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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

> Penrose essentially takes for granted that human brains can reason about or produce results that are otherwise uncomputable.

That's Penrose's old criticism. We're past that. It's the wrong point now.

Generative AI systems are quite creative. Better than the average human at art. LLMs don't have trouble blithering about advanced abstract concepts. It's concrete areas where these systems have trouble, such as arithmetic. Common sense is still tough. Hallucinations are a problem. Lying is a problem. None of those areas are limited by computability. It's grounding in the real world that's not working well.

(A legit question to ask today is this: We now know how much compute it takes to get to the Turing test level of faking intelligence. How do biological brains, with such a slow clock rate, do it? That was part of the concept behind "nanotubules". Something in there must be running fast, right?)

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> Something in there must be running fast, right?

Nah. It just needs to be really wide. This is a very fuzzy comparison, but a human brain has ~100 trillion synaptic connections, which are the closest match we have to "parameters" in AI models. The largest such models currently have on the order of ~2 trillion parameters. (edit to add: and this is a low end estimate of the differences between them. There might be more stuff in neurons that effectively acts as parameters, and should be counted as such in a comparison.)

So AI models are still at least two orders of magnitude off from humans in pure width. In contrast, they run much, much faster.

IMO creativity is beside the point, I mean, it is just one of those things that the human brain happens to be good at, so we identify it with consciousness (in the sense that it falls out of the same organ). But really all sorts of stuff can look creative. I mean, just to use an example that is clearly identified as a creative product: a Jackson Pollock painting is clearly a creative work, but a lot of the beauty comes from purely physical processes, the human influences the toss but after that it’s just a jumble of fluid dynamics.

We wouldn’t call the air creative, right? Or if we do, we must conclude that creativity doesn’t require consciousness.

> Better than the average human at art.

Given that we struggle with even a basic consensus about which humans are better at art than others, I don't think this sentence carries any meaning whatsoever.

No, we struggle with consensus about which expert-level humans are better than others at art.

> How do biological brains, with such a slow clock rate, do it?

And much lower energy expenditure.

A brain consumes something like 20 W while working.

They’re better than your average human at producing jpegs. I think if you put any of your average humans in a closed room with nothing but canvases, paint, and a mirror, within a month or two they’d be producing pretty interesting paintings without having been fed an image of every single artwork humanity has ever made.

> It's concrete areas where these systems have trouble, such as arithmetic. Common sense is still tough. Hallucinations are a problem. Lying is a problem

Gestures broadly at humanity

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