do at initialization, it wouldn't get very far at all. Similarly, our AIs now also have neural networks with billions of parameters. These parameters need their own rich, high information density supervision signal. We are not going to re-run evolution. But we do have mountains of internet documents. Yes it is basically supervised learning that is ~absent in the animal kingdom. But it is a way to practically gather enough soft constraints over billions of parameters, to try to get to a point where you're not starting from scratch. TLDR: Pretraining is our crappy evolution. It is one candidate solution to the cold start problem, to be followed later by finetuning on tasks that look more correct, e.g. within the reinforcement learning framework, as state of the art frontier LLM labs now do pervasively.

I still think it is worth to be inspired by animals. I think there are multiple powerful ideas that LLM agents are algorithmically missing that can still be adapted from animal intelligence. And I still think the bitter lesson is correct, but I see it more as something platonic to pursue, not necessarily to reach, in our real world and practically speaking. And I say both of these with double digit percent uncertainty and cheer the work of those who disagree, especially those a lot more ambitious bitter lesson wise.

So that brings us to where we are. Stated plainly, today's frontier LLM research is not about building animals. It is about summoning ghosts. You can think of ghosts as a fundamentally different kind of point in the space of possible intelligences. They are muddled by humanity. Thoroughly engineered by it. They are these imperfect replicas, a kind of statistical distillation of humanity's documents with some sprinkle on top. They are not platonically bitter lesson pilled, but they are perhaps "practically" bitter lesson pilled, at least compared to a lot of what came before. It seems possibly to me that over time, we can further finetune our ghosts more and more in the direction of animals; That it's not so much a fundamental incompatibility but a matter of initialization in the intelligence space. But it's also quite possible that they diverge even further and end up permanently different, un-animal-like, but still incredibly helpful and properly world-altering. It's possible that ghosts:animals :: planes:birds.

Anyway, in summary, overall and actionably, I think this pod is solid "real talk" from Sutton to the frontier LLM researchers, who might be gear shifted a little too much in the exploit mode. Probably we are still not sufficiently bitter lesson pilled and there is a very good chance of more powerful ideas and paradigms, other than exhaustive benchbuilding and benchmaxxing. And animals might be a good source of inspiration. Intrinsic motivation, fun, curiosity, empowerment, multi-agent self-play, culture. Use your imagination.

[Matthew Pirkowski @MattPirkowski]

The real answer is that it’s a space-filling curve, which is the natural consequence of any surface of dimension n growing within a topological space of higher dimension.

This, specifically, occurs because a 2-manifold (the cortex or cabbage sheaves) begins to grow within a 2-sphere (empty “ball”, either skull or outer cabbage sheaf).

The growing manifold then folds in order to efficiently fill the space.

Interestingly, if you measure the fractal dimension of a space-filling curve, the “foldiness” of the manifold approaches the dimension of the higher dimensional “ball”.

So in either the cabbage or the brain, a 2-dimensional manifold grows “into” a structure of fractal dimension that in humans both approached 3 and induced a selection pressure wrt skull size, which was itself eventually upper-bounded by female hip width hitting a functional limit.

With all this context on board, the symmetry appears perfectly natural, and one can generalize the idea to the dynamics of any organic growth within the constraints described above.

Without it, the symmetry appears supernaturally mysterious.

Many things are like this.

[Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel]

One of my favorite lessons from neuroscience:

When you start something new, it feels like a struggle and requires your entire focus to figure out. But as you get better, it gets easier and you need far less brain power. Things become automatic and you can dedicate your brain to other tasks.

In the image below, you can see how the brain becomes more efficient at the exact same task as people go from a novice to skilled over the course of a single 60-minute practice session.

If something feels difficult, just keep at it. I've had this experience 100 different times over my life. Things that once took me weeks, now take me minutes. https://t.co/vKqG42WndS

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

Schopenhauer... 10/10 advice

[Andy Galpin, PhD @DrAndyGalpin]

Screens at night are a problem for sleep, but not for the reasons you think.

I'm basically fully convinced that the available quality data suggests it has little to do with light exposure (blue or otherwise) and almost everything to do with simple procrastination.

When you cut screens out, people just go to sleep earlier.

Some people are light sensitive, but most of the time, it's just that screens are more appealing than sleep.

[Santiago Mille @santimillef]

The ability to design antibodies against any protein of interest has major implications for medicine, biotech, and basic science.

Today, we introduce Germinal, a pipeline for epitope-targeted de novo antibody design achieving  4–22% success rates with efficient experimental validation.

[pratyush @impr4t]

@fmfclips have you ever considered chomping on ketones instead of a vegetable that contains goitrogens.

[sucks @powerbottomdad1]

indians panicking but the funny part is this will be clearly good for India right? stopping the brain drain I mean? they should be happy

[pratyush @impr4t]

@ANI No scientific temperament, very fitting.

[ₕₐₘₚₜₒₙ @hamptonism]

Founder of Bloomberg explains the $30,000 Bloomberg Terminal:

[Giga Based Dad @GigaBasedDad]

What has caused this phenomenon?

[pratyush @impr4t]

@LilaGraceRose @lilaroseshow 1 Timothy 2:12

[pratyush @impr4t]

@curtis_yarvin 🤣

[pratyush @impr4t]

@HumbleFlow their soul

[pratyush @impr4t]

@thehealthb0t Physiognomy and frame.

[DaVinci @BiancoDavinci]

“Art Nouveau is when it looks made by elves.
Art Deco is when it looks made by dwarves.”

We need that magic again!