14 ms·

When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in

When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory. However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.

utkarsh858 2y ago
Rapid evolution of AI needs a director, a human training and guiding it to get tangible results.
- cryptoz 2y ago
  For now.
  - utkarsh858 2y ago
    The AI guiding and training another AI will in turn need guidance on higher level.
    - setum 2y ago
      until it breaks the loop
    - utkarsh858 2y ago
      Even if it does break the loop, it would always be named as started by a 'creator' or an initiator. And also the AI will require power source to maintain itself which will be provided by creatures outside it's system.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Which is built on all this "billions of years of randomness" to begin with.
  - utkarsh858 2y ago
    Random, that's what we think, bacteria living in gut can also think the whole digestive process to be part of some random universal law
    - hnhg 2y ago
      Using your analogy, it's absolutely unknowable to bacteria, and therefore absolutely unknowable to us. Random is perhaps the most intellectually honest way of describing it, since it is widely accepted that randomness is a feature of relatively uncomplicated systems.
      - utkarsh858 2y ago
        What is called as 'Random', I will term it as 'free will'. In case of a human training an AI, free will be of the human and in case of creation of universe free will be that of the 'intelligent designer'
        asimovfan 2y ago
        at least for human it is definitely not 'free will' as it is influenced by everything that has happened to it before and would not have made the same choices, if it had been influenced by other things in another way.
- fennecbutt 2y ago
  Isn't our evolution directed by both the (fixed) laws of physics and by the (random) efforts of all other life forms on this planet?
TrainedMonkey 2y ago
AFAIK key insight into evolution is not randomness but rather sheer amount of compute. Specifically, evolution is a massively parallel flood algorithm that will try every single mutation. Barely any of them will have positive impact on organism fitness, but some will.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  That, and of course the other key insight is the "flood algorithm" part. I.e. evolution isn't about randomness (the "throw some parts into a bag and spin them until a 747 flies out" criticism), it's about bias and feedback: the environment itself isn't uniform, creating a bias in what would otherwise be entirely uniform selection, one which compounds with every generation. Randomness is just adding variance here, jitter preventing the process from getting stuck with one outcome.
- raffraffraff 2y ago
  The way I understood evolution wasn't that "some mutations will have a positive impact", it's more like, when a species hits hard times, "some mutations allow it to survive long enough to reproduce". Sure, you have dominant genes like eye colour. But evolutionary changes to a whole species are more about weeding out genes that cannot survive, right? Because if a species has no specific sexual selectors for breeding and all mutations survive and reproduce, then how does a specific gene thrive? Edit: but chatting to my wife, she mentioned that species is a difficult concept, generally taken to be a generic group that actual mate in the wild. There are several different species that could technically produce offspring but through sexual selection, do not.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    You will probably find this article about the species concept interesting: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/
- SamPatt 2y ago
  Also worth pointing out that billions of years already sounds like a long time to humans, but once you grasp how quickly everything is moving at the cellular or molecular level then it becomes a really reallllllly long time.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kortilla 2y ago
AI isn’t being trained on random though. It’s the corpus of a large portion of all of humanity’s written communication. I don’t think it’s a good analogy to evolution. A single training session will iterate more than the number of generations of all birds.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  > A single training session will iterate more than the number of generations of all birds. But that's not the right analogy. Evolution happens at the individual level, and even to some extent at the individual gamete level. So it's actually every single fecundated bird egg that ever existed, and even every single spermatozoon and egg cell every time two birds mated. Not to mention every division of every bacterial cell in every bird gut, since microflora are a key part of the organism too. And even this is an undercount, since the DNA and gene expression of an individual actually changes during its lifetime, and those changes can be passed down to offspring through various mechanisms. So there is a constant process of evolution that even all cells inside a living organism go through, that we're still trying to fully understand.
  - Ma8ee 2y ago
    > since the DNA and gene expression of an individual actually changes during its lifetime, and those changes can be passed down to offspring through various mechanisms. That statements need a whole lot of backing. It contradicts the Central dogma of molecular biology [0]. The idea that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime is called Lamarckism which was disproven more than a hundred years ago. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_biology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_bio...
    - alanbernstein 2y ago
      The article you link includes a section on types of information transfer that this human-originated rule does not apply to...
akomtu 2y ago
