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 | Found by humans or found by AI? | Length of lead time prior to 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[1] |