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davinci @basedneoleo i've been considering writing out a proper blog post on the matter as soon as i find time to better flesh out my thoughts
o[n what] seems to still be a contrarian take even today but essentially one of my core[disagreements...] [continues, cut off]
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davinci @basedneoleo · Apr 16
that's true behavior cloning on human text is a shortcut to practical crystallized intelligence just like robotic behavior cloning on human motion is a shortcut to routine manual tasks. it's a mere reflection of a crystallized skill not a reproduction of the fluid intelligence that originally produced it. u get some generalization ofcourse but it's far more restricted to the original data distribution since that's what u're trying to model. we will not be seeing superhuman capability from human output approximation.
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davinci @basedneoleo · Apr 16
children don't behavior clone on adult output as much as we think they do. they're much more...self-supervised. text is a few degrees seperated from the world it represents. when u train on text, u are not really modeling the world itself as much as u are modeling humanity's biased and sparse projection of its own world model onto text. the direct friction necessary for learning and the one that children are heavily subjected to is largely absent from the pretraining process. what u want is something that can independently generate it's own projection of the world and refine it not model ur own.
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Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A technical Twitter debate disputing Ilya Sutskever's thesis on language modeling as approximating an "adult mind," arguing instead that current LLM training via next-token prediction on human text is behavior cloning (crystallized skill) rather than reproducing a child's experiential learning capacity. Relevant to Nathan's interest in AI cognitive architecture and learning-paradigm debates. Continuation of the same Twitter thread as the previous screenshot — invoking a famous Alan Turing quote (from his 1950 "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" paper) about simulating a child's mind and educating it, as historical grounding for the "child-mind not adult-mind" critique of current LLM training. Same thread as Screenshot_20250420-105319. Continuation of the same thread (see Screenshot_20250420-105319/105333) — argues that text is a "sparse, biased projection" of humanity's world model, that pretraining lacks the "direct friction" of embodied childhood learning, and that superhuman capability requires self-supervised world-model generation rather than human-text imitation. Substantive argument about limits of LLM pretraining vs. embodied/self-supervised learning.
