Max Bennett
@maxsbennett
Co-Founder of Bluecore, author of "A Brief History of Intelligence"
1/ My book "A Brief History of Intelligence" is now available! I tell the 600 million year story of how human intelligence evolved and its relationship to progress in AI. More details in thread below👇 a.co/d/fBLWgZH
The Orthogonal Bet. It's a smart maneuver. But it's also the name of my friend Samuel Arbesman's latest podcast. Here are some sample episodes, (including one from yours truly) on a -different- take of one of the most important issues of our time: Embodied Intelligence.…
A little less than a year ago, I began working on something I felt was truly unique. Today it launches🧵
Remember Moravec's paradox? "Corner cases". "Long tails". You can play whack-a-mole with them. Or, you can confront their root causes directly. Our new paper "Evolution and The Knightian Blindspot of Machine Learning" argues we should do the latter.
Random speculation: bird DVR and mammal neocortex seem to perform similar tasks but with clearly different architectures (DVR is nuclear, neocortex is layered). Bird and dinosaur brains always remained comparatively quite small, whereas many mammal brains have gotten quite big -…
Convergent evolution of intelligence between of birds and mammals: - both are warm blooded (while common ancestor was not warm blooded) - both show evidence of mental simulation, planning, episodic-like memory, causal reasoning (while most nonmammal/non-avian vertebrates do…
Someone should try and replicate this study: shows latent learning in zebrafish. I am not aware of any other study that has shown this or replicated it. It would suggest model-based RL in fish. If found broadly in non-mammalian and non-avian vertebrates (instead of just…
This book by @anilananth truly is a masterpiece. One of my fav parts of my day has been gobbling up a chapter or two each night
I know we are only in July, but I’ve just finished “A Brief History of Intelligence” by @maxsbennett and I’m calling it my “book of the year”. What an amazing, step-by-step, story of how human intelligence developed over the last 600 million years. Some of the ideas that blew…
New Inner Cosmos ep has dropped: "How did human brains get runaway intelligence?" We're the single species who composes symphonies, erects skyscrapers, builds computers, and regularly gets off the planet. But how did human intelligence evolve from our ancestors in the animal…
The Sweat Science 2024 Summer Book List, featuring titles from @sabrinablittle, @gwendolynbounds, @maddyjorr, @billdonahue13, @PhilCousineau, @maxsbennett, @mattfitwriter, and... uh... @WorldAthletics (seriously, it's good!). outsideonline.com/health/trainin…
AGI has been achieved domestically (adorable gentle intelligences)
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by gratitude for how supportive and generous even distant humans can be of each other.
This is by far the best non-technical Natural and Artificial Intelligence book anyone could read. This comprehensive, well-researched, crisply clear, sharply focused and illuminating book is a thing of beauty. It is the book I wish I had had when I started my AI career 30 years…
I've been recommending A Brief History of Intelligence to everyone I know. A truly novel, beautifully crafted thesis on what intelligence is and how it has developed since the dawn of life itself. Check out @maxsbennett's book here: abriefhistoryofintelligence.com
This is a key point. Lots of people conflate a “world model” with just any model. Yes, LLMs clearly have a representation of things (ie a model), which they have learned from text, and this model clearly enables LLMs to answer novel questions with an impressive cleverness. LLMs…
Lots of confusion about what a world model is. Here is my definition: Given: - an observation x(t) - a previous estimate of the state of the world s(t) - an action proposal a(t) - a latent variable proposal z(t) A world model computes: - representation: h(t) = Enc(x(t)) -…
I loved this book by @maxsbennett and learned a lot. Highly recommended for those interested in neuroscience, evolution, and artificial intelligence.
I’ve recently come to wonder how “general” our general intelligence really is. Have been reading a couple of books that delve into the environmental pressures that have governed biological evolution (particularly An Immense World and A Brief History of Intelligence - both…
Tim is an amazing interviewer, this was a blast. 2 more episodes yet to come out!
I really enjoyed reading "A Brief History of Intelligence" by @maxsbennett - books of this quality level only crop up occasionally - highly recommend grabbing a copy.
In Ex Machina's final plot twist, the AI company CEO reveals to the protagonist, Caleb, that the intelligent humanoid, Ava, only pretended to have feelings for Caleb, who she seduced to help her escape. The CEO reveals that this was his Turing test all along, and by manipulating…