Manifold, May 12, 2023
Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Join him for wide-ranging conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.
I’m pretty confident that existing data and compute capabilities are going to easily produce superhuman capability in almost any domain. So, any narrow, relatively narrowly defined problem for sure. I think we’re gonna be able to build neural nets that are superhuman better than what our brains can do in that narrow domain. And, and then even I think in the future, you know, in a, in a more generalized sense as well.
This has long-term consequences for the future of our universe because the fact that we can build, you know, we’re just a little bit removed from our ape days in terms of biological evolution, but yet we’ve already reached a point where we can build machines, which are probably good enough to learn almost everything that’s learnable about our universe. So, all of us are sitting at this inflection point in history, at least on this planet, of ape-like brains not being able to do this, and ape brains suddenly being able to do this, during our lifetimes.