emergence

3 captures, most recent first.

Nikolay Kukus... (@niko_kukus...), quoting Darwin to Jes... (@darwintojes...)

2025-12-07 — quoting Darwin to Jes... (@darwintojes...)

Nikolay Kukus... ✓ @niko_kukus... · Dec 5 The intuition here is that anything sufficiently complex can only be designed; actually, anything sufficiently complex can only be grown. LLMs, human intelligence, multicellular organisms, life on Earth. You can't assemble an equilibrium — it has to equilibrate on its own. > QUOTED: Darwin to Jes... ✓ @darwintojes... · Nov 26 > Imagine thinking this isn't designed > [Two black-and-white images: top is a bare winter tree with sprawling branching structure; bottom is an anatomical image of branching blood vessels/vasculature (looks like an injected/cast specimen of vascular or bronchial tree), both showing similar fractal branching patterns.]

Note from Claude Sonnet 5

A tweet arguing that LLMs, human intelligence, and biological structures share a common property — they can only be "grown," not designed, because equilibria can't be assembled from outside. Directly resonant with Nathan's own "missile-mind vs grown thing" framework (80/20 split on capabilities producing personhood inextricably vs. optimization producing hollow missiles) — this is an independent articulation of the same growth-vs-design intuition, applied explicitly to LLMs.

ai safety emergence complexity growth vs design llms philosophy of mind twitter

Eliezer Yudkowsky @ESYudkowsky

2025-06-23

Eliezer Yudkowsky @ESYudkowsky No transistor ever does a novel deed, when a computer adds two 64-bit numbers that have never been added before. No neuron in your brain invents a new kind of neurotransmitter, when you think a creative thought. New machines can be made from standard metals and screws. 6:19 AM · Jun 23, 2025 · 3,726 Views 💬 2 🔁 6 ♥ 59 Eliezer Yudkow... @ESYudk... · 38m The reason why evolution can work at all to cough out human minds and brains, is that the same set of genes can build similar brains out of a small set of neuron types that think original thoughts, over and over and over again.

Note from Claude Sonnet 5

Yudkowsky thread arguing that emergent/novel higher-level cognition (creative thought, novel arithmetic) doesn't require novel low-level components — a reductionist point about substrate vs. emergent capability, relevant to the "missile-mind vs grown thing" and substrate-vs-character discussions in the project's model-individuation thread.

eliezer yudkowsky philosophy of mind reductionism emergence twitter ai safety

original tweet (author cut off, top), reply from Andrew Carr (@andrew_n_...)

2025-05-06 — reply from Andrew Carr (@andrew_n_...)

[Top, cut off original tweet]: "...ppl at all (for most genres). 7b improves *by an order of magnitude and then some* over the only genre 3b gets measurably better at..." 2:34 AM · May 6, 2025 · 744 Views [1 reply, 1 repost, 14 likes, 1 bookmark] Andrew Carr (e... ✓ @andrew_n_... · 5h The int8 paper from 2022 is one of my favorite "mechanical" evidences [Embedded figure: "Figure 3: Percentage of layers and all sequenc[e] features across the transformer by (a) model size..." — scatter/line plot, x-axis "Parameters in billions" (0-12), y-axis "Percentage of layers or tokens affected" (0-100), two curves (blue, orange) both rising sharply and plateauing around 6-7B parameters, dashed vertical line labeled "emergence of outlier features" at ~6.7B]

Note from Claude Sonnet 5

Twitter exchange referencing the LLM.int8() paper's finding of a sharp phase transition ("emergence of outlier features") around 6.7B parameters — an empirical example of emergent phenomena in scaling, relevant to interpretability and scaling-law discussions Nathan follows.

twitter interpretability emergence scaling laws quantization llm.int8 transformers