Where's randomness? AI is an intelligently designed algorithm trained to mimic words of highly intelligent species, and all that runs on GPUs that didn't evolve from a pile of mud, but were intelligently created according to a plan.
- spiderfarmer 2y ago
  The commenter is wrong. There is not a single analogy between the development of AI and evolution.
zaptrem 2y ago
AI gets backpropagation whereas evolution is more like particle swarm optimization (pick a bunch of random values, then pick more random values near the ones that do best). Backpropagation is way better/faster since in expectation the gradient points toward a better set of weights, but it relies on a differentiable loss function.
ssener2001 2y ago
Notice that AI is not by evolution but the result of many scientists or works, devices etc. If suppose evolution were to occur , then many wrong and absurd things would emerge or they would not have come into existence. But there is no disorder or mistake in the past or present and everything seems to be created perfectly. "We see that in its existence, its attributes, and its lifetime, while hesitant among innumerable possibilities, that is, among truly numerous ways and aspects, each thing follows a well-ordered way in regard to its being in innumerable respects. Its attributes also are given it in a particular way. All the attributes and states which it changes throughout its life are specified in the same fashion. This means it is impelled on a wise way amid innumerable ways through the will of one who specifies, the choice of one who chooses, and the creation of a wise Creator. He clothes it with well-ordered attributes and states. Then it is taken out of isolation and made part of a compound body, and the possibilities increase, for they may be found in that body in thousands of ways. Whereas among those fruitless possibilities, it is given a particular, fruitful state, whereby important results and benefits are obtained from that body, and it is made to carry out important functions. Then the body is made a component of another body. Again the possibilities increase, for it could exist in thousands of ways. Thus, it is given one state among those thousands of ways. And through that state it is made to perform important functions; and so on. It progressively demonstrates more certainly the necessary existence of an All-Wise Planner. It makes known that it is being impelled by the command of an All-Knowing Commander. Body within body, each has a function, a well-ordered duty, in all the compounds that one within the other themselves become components of larger compounds, and has relationships particular to each, in the same way that a soldier has a function and well-ordered duty in his squad, his company, his battalion, his regiment, his division, and his army, and a relationship particular to each of these sections, one within the other. A cell from the pupil of your eye has a duty in your eye and a relationship with it, and has wise functions and duties in your head as a whole and a relationship with it. If it confuses these the tiniest jot, the health and organization of the body will be spoilt. It has particular functions with regard to each of the veins, the sensory and motor nerves, and even the body as a whole, and wise relations with them. That specified state has been given it within thousands of possibilities through the wisdom of an All-Wise Maker. In just the same way, each of the creatures in the universe testifies to the Necessarily Existent One through the particular being, the wise form, the beneficial attributes given it among numerous possibilities. So too when they enter compounds, those creatures proclaim their Maker with a different tongue in each compound. Step by step till the greatest compound, through their relations, functions, and duties, they testify to the necessary existence, choice, and will of their All-Wise Maker. Because the one who situates a thing in all the compounds while preserving its wise relations, must be the Creator of all the compounds. That is to say, it is as though one single thing testifies to Him with thousands of tongues. Thus, from the point of view of contingency, the testimony to the existence of the Necessarily Existent One is as numerous, not as the number of beings in the universe, but as the attributes of beings and the compounds they form..." So turn your vision again: do you see any flaw? Then turn your vision a second time; your vision will come back to you in a state dazzled and truly defeated(Quran) state and point out, however much the human gaze tries to find faults, it can find none anywhere, and returns worn out to its dwelling, the eye, and says to the fault-finding mind who sent it: “I am worn out for nothing; there are no faults.” This shows that the order and regularity are most perfect
eru 2y ago
The key insight for both evolution and contemporary AI is that hill-climbing (either completely random a la evolution, or guided locally like in back-propagation) can work really well, if you have enough dimensions to play with. Hill climbing obviously gets stuck easily in 2 or 3 dimensions. So our intuition ain't reliable.
- carlmr 2y ago
  >Hill climbing obviously gets stuck easily in 2 or 3 dimensions. So our intuition ain't reliable. Also our intuition about overfitting from lower-dimensional representations seems to be less of an issue at high dimensions.
openrisk 2y ago
