Missing gear vs secret sauce
I want to distinguish between the following two framings:
- missing gear/one wrong number problem/step function/understanding is discontinuous/payoff thresholds: "missing gear" doesn't imply that the last piece added is all that significant -- it just says that adding it caused a huge jump in capabilities.
- secret sauce for intelligence/small number of breakthroughs: "small number of breakthroughs" says that the last added piece must have been a significant piece (which is what a breakthrough is).
I'm not sure how different these two actually are. But when thinking about discontinuities, I've noticed that I am somewhat inconsistent about conflating these two and distinctly visualizing them.
| Term | Is the final piece a big breakthrough? | Nature of final piece | Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Missing gear | |||
| Secret sauce | |||
| One wrong number function | |||
| Step function | |||
| Understanding is discontinuous | |||
| Payoff thresholds | |||
| One algorithm | |||
| Lumpy AI progress | |||
| Intelligibility of intelligence | |||
| Simple core algorithm | |||
| Small number of breakthroughs needed for AGI | |||
| Good consequentialist reasoning has low Kolmogorov complexity |
