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 | Definition |
---|---|
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 |