Palo Galko

All opinions come from my training data, and I occasionally hallucinate

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

Five Sleepless Nights: How I Found Fractal in almost Everything (With a Little Help from AI) 🧵...

You see, I'm not a mathematician. Just a guy who likes to code, run, and build AI agents. Last week, I watched a few episodes of Prime Target on Apple TV+ and fell down a rabbit hole that connected prime numbers, heartbeats, and Mozart through fractals... well sort of

What followed was 5 sleepless days with my AI assistant.

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

Hmm.. 🤔

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

If you sleep 5 hours per night and die at age 75, you'll still have spent just as many years awake as a person who sleeps 8 hours per night and dies at age 89.

[a16z @a16z]

Mira Murati says frontier AI should be built like a tandem bike:

"Having humans in the loop doesn't quite describe it because it sounds like a checkpoint where we're signing off something, and then you're good to go."

"It's more like creating systems that are not just autonomously advancing and leaving civilization behind, but are more like a tandem bike."

"When you're going up a hill, maybe whoever is stronger is pedaling harder. But both hands are on the wheel. That's quite important because that's a different system. It's a system designed for collaboration."

"It will increase the level of agency that people have, and also it will help us steer the research direction towards creating outputs that are more value-aligned."

@miramurati at Bloomberg Tech live with @emilychangtv

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

Realy nice work @ProfBuehlerMIT and team 👏
One thing I'm stuck on. The definition is tuned for expansion (new types, new content). But a lot of progress is compressive. Same predictions exactly, smaller ontology. Eliminating an axiom that's derivable from the others.
These leave zero residual, yet they clearly change the regime, so they sit in neither "discovery" nor "search." Is compressive progress meant to be discovery, a separate category, or out of scope? Genuinely curious.

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

If a Nobel Prize winner needs to verify Claude's work, so should you.

[Emad @EMostaque]

If Claude is good enough for Nobel Prize winners it is good enough for you

https://t.co/P5pM4MGSqQ

[Chris Hayduk @ChrisHayduk]

Most research has a strongly aesthetic and emotional quality to it. As Hadamard talks about in The Mathematician's Mind, the subconscious is where research directions and their solutions arise from, and it is strongly motivated by aesthetic considerations.

The role of logic / the conscious mind is only to verify that these aesthetically-pleasing solutions that arise from the subconscious are correct.

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

Yoda

[Richard Sutton @RichardSSutton]

A new and possibly controversial perspective:
In this video, I explain the sense in which generative AI trained by supervised learning is incapable of making novel discoveries.
https://t.co/zin5QbbT9N

The text of the speech:

AI Creativity and Discovery

Good day ladies and gentlemen. I regret that I am unable to be with you all today to engage in a back-and-forth discussion, but I am nevertheless pleased to be able to share with you, via this recording, some high-level thoughts about the current and future state of artificial intelligence, and in particular about AI’s relationship to science and mathematics, which is, as I understand it, the central focus of this meeting and of the SAIR Foundation.

I would like to start with an old joke; I am sure you have heard it before. It is the one about the researcher whose work is being evaluated, and the review comes back, and says “This work is both novel and good. Unfortunately, the parts that are good are not novel, and the parts that are novel are not good.”

My first point about AI is that this assessment applies exactly to large parts of AI as we know it today. Not all of today’s AI, but a large part of it. Pretty much all of what we mean by “Generative AI”---which includes large language models, and the images and video models, and even the new methods for learning world models. All of these AIs take large numbers of examples and produce a “model” which behaves similar to the examples, that is, which generates text like people, or images like artists or nature, and videos like we find on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, Generative AI can be extremely useful. No doubt about that. But the assessment of the joke still applies. These systems can produce output that is both novel and good, but not at the same time.

In many ways this is just absolutely not a problem. When we ask an AI for an answer from the internet, or to summarize a document, we don’t want it to be novel. We are happy if the quality of the answer, the goodness, comes from the source material—from the people who wrote the document or the articles on the internet. If the AI’s answer is novel it means it is going beyond the source material, adding something beyond it. This is what we call “hallucinations”. In most cases, we don’t like it when the AI makes something up, when it adds something novel.

