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Missing gear vs secret sauce

From Issawiki (static archive)

I want to distinguish between the following two framings:

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 Number of pieces Explanation
Missing gear Not necessarily. I think this term is somewhat ambiguous about whether the final piece is expected to be big vs small.
Secret sauce Yes Small number, possibly one?
One wrong number function / Step function
Understanding is discontinuous Not necessarily Restricts the final piece to be about understanding, where the AI goes from "not understanding" to "understanding" something.
Payoff thresholds Not necessarily Does not specify
One algorithm[1] Yes Small number, possibly one?
Lumpy AI progress Yes
Intelligibility of intelligence Yes
Simple core algorithm Yes
Small number of breakthroughs needed for AGI Yes Small number (up to around 10?)
Good consequentialist reasoning has low Kolmogorov complexity[2] Yes I think MIRI wants humans to discover this, for the sake of being able to align the AI. But this core of good consequentialist reasoning can also be discovered by a search process (e.g. resulting in a mesa-optimizer). Small number?

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