learning cycles are measured in hours or days, not milliseconds.
Yeah but that's still orders of magnitude faster than humans. AI may not be able to do everything humans can, but what they can do, they can do much faster. No human can learn to be an expert at Go in a week, babies take longer than a day to learn to see, and much longer than a day to learn the basics of language.
Did Google actually say how long it took to train Alpha Go? In any case, even if it took a week or less, that is not strong evidence that an AGI could go from knowing nothing to knowing a reasonable amount in a week. It could easily take months, even if it would learn faster than a human being. You need to learn a lot more for general intelligence than to play Go.
I've been going through the AIFoom debate, and both sides makes sense to me. I intend to continue, but I'm wondering if there're already insights in LW culture I can get if I just ask for them.
My understanding is as follows:
The difference between a chimp and a human is only 5 million years of evolution. That's not time enough for many changes.
Eliezer takes this as proof that the difference between the two in the brain architecture can't be much. Thus, you can have a chimp-intelligent AI that doesn't do much, and then with some very small changes, suddenly get a human-intelligent AI and FOOM!
Robin takes the 5-million year gap as proof that the significant difference between chimps and humans is only partly in the brain architecture. Evolution simply can't be responsible for most of the relevant difference; the difference must be elsewhere.
So he concludes that when our ancestors got smart enough for language, culture became a thing. Our species stumbled across various little insights into life, and these got passed on. An increasingly massive base of cultural content, made of very many small improvements is largely responsible for the difference between chimps and humans.
Culture assimilated new information into humans much faster than evolution could.
So he concludes that you can get a chimp-level AI, and to get up to human-level will take, not a very few insights, but a very great many, each one slowly improving the computer's intelligence. So no Foom, it'll be a gradual thing.
So I think I've figured out the question. Is there a commonly known answer, or are there insights towards the same?