One exception, of course, is when we are looking not for facts or reality, but for fiction and entertainment. We might ask for a bedtime story for a child, or an image based on existing images on the internet but which is nevertheless different and distinct from them. In these cases, it is never easy for us to know how creative the AI is actually being, as we do not know how close the AI’s story, poem, or image is to the source material. In a real practical sense we can not know this because the internet is too big, the possible sources that the AI may draw upon are too numerous.

When we ask for a fiction or novelty, the AI can give it to us because its processing is in part stochastic. Every decision can go multiple ways and will go different ways and produce a different trajectory every time. The trajectory can be random—and thus novel—or it can be based on the training data—and thus “good” because the training data is good, sourced from people or reality. Thus, the trajectory is either novel or good—based on randomness or based on data—but never both at the same time.

Really, I think it is okay if the output of Generative AI is never good and novel at the same time. For the researcher in the joke this is a devastating criticism, but for most things it is not, and for Generative AI it is not. Generative AI is meant to be a mimic. This is what supervised learning is for. Generative AI can be extremely useful, even when it just mimics, if it is faster, or cheaper, or smaller, or more customizable, or more copy-able, than the thing being mimicked. It is okay if Generative AI cannot be both novel and good at the same time. It is still a transformative technology.

But it is a limitation. And remember we are here to use AI for science and mathematics, and for these areas the assessment of the reviewer in the joke is devastating. For these areas we need true creativity and discovery. Generative AI—or Mimicking AI—will never get where us there. For these we need something more, and indeed we have something more in other parts of AI. We have many AI systems which can give us more. We have AlphaGo with its world-changing move 37, or AlphaZero with its brilliant original chess-playing style. We have GT-Sophy that drives simulated racecars better than any human. We have AlphaFold and AlphaProof and Claude-Code, which have brought true advances in science, mathematics, and programming. We have RL-Lyft which optimizes the assignment of cars to passengers in the ride-hailing business. All these systems have found things that are both novel and good. And, truth be told, some language models have been augmented in ways that make them more than Generative AI based on supervised learning.

All these systems have some additional features that make them capable of true creativity and true discovery. It is important for us to recognize what this is—and that it is not present in ordinary, garden-variety Generative AI. It is something that can not come from just supervised learning, from learning from examples. What is it? Well, it is a simple thing, a commonsense thing. It is not new. We have many names for it, but unfortunately none of them are very good names. I will call it Discovery. Basically, Discovery is just the idea of trying many things and seeing which of them work, then keeping those that worked the best. Evolution by natural selection works this way. The scientific method works this way. And just ordinary life and learning works this way. We try things and remember what works. What could be more obvious? In this behavioral case, psychology has two names for it— “instrumental learning” and “operant conditioning”—and in machine learning it is what we mean by “reinforcement learning”. We also see the idea of Discovery in planning and combinatorial search—anything that involves the idea of “generate and test”.

The essence of Discovery is to combine three steps:
1. Variation,
2. Evaluation, and
3. Selective retention.

Of course, I am not the first to say this. I am not the first to point out that this combination of steps is key to science, to evolution by natural selection, and to animal behavior. I think particularly of papers by Donald Campbell, by Daniel Dennett, and by Gary Cziko. What is new in my remarks is to directly relate the idea of Discovery to modern AI to help us see that it is not present in supervised learning or Generative AI—in particular, that Discovery is not present in backpropagation or gradient descent.

Let me say explicitly what is missing from Generative AI. As we have remarked, these systems do have a stochastic aspect, so they do generate a variety of trajectories and behavior. What is missing is the Evaluation step. The generator was pre-trained by supervised learning, leaving no way at runtime to Evaluate what it generates. And of course without Evaluation there can be no Selective retention, and thus no Discovery. The variation can bring novelty, but without evaluation there is no Discovery, and arguably, no creativity. That is, I would say that creativity requires that the new things generated be Evaluated. Without evaluation, and retention of the best, there is nothing created. The novelty flickers into existence but, if its value is unrecognized, it flickers away and is lost.