Strictly speaking the two domains have very little in common besides "evolving" in a general sense (as opposed to something being static and unchanging). But if we generalize a bit our target system we can make the analogy more fruitful. LLM Algorithms don't "evolve" when trained, they just fit data in a pre-existing and hardwired "DNA". More GPU, data, energy consumption etc. simply means different weights (parameters) for the same fixed algorithm. Training involves no feedback loop on the algorithm design itself. The biological analogy is like what happens when you starve or overfeed somebody: They become skinny or obese (but they will not pass on that attribute to their offspring). The algorithm's DNA is explicitly designed and put in place by human intelligence. When thinking of the observed "evolution" of algorithms we need to include the sum total of the people involved in algorithmic design and deployment, their cognitive toolkit, incentives etc. Now that part is definitely "evolving" (various mathematical, technical or economic breakthroughs), not biologically of course, but culturally. So-called AI Winters (and other AI Seasons) are indeed evidence of this collective cultural movement. You could say that the invention / adoption of the multilayered neural net pattern has led to a sort of Cambrian explosion similar to going from single cell to multicellular organisms.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nkrisc 2y ago
The fascination with “intelligent design” is cherry-picking. The is no shortage of “unintelligent design” in the natural world. Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure. Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in intelligent design, ask why our intelligent designer thought it wise to link our jaw to our ears so that it’s hard to hear things when you’re chewing.
- lpat 2y ago
  That's pretty weak argument against intelligent design. 1. The designer does not have to be "omniscient" only intelligent. Some people believe in it's omniscience but I don't think it's a requirement. 2. How do you know that our trachea is not an optimal design when you take into account all the tradeoffs? 3. You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and tend to break. Obviously you wouldn't argue based on this that they weren't designed by intelligent beings.
  - nkrisc 2y ago
    > How do you know that our trachea is not an optimal design when you take into account all the tradeoffs? Because if we were designed from scratch we could have been designed in any optimal shape or form. > You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and tend to break. Obviously you wouldn't argue based on this that they weren't designed by intelligent beings. Show me an intelligent designer who can literally design the universe, but is still not intelligent enough to avoid these flaws even we can recognize. I don’t think we are intelligent enough to design a completely novel life form, let alone as many as exist on earth in all their forms. This is all beside the point that there’s no evidence of any kind for intelligent design, only supposition based on nothing more than intuition and feelings.
    - smusamashah 2y ago
      Flaws is a wrong way to put these things you notice. Would a perfectly and optimally designed being get no diseases? won't die? won't fall?
jhanschoo 2y ago
As other commenters, it tickles me that this was your takeaway as optimizers mildly altering weights at every training step to a more correct representation is more analogous to intelligent design, where a God guides the evolution of species to develop the features they need.
interludead 2y ago
It makes the idea of randomness and feedback loops in nature more tangible
protonbob 2y ago
All of the data that has gone into AI has been intelligently created. Also, there are plenty of intelligent people cleaning the test data and guiding its training. That is basically the entire premise of intelligent design. Not that there is no evolution, but that it is a guided process.
- fellowniusmonk 2y ago
  Right, genetic and morphological lineage data among hominidae and other families look exactly like you'd expect from unguided mutation. So any intelligent hand involved would have to be a real trickster to put so much effort into making the data look the way it does, or just shouldn't have bothered because it seems we end up at the same place regardless.
  - protonbob 2y ago
    I'm just saying your conclusion doesn't follow from AI. I'm not arguing for God right now.
    - fellowniusmonk 2y ago
      I think you're replying to the wrong person.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
wruza 2y ago
what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve Half a billion, afaik. And also how technology matters. Oxygenless ~3.5B years were boring as hell. For those unaware: Earth not always had O2 in its athmosphere - O2 is a result of one kind of ubiquitous goo that was emitting it as a byproduct. And while it oxidized what it could on the surface, it killed almost every goo, cause it is a poison. Then (and that is still an unproven theory) oxygen-breathing evolved and allowed for fast movement and carnivory, which started arms race of tracking and evasion, coordination, vision, swarming, etc. 0.5B years later here we are. Btw, there were even higher peaks of oxygen concentration that allowed for animal-sized insects to exist. A time insectophobes wouldn’t want to live in. Scientists know that dragonflies with wing spans as wide as a hawk's and cockroaches big enough to take on house cats lived during the Paleozoic era (245-570 million years ago). At the same time, mammoth millipedes longer than a human leg skittered across prehistoric soil.
- mietek 2y ago
  Big millipedes are still around! Although not quite as big as before. https://youtu.be/oY32HPQrhYg?si=z0QO821u3-E5sJ6l&t=480 https://youtu.be/oY32HPQrhYg?si=z0QO821u3-E5sJ6l&t=480 (about millipedes from 8:00)
palata 2y ago
> However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve. The thing with evolution is that it is robust. Even after the human species collapses (with everything it manages to bring down with it), evolution will still work. Modern humans have been very quick at many things, but at the cost of breaking the conditions of their survival. One may say "that's wrong, with enough GPU a solution will appear", but on the other hand maybe we have already passed the tipping point where we actually cannot solve it anymore.
fennecbutt 2y ago
I mean even real biology like our tailbone, reflexes and organs we no longer actually need are all good indicators.

