Raphaël Millière Contra Scaling Maximalism

The Inside View

Raphaël Millière is a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University. He has previously completed a PhD in philosophy in Oxford, is interested in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, and has recently been discussing at length the current progress in AI with popular Twitter threads on GPT-3, Dalle-2 and a thesis he called “scaling maximalism”. Raphaël is also co-organizing with Gary Marcus a workshop about compositionality in AI at the end of the month.

Transcript: https://theinsideview.ai/raphael

Video: https://youtu.be/2EHWzK10kvw

Host: https://twitter.com/MichaelTrazzi

Raphaël : https://twitter.com/raphaelmilliere

Workshop: https://compositionalintelligence.github.io

Outline

(00:36) definitions of artificial general intelligence

(7:25) behavior correlates of intellience, chinese room

(19:11) natural language understanding, the octopus test, linguistics, semantics

(33:05) generating philosophy with GPT-3, college essays grades, bullshit

(42:45) Stochastic Chameleon, out of distribution generalization

(51:19) three levels of generalization, the Wozniak test

(59:38) AI progress spectrum, scaling maximalism

(01:15:06) Bitter Lesson

(01:23:08) what would convince him that scale is all we need

(01:27:04) unsupervised learning, lifelong learning

(01:35:33) goalpost moving

(01:43:30) what researchers "should" be doing, nuclear risk, climate change

(01:57:24) compositionality, structured representations

(02:05:57) conceptual blending, complex syntactic structure, variable binding

(02:11:51) Raphaël's experience with DALL-E

(02:19:02) the future of image generation