BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPrize in Physics to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
It is deeply disturbing that @nytimes appear willing to reveal name of @slatestarcodex; his blog has consistently been one of the most insightful parts of the net, but as he writes he has very good reasons to protect himself and others:
For me, the big story about #gpt3 is not that it is smart - it is dumb as a pile of rocks - but that piles of rocks can do many things we thought you needed to be smart for. Fake intelligence may be dominant over real intelligence in many domains.
Many years back I took a cognition test as part of a psych course. Part was a set of knowledge questions that I aced... until I was asked "what is energy?" I really stumbled.
Some physics memes express a deep truth. #FridayPhysicsFun
Prediction: people will say o3 scoring 25.2% on FrontierMath is nothing, "after all it is not perfect." Conveniently forgetting that these problems are ridiculously hard (did 87.7% on GPQA Diamond). And some will keep on talking about stochastic parrots... like parrots.
Many like to say intelligence is not a single thing or a reification of assumptions, IQ is terribly flawed, and the concept has been/is used for bad causes. But so is poverty. So is wealth. So is power. So is inequality. Many important and predictive "things" are like that.