utkarsh858 2y ago

Rapid evolution of AI needs a director, a human training and guiding it to get tangible results.

cryptoz 2y ago
For now.
- utkarsh858 2y ago
  The AI guiding and training another AI will in turn need guidance on higher level.
  - setum 2y ago
    until it breaks the loop
  - utkarsh858 2y ago
    Even if it does break the loop, it would always be named as started by a 'creator' or an initiator. And also the AI will require power source to maintain itself which will be provided by creatures outside it's system.
bamboozled 2y ago
Which is built on all this "billions of years of randomness" to begin with.
- utkarsh858 2y ago
  Random, that's what we think, bacteria living in gut can also think the whole digestive process to be part of some random universal law
  - hnhg 2y ago
    Using your analogy, it's absolutely unknowable to bacteria, and therefore absolutely unknowable to us. Random is perhaps the most intellectually honest way of describing it, since it is widely accepted that randomness is a feature of relatively uncomplicated systems.
    - utkarsh858 2y ago
      What is called as 'Random', I will term it as 'free will'. In case of a human training an AI, free will be of the human and in case of creation of universe free will be that of the 'intelligent designer'
      - asimovfan 2y ago
        at least for human it is definitely not 'free will' as it is influenced by everything that has happened to it before and would not have made the same choices, if it had been influenced by other things in another way.
fennecbutt 2y ago
Isn't our evolution directed by both the (fixed) laws of physics and by the (random) efforts of all other life forms on this planet?

