The Dragon Hatchling: The missing link between the transformer and brain models

The actual paper's title: "The Dragon Hatchling: The Missing Link between the Transformer and Models of the Brain"

Don't berate the authors for the HN submitter's carelessness.

A real scientist wouldn’t use an imprecise term like “brain-like”

That last line isn't true. To be brain-like, it only needs to imitate one thing in the brain. That thing is udually tested in isolation against observed results in human brains. Then, people will combine multiple, brain-inspired components in various ways.

That's standard in computational neuroscience. Our standard should simply be whether they are imitating an actual structure or technique in the brain. They usually mention that one. If they don't, it's probably a nonsense comparison to get more views or funding.

> the end of the Crypto Bubble

BTC literally hit all time high this month, fyi.

Seems like this should be in the paper! Thanks though

Hah, that's pretty clever if it's true .D

Absolutely agreed, but we may not even hear about it as Meta has made it clear they're not necessarily committed to the open source first policy at this point.

That's not true. The AI industry appears to play a game of follow the leader copying other companies and major researchers. There's all kinds of good ideas we never see applied by big companies. So, it's not safe to assume they tried them all and they didn't work.

In fact, we've sometimes seen new companies show up with models based on research big companies didn't use, the new models are useful or better in some way, and people use them or big companies acquire them. I'd say that's proof big companies miss a lot of good ideas internally.

This doesn't change the fact that the PDF contains a ~440 word abstract. It comes off as a defensive marketing pitch when it's this long.

It’s a clear signal the paper is gonna be hard to read. It takes a ton of work to compress complex ideas down to 8 pages for a conference paper. But that work makes it easier to understand. This paper did not do that work. In fact it seems they did the opposite: try to write a LONG paper as if that shows how much originality they have.

For the record, I'm agnostic to whether or not consciousnses is possible upon silica. I think it is pretty safe to say though that it likely is an emergent property of specifically-configured complex systems, and humanlike intelligence on silica is certainly something that might qualify.

I don't think appealing to whether or not inanimate objects may be conscious is sufficient to discount that we are toying with a different beast in machine learning. And, if we were to discover that inanimate objects are in-fact conscious, that would be an even greater reason to reconfigure our society and world around compassion.

I agree that LLMs are a great breakthrough, and I think there are many reasons to doubt consciousness there. But I would suggest we rest on our laurels for a bit, and see what we can get out of LLMs, rather than push to create something that is closer to mimicking humans because it might be more useful. From the evil perspective of pure utility, slaves are quite useful as well.

I hope your generous interpretation is right... I can't really tell what's going on with Anthropic's theater either. They definitely seem like they are vigilant of bad outcomes, going as far as to publish their own economic index trying to monitor how AI is affecting labor markets.

That said, the cynic in me thinks they give lip service to these things while pushing fully ahead into the unknown on the presumption of glory and a possibility of abundance. A bunch of the leadership are EAs who subscribe to a kind of superintelligence eschatology that goes as far as to give a shot at their own immortality. Given that, I think they act on the assumption that AGI is a necessity, and they'd rather take the risks on everyone's behalf than just not create the technology in the first place.

Them recently flirting with money from the gulf states is a pretty concerning signal pointing to them being more concerned with their own goals rather than ethics.

In this thought experiment, I am considering artificial life genuine. I would agree that there could be productive outlets for our selfish impulses if there was something that mimicked their targets without consciousness to experience the externalities of such impulses.

That said, I think probably the best path would just be to build and foster technologies that help our species mature, so if one day we do get the ability to spin-up conscious beings artificially, it can be done in a manner that adds more beauty rather than despair to our universe.

The paper would think it's ridiculous that meat could suffer.

Suffering isn't necessary outside evolutionary pressures. But if a bouillon of animal proteins could be conscious why not.

I am empathetic to arguments against consciounsess being computational. Definitely strange to imagine an algorithm played out on trillions of abacuses being conscious.

That said, I don't think it is a sufficient appeal to entirely discount the possibility that the right process implemented on silicon could in fact be conscious in the same way we are. I'm open to whether or not it is possible--I don't have a vested interest in the space--but silica seems to be a medium that can possible hold the level of complexity for something like consciousness to emerge.

So this is to say that I agree with you that consciousness likely requires substrate-specific embodiment, but I'm open to silica being a possible substrate. I certainly don't think it can be discounted at this point in time, and I'd suggest that we don't risk a digital holocaust on the bet that it can't.