[robwwilliams]

> But these systems need to grow a ton of new helper functionality and subsystems to hope to achieve that kind of performance. And, I'll venture that kind of thing is a lower bound on the abilitites of any being who would be able to savage the world with it's intellect. It will have to be able to link up so, so many disparate threads to do it. It boggles our minds, which are only squaring a measly 100T dimension every tick.

Agreed: LLM are just one of many necessary modules. But amazing nonetheless. The quadratic scaling problem needs an attentional-conceptual extractor layer with working memory. Hofstadter points out that this needs to be structured as a recursive “strange loop” (p 709 of GEB). Thalamo-cortico-thalamic circuitry is a strange loop and attentional self-control may happens by phase- or time-shifting activity of different circuits to achieve flexible “binding” for attention and compute.

I’m actually optimistic that this is not a heavy computational lift but a clever deep extension of recursive self-modulating algorithms across modules. The recursion is key. And the embodiment is also probably crucial to bootstrap self-consciousness. Watching infants bootstrap is an inspiration.