TrainedMonkey 2y ago

AFAIK key insight into evolution is not randomness but rather sheer amount of compute. Specifically, evolution is a massively parallel flood algorithm that will try every single mutation. Barely any of them will have positive impact on organism fitness, but some will.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
That, and of course the other key insight is the "flood algorithm" part. I.e. evolution isn't about randomness (the "throw some parts into a bag and spin them until a 747 flies out" criticism), it's about bias and feedback: the environment itself isn't uniform, creating a bias in what would otherwise be entirely uniform selection, one which compounds with every generation. Randomness is just adding variance here, jitter preventing the process from getting stuck with one outcome.
raffraffraff 2y ago
The way I understood evolution wasn't that "some mutations will have a positive impact", it's more like, when a species hits hard times, "some mutations allow it to survive long enough to reproduce". Sure, you have dominant genes like eye colour. But evolutionary changes to a whole species are more about weeding out genes that cannot survive, right? Because if a species has no specific sexual selectors for breeding and all mutations survive and reproduce, then how does a specific gene thrive? Edit: but chatting to my wife, she mentioned that species is a difficult concept, generally taken to be a generic group that actual mate in the wild. There are several different species that could technically produce offspring but through sexual selection, do not.
- keiferski 2y ago
  You will probably find this article about the species concept interesting: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/
SamPatt 2y ago
Also worth pointing out that billions of years already sounds like a long time to humans, but once you grasp how quickly everything is moving at the cellular or molecular level then it becomes a really reallllllly long time.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kortilla 2y ago

AI isn’t being trained on random though. It’s the corpus of a large portion of all of humanity’s written communication. I don’t think it’s a good analogy to evolution. A single training session will iterate more than the number of generations of all birds.

tsimionescu 2y ago
> A single training session will iterate more than the number of generations of all birds. But that's not the right analogy. Evolution happens at the individual level, and even to some extent at the individual gamete level. So it's actually every single fecundated bird egg that ever existed, and even every single spermatozoon and egg cell every time two birds mated. Not to mention every division of every bacterial cell in every bird gut, since microflora are a key part of the organism too. And even this is an undercount, since the DNA and gene expression of an individual actually changes during its lifetime, and those changes can be passed down to offspring through various mechanisms. So there is a constant process of evolution that even all cells inside a living organism go through, that we're still trying to fully understand.
- Ma8ee 2y ago
  > since the DNA and gene expression of an individual actually changes during its lifetime, and those changes can be passed down to offspring through various mechanisms. That statements need a whole lot of backing. It contradicts the Central dogma of molecular biology [0]. The idea that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime is called Lamarckism which was disproven more than a hundred years ago. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_biology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_bio...
  - alanbernstein 2y ago
    The article you link includes a section on types of information transfer that this human-originated rule does not apply to...

akomtu 2y ago

Where's randomness? AI is an intelligently designed algorithm trained to mimic words of highly intelligent species, and all that runs on GPUs that didn't evolve from a pile of mud, but were intelligently created according to a plan.

spiderfarmer 2y ago
The commenter is wrong. There is not a single analogy between the development of AI and evolution.

zaptrem 2y ago

AI gets backpropagation whereas evolution is more like particle swarm optimization (pick a bunch of random values, then pick more random values near the ones that do best). Backpropagation is way better/faster since in expectation the gradient points toward a better set of weights, but it relies on a differentiable loss function.

