When people asked on Twitter who was the edgiest people at MiLA, his name got actually more likes than Ethan, so  hopefully, this podcast will help re-establish the truth. Blake Richards is an Assistant Professor in the Montreal Neurological Institute and the School of Computer Science at McGill University and a Core Faculty Member at MiLA. He thinks that AGI is not a coherent concept, which is why he ended up on a recent AGI political compass meme.

Transcript: https://theinsideview.ai/blake

Video: https://youtu.be/kWsHS7tXjSU

Outline:

01:03 AGI good / AGI not now compass

02:25 AGI is not a coherent concept

05:30 you cannot build truly general AI

14:30 no "intelligence" threshold for AI

25:24 benchmarking intelligence

28:34 recursive self-improvement

34:47 scale is something you need

37:20 the bitter lesson is only half-true

41:32 human-like sensors for general agents

44:06 the credit assignment problem

49:50 testing for backpropagation in the brain

54:42 burstprop (bursts of action potentials), reward prediction errors

01:01:35 long-term credit-assignment in reinforcement learning

01:10:48 what would change his mind on scaling and existential risk