Empathy as a natural consequence of learnt reward models

Empathy, the ability to feel another’s pain or to ‘put yourself in their shoes’ is often considered to be a fundamental human cognitive ability, and one that undergirds our social abilities and moral intuitions. As so much of human’s success at becoming dominant as a species comes down to our... [Read More]

How to evolve a brain

Epistemic status: This is mostly pure speculation, although grounded in many years of studying neuroscience and AI. Almost certainly, much of this picture will be wrong in the details, although hopefully roughly correct ‘in spirit’. [Read More]

The Scale of the Brain vs Machine Learning

Epistemic status: pretty uncertain. There is a lot of fairly unreliable data in the literature and I make some pretty crude assumptions. Nevertheless, I would be surprised though if my conclusions are more than 1-2 OOMs off though. [Read More]

Understanding Overparametrized Generalization

This is a successor post to my previous post on Grokking Grokking. Here we present a heuristic argument as to why overparametrized neural networks appear to generalize in practice, and why this requires a substantial amount of overparametrization – i.e. the ability to easily memorize (sometimes called interpolate) the training... [Read More]