ssener2001 2y ago

Notice that AI is not by evolution but the result of many scientists or works, devices etc. If suppose evolution were to occur , then many wrong and absurd things would emerge or they would not have come into existence. But there is no disorder or mistake in the past or present and everything seems to be created perfectly. "We see that in its existence, its attributes, and its lifetime, while hesitant among innumerable possibilities, that is, among truly numerous ways and aspects, each thing follows a well-ordered way in regard to its being in innumerable respects. Its attributes also are given it in a particular way. All the attributes and states which it changes throughout its life are specified in the same fashion. This means it is impelled on a wise way amid innumerable ways through the will of one who specifies, the choice of one who chooses, and the creation of a wise Creator. He clothes it with well-ordered attributes and states. Then it is taken out of isolation and made part of a compound body, and the possibilities increase, for they may be found in that body in thousands of ways. Whereas among those fruitless possibilities, it is given a particular, fruitful state, whereby important results and benefits are obtained from that body, and it is made to carry out important functions. Then the body is made a component of another body. Again the possibilities increase, for it could exist in thousands of ways. Thus, it is given one state among those thousands of ways. And through that state it is made to perform important functions; and so on. It progressively demonstrates more certainly the necessary existence of an All-Wise Planner. It makes known that it is being impelled by the command of an All-Knowing Commander. Body within body, each has a function, a well-ordered duty, in all the compounds that one within the other themselves become components of larger compounds, and has relationships particular to each, in the same way that a soldier has a function and well-ordered duty in his squad, his company, his battalion, his regiment, his division, and his army, and a relationship particular to each of these sections, one within the other. A cell from the pupil of your eye has a duty in your eye and a relationship with it, and has wise functions and duties in your head as a whole and a relationship with it. If it confuses these the tiniest jot, the health and organization of the body will be spoilt. It has particular functions with regard to each of the veins, the sensory and motor nerves, and even the body as a whole, and wise relations with them. That specified state has been given it within thousands of possibilities through the wisdom of an All-Wise Maker. In just the same way, each of the creatures in the universe testifies to the Necessarily Existent One through the particular being, the wise form, the beneficial attributes given it among numerous possibilities. So too when they enter compounds, those creatures proclaim their Maker with a different tongue in each compound. Step by step till the greatest compound, through their relations, functions, and duties, they testify to the necessary existence, choice, and will of their All-Wise Maker. Because the one who situates a thing in all the compounds while preserving its wise relations, must be the Creator of all the compounds. That is to say, it is as though one single thing testifies to Him with thousands of tongues. Thus, from the point of view of contingency, the testimony to the existence of the Necessarily Existent One is as numerous, not as the number of beings in the universe, but as the attributes of beings and the compounds they form..." So turn your vision again: do you see any flaw? Then turn your vision a second time; your vision will come back to you in a state dazzled and truly defeated(Quran) state and point out, however much the human gaze tries to find faults, it can find none anywhere, and returns worn out to its dwelling, the eye, and says to the fault-finding mind who sent it: “I am worn out for nothing; there are no faults.” This shows that the order and regularity are most perfect

eru 2y ago

The key insight for both evolution and contemporary AI is that hill-climbing (either completely random a la evolution, or guided locally like in back-propagation) can work really well, if you have enough dimensions to play with. Hill climbing obviously gets stuck easily in 2 or 3 dimensions. So our intuition ain't reliable.

carlmr 2y ago
>Hill climbing obviously gets stuck easily in 2 or 3 dimensions. So our intuition ain't reliable. Also our intuition about overfitting from lower-dimensional representations seems to be less of an issue at high dimensions.

openrisk 2y ago

Strictly speaking the two domains have very little in common besides "evolving" in a general sense (as opposed to something being static and unchanging). But if we generalize a bit our target system we can make the analogy more fruitful. LLM Algorithms don't "evolve" when trained, they just fit data in a pre-existing and hardwired "DNA". More GPU, data, energy consumption etc. simply means different weights (parameters) for the same fixed algorithm. Training involves no feedback loop on the algorithm design itself. The biological analogy is like what happens when you starve or overfeed somebody: They become skinny or obese (but they will not pass on that attribute to their offspring). The algorithm's DNA is explicitly designed and put in place by human intelligence. When thinking of the observed "evolution" of algorithms we need to include the sum total of the people involved in algorithmic design and deployment, their cognitive toolkit, incentives etc. Now that part is definitely "evolving" (various mathematical, technical or economic breakthroughs), not biologically of course, but culturally. So-called AI Winters (and other AI Seasons) are indeed evidence of this collective cultural movement. You could say that the invention / adoption of the multilayered neural net pattern has led to a sort of Cambrian explosion similar to going from single cell to multicellular organisms.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nkrisc 2y ago

The fascination with “intelligent design” is cherry-picking. The is no shortage of “unintelligent design” in the natural world. Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure. Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in intelligent design, ask why our intelligent designer thought it wise to link our jaw to our ears so that it’s hard to hear things when you’re chewing.

