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Comment by chriskanan

You are conflating multiple things.

1) First, you are talking about positive forward transfer in continual learning. I've been giving talks for the past 6-7 years about how that community (I was one of the founders) went astray and wasn't focusing enough on that topic, but continual learning of the kind you are thinking isn't in any of these systems right now. I think some people left the Grok team to make a start-up to focus on that. By forward transfer, what I mean is weights update over time and past learning improves future learning such that we get better sample efficiency.

2) Psychologists distinguish among different kinds of intelligence for Spearman's g (IQ). Crystalized intelligence is using already acquired knowledge (frontier models probably have maxed out that). Fluid intelligence is reasoning and finding solutions in novel situations or without the necessary crystalized knowledge. [Giving colloquial definitions]

3) Now, interestingly, neither of those are correlated with _creativity_ (just they are independent, note some have this threshold theory but it hasn't held up in recent papers). That's what the AI's really are terrible at -- creativity. But I'd argue the vast majority of humans aren't very creative, with truly out-of-the-box ideas. Given that this is HN, and a non-trivial number of us have ADHD, creativity is positively correlated with ADHD.

I did a bunch of research on these topics for my AGI course that I teach each Spring (where I then point out conflicting definitions and start using multiple alternative terms rather than AGI to distinguish among the different definitions).

parent chriskanan 1 month ago

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