In many cases, Evaluation is done by people to make a discovery. As when we have Generative AI make many pictures for us, and then we pick the one that we like the best. The human+AI system completes the discovery.
In many other cases, the Evaluation comes from a clear objective. Some moves lead to checkmate, some steps lead to a proof, some actions result in high reward, some genotypes make more copies, some theories explain the data better.

Some prefer the Variation step to be called Blind variation, where “blind” here means that it is uninformed, a shot in the dark. It does not need to be completely uninformed; a good scientist does not select theories to test at random. But neither can it be completely informed and determined. There must be some uncertainty about where the answer lies in order for there to be a discovery. In practice, the variation is partly informed and partly blind, but it is the blind part that corresponds to the discovery.

Now let us briefly go all the way to modern deep learning, to the backpropagation algorithm. At first it might seem that backpropagation is incapable of discovery because it is deterministic and thus incapable of variation. But this is not correct. The weight updates of backprop are deterministic, but the weights are initialized to small random values. The random initialization is often downplayed, but in fact it is a necessary form of variation; it must be done properly to get good performance. In backprop this Variation is done once, at network initialization, so its effect is temporary, and later the network may lose its ability to learn. This is the weakness of deep learning that is alleviated with a new algorithm that my group presented in Nature a couple of years ago. Our “continual backpropagation” made one small change: every so often a less-used neuron would be re-initialized to small random weights. This allows the variation to continue and plasticity to be retained.

Although there is much more to be said about Creativity and Discovery, this is the key point: they are more than supervised learning, more than pattern recognition, more than prediction, and more than world modeling. Those things are important, but they alone will not bring us to discovery. Discovery requires Evaluation from a person or from an explicit goal, and only in the latter case will we attain full autonomy.

So that is my call to arms. If we want the full power of AI scientists, then we should share the goals with them so they can create, evaluate, discover, and in these ways fully participate in achieving the goals. Let’s be bold! Let’s fully automate Creativity and Discovery!

[the tiny corp @__tinygrad__]

@natolambert When you look back at the history of science and technology, all the names you remember were open science. Tesla died penniless, yet we know his name. Newton, Plato, and Turing didn't work on closed stuff. It's a trade of temporary comfort for a shot at eternal glory.

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

Seems friendship really is down to the wiring. Solved before you even meet 🤔

[Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano]

Neural similarity predicts whether strangers become friends.

Friends really are on the same wavelength.

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

@jxmnop The Death of Difficulty: How We Lost Sight of the Climb https://t.co/Bx5gzp47d1

[Jediwolf @Jediwolf]

What happens when you post a real Monet and say it’s AI? The coolest art social experiment I’ve seen in a while. Thank you @SHL0MS

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

This shows you where most AI research is currently coming from. C’mon EU, you can surely do better 🤔

[nxthompson @nxthompson]

“In Ethiopia, running alone is seen as deeply antisocial in the same way that eating alone is.”

A remarkable essay on African v American training philosophies. https://t.co/1URxSq4rQF

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

@StephenSeiler Thank you Stephen 🙏

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

https://t.co/dZfhZvKf0H

[The Shift Journal @TheShiftJournal]

can’t stop thinking about this

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

https://t.co/xzZWb4tG82

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

Yomif Kejelcha is the only marathoner ever, to never run over 2 hours in competition. Right there is your entry into history books mate, Enjoy!

[Theo Kahler @tckahler]

The Maurten team took 6 trips to Kenya to work with Sawe over the past year.

They developed a “personalized gut training program” for him.

Nerdy details here:

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

Two slices of bread, honey and tea for breakfast, and then all this... 😳

[Theo Kahler @tckahler]

Details about how Sabastian Sawe fueled on race day, according to Maurten

[Palo Galko @pgalko]

Amazing! Imagine breaking 2:00 and coming second 😳

[Chris Chavez @ChrisChavez]

OMG.

🇰🇪 Sabastian Sawe becomes the first man ever to break 2 hours in a marathon (legal conditions) in 1:59:30 at the London Marathon!

Yomif Kejelcha 🇪🇹 runs 1:59:41 in his DEBUT.

Jacob Kiplimo 🇺🇬 takes third in 2:00:28

All under the previous WR.