lpat 2y ago
That's pretty weak argument against intelligent design. 1. The designer does not have to be "omniscient" only intelligent. Some people believe in it's omniscience but I don't think it's a requirement. 2. How do you know that our trachea is not an optimal design when you take into account all the tradeoffs? 3. You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and tend to break. Obviously you wouldn't argue based on this that they weren't designed by intelligent beings.
- nkrisc 2y ago
  > How do you know that our trachea is not an optimal design when you take into account all the tradeoffs? Because if we were designed from scratch we could have been designed in any optimal shape or form. > You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and tend to break. Obviously you wouldn't argue based on this that they weren't designed by intelligent beings. Show me an intelligent designer who can literally design the universe, but is still not intelligent enough to avoid these flaws even we can recognize. I don’t think we are intelligent enough to design a completely novel life form, let alone as many as exist on earth in all their forms. This is all beside the point that there’s no evidence of any kind for intelligent design, only supposition based on nothing more than intuition and feelings.
  - smusamashah 2y ago
    Flaws is a wrong way to put these things you notice. Would a perfectly and optimally designed being get no diseases? won't die? won't fall?

jhanschoo 2y ago

As other commenters, it tickles me that this was your takeaway as optimizers mildly altering weights at every training step to a more correct representation is more analogous to intelligent design, where a God guides the evolution of species to develop the features they need.

interludead 2y ago

It makes the idea of randomness and feedback loops in nature more tangible

protonbob 2y ago

All of the data that has gone into AI has been intelligently created. Also, there are plenty of intelligent people cleaning the test data and guiding its training. That is basically the entire premise of intelligent design. Not that there is no evolution, but that it is a guided process.

fellowniusmonk 2y ago
Right, genetic and morphological lineage data among hominidae and other families look exactly like you'd expect from unguided mutation. So any intelligent hand involved would have to be a real trickster to put so much effort into making the data look the way it does, or just shouldn't have bothered because it seems we end up at the same place regardless.
- protonbob 2y ago
  I'm just saying your conclusion doesn't follow from AI. I'm not arguing for God right now.
  - fellowniusmonk 2y ago
    I think you're replying to the wrong person.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

wruza 2y ago

what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve Half a billion, afaik. And also how technology matters. Oxygenless ~3.5B years were boring as hell. For those unaware: Earth not always had O2 in its athmosphere - O2 is a result of one kind of ubiquitous goo that was emitting it as a byproduct. And while it oxidized what it could on the surface, it killed almost every goo, cause it is a poison. Then (and that is still an unproven theory) oxygen-breathing evolved and allowed for fast movement and carnivory, which started arms race of tracking and evasion, coordination, vision, swarming, etc. 0.5B years later here we are. Btw, there were even higher peaks of oxygen concentration that allowed for animal-sized insects to exist. A time insectophobes wouldn’t want to live in. Scientists know that dragonflies with wing spans as wide as a hawk's and cockroaches big enough to take on house cats lived during the Paleozoic era (245-570 million years ago). At the same time, mammoth millipedes longer than a human leg skittered across prehistoric soil.

mietek 2y ago
Big millipedes are still around! Although not quite as big as before. https://youtu.be/oY32HPQrhYg?si=z0QO821u3-E5sJ6l&t=480 https://youtu.be/oY32HPQrhYg?si=z0QO821u3-E5sJ6l&t=480 (about millipedes from 8:00)

palata 2y ago

> However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve. The thing with evolution is that it is robust. Even after the human species collapses (with everything it manages to bring down with it), evolution will still work. Modern humans have been very quick at many things, but at the cost of breaking the conditions of their survival. One may say "that's wrong, with enough GPU a solution will appear", but on the other hand maybe we have already passed the tipping point where we actually cannot solve it anymore.

fennecbutt 2y ago

I mean even real biology like our tailbone, reflexes and organs we no longer actually need are all good indicators.