That’s the thing that’s interesting to me though and I had the same first reaction. It’s a very different problem than brute-forcing chess. It has one chance to come to the correct answer. Running through thousands or millions of options means nothing if the model can’t determine which is correct. And each of these visual problems involve combinations of different interacting concepts. To solve them requires understanding, not mimicry. So no matter how inefficient and “stupid” these models are, they can be said to understand these novel problems. That’s a direct counter to everyone who ever called these a stochastic parrot and said they were a dead-end to AGI that was only searching an in distribution training set.
The compute costs are currently disappointing, but so was the cost of sequencing the first whole human genome. That went from 3 billion to a few hundred bucks from your local doctor.
That’s the thing that’s interesting to me though and I had the same first reaction. It’s a very different problem than brute-forcing chess. It has one chance to come to the correct answer. Running through thousands or millions of options means nothing if the model can’t determine which is correct. And each of these visual problems involve combinations of different interacting concepts. To solve them requires understanding, not mimicry. So no matter how inefficient and “stupid” these models are, they can be said to understand these novel problems. That’s a direct counter to everyone who ever called these a stochastic parrot and said they were a dead-end to AGI that was only searching an in distribution training set.
The compute costs are currently disappointing, but so was the cost of sequencing the first whole human genome. That went from 3 billion to a few hundred bucks from your local doctor.