The gap between chimps and humans is no evidence that a small increase in compute yields an explosion of capability, because evolution was not optimising chimps for technology.

Added to korrents 24 Feb 2018 · How quotes work · Something wrong? Tell us

Where this collides

• Cannot both be true

  Intelligence is going to scale by exactly one thing, and that thing is compute.

  Huang says intelligence scales by exactly one thing and that thing is compute. Christiano says the gap between chimps and humans is no evidence that a small increase in compute yields an explosion of capability -- which is the intuition the compute-only story leans on when it is asked why more of it should be transformative rather than incremental.

Related korrents

Our reading — they may agree, disagree or merely touch the same thing. Closest first: a shared subject counts for most, then how near the wording is.

• Humanity's advantage is accumulated shared knowledge rather than higher intelligence — and AI models, which vanish with their context window, have none of it. NBNoam Brown26 Jun 2026similar wording
• Model intelligence should speciate like the animal kingdom rather than converge on one oracle that knows everything. AKAndrej Karpathy20 Mar 2026similar wording
• Because we do not have good alignment technology, we are choosing to build an alien mind with its own values and gamble on it instead of building a tool. RGRyan Greenblatt11 Aug 2026similar wording
• That people are good at maths and coding, which evolution never selected for, shows human learning is not a complicated evolutionary prior but something more fundamental. ISIlya Sutskever25 Nov 2025similar wording
• AI capabilities are jagged rather than smooth, so the different definitions of human-level AI will be met years apart rather than together. HTHelen Toner6 Apr 2026similar wording

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