Stats prof Gary Smith dissects claims at New York Times that an AI theory of everything is the Next Big Thing:
Judea Pearl, a winner of the Turing Award (the “Nobel Prize of computing”), has argued that, “All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting.” Finding patterns in data may be useful but it is not real intelligence…
Professor Tegmark argued that, “We’re hoping to discover all kinds of new laws of physics. We’re already shown that it can rediscover laws of physics.” If computer algorithms can indeed discover laws of physics, that would be far beyond mere curve fitting. Alas, such prowess remains a long way off, as does Hawking’s prediction of the demise of theoretical physicists.
Pearl is still correct.
The AI Feynman algorithm is impressive but it doesn’t devise any laws of physics. The researchers used each of Feynman’s equations to generate data. The algorithm was then told the variables in the equation and tasked with identifying the form of the mathematical relationship that generated the data. It is curve fitting on steroids, but it is still just curve fitting.
News, “AI is just curve fitting, not finding a theory of everything” at Mind Matters News
Gary Smith concludes, “Computers are much better than humans at curve fitting but still far worse at devising models that help us understand and predict the world.”
Big Tech no like this talk. Tough. They’ll just have to program around it. As soon as we heard Max Tegmark was involved… we switched the basic mode to science fiction.
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