On the downside, if matrix multiplication is the absolute simplest, most interpretable AI blueprint there is—if it’s surrounded on all sides by asynchronous non-digital biological-style designs, or other equally weird alien architectures—that sounds like pretty bad news. Instead of hoping that we luck out and get a simpler, more interpretable architecture in future generations of more-powerful AI, we will be more likely to switch to something much more inscrutable, perhaps at just the wrong time. (ie, maybe matrix-based AIs help design more-powerful successor systems that are less interpretable and more alien to us.)
I would genuinely be surprised if there weren’t ways to at least simplify parts of it.
Like, a mind is able to do multiplication or addition. But any and all algorithms for those kind of operations that we regularly use are much simpler and more reliable than whatever a GPT does for its own primitive math capabilities (which is probably a lot more like a lookup table of known operations). You’d think you could disentangle some functionality into its own modules and make it more reliable that way.
On the downside, if matrix multiplication is the absolute simplest, most interpretable AI blueprint there is—if it’s surrounded on all sides by asynchronous non-digital biological-style designs, or other equally weird alien architectures—that sounds like pretty bad news. Instead of hoping that we luck out and get a simpler, more interpretable architecture in future generations of more-powerful AI, we will be more likely to switch to something much more inscrutable, perhaps at just the wrong time. (ie, maybe matrix-based AIs help design more-powerful successor systems that are less interpretable and more alien to us.)
I would genuinely be surprised if there weren’t ways to at least simplify parts of it.
Like, a mind is able to do multiplication or addition. But any and all algorithms for those kind of operations that we regularly use are much simpler and more reliable than whatever a GPT does for its own primitive math capabilities (which is probably a lot more like a lookup table of known operations). You’d think you could disentangle some functionality into its own modules and make it more reliable that way.