[MR4D]

I agree. I read Jeff Hawkins book On Intelligence [0] back when it came out, and it had a profound effect on my thinking. Chasing more data, aka "parameters" doesn't seem to be the right answer. I think more of a Bayes model like spam filtering, but cobbled together with other Bayes models looking at other things until something emerges that we call "intelligent". Heck, I'd consider Google's spam filtering pretty intelligent today.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence

[jcims]

Hawkins way of thinking really maps well for me also. It seems like that more parameters helps until it doesn't, then you need to encapsulate those networks and pin them to some reference frame, they create hierarchies of these networks and a system to generalize and compress those hierarchies (aka patterns), rinse and repeat.

My brother just became a grandpa and I was watching his grandson navigate the world this past weekend. It's unbelievable how quickly the brain can extrapolate a new relationship between objects/actions/etc and then apply it elsewhere. Minimally you see it in the drinking action applied to all sorts of things, this sort of repetitive clenching/releasing of the fingers to find things to grip without looking, etc etc. Watching mom use a fork and very quickly understand how to grasp and manipulate it. The model of just training everything from exogenous data into a flat network seems like it will hit some asymptotic limit.