10 August

In conversation with people here and elsewhere, so often I see angry rejections of the idea that AI is thinking. A reminder that Hinton’s work on machine intelligence via neural networks is the foundation of AI, and won him the Nobel Prize in 2024. Bring your A-game if you still think AI is ‘slop’ and just mindless pattern-matching. He also makes the critical point here that AI is *distributed* intelligence. Tesla’s self-driving is a case in point. Every error a Tesla vehicle makes is firstly used for learning. And that learning is then sent to the entire Tesla fleet. Every single car becomes a better driver, from every single car’s learning. Instantly. The whole fleet drives better, every day. The learning and improvement never ends. Compare that with human driving. Nothing a good human driver does can make other drivers better drivers. And nothing stops humans taking their rivalries onto the road with them. Except AI-driven cars.