Reading this reinforces that a lot of what makes up current "AI" is brute forcing and not actually intelligent or thoughtful. Although I suppose our meat-minds could also be brute-forcing everything throughout our entire lives, and consciousness is like a chat prompt sitting on top of the machinery of the mind. But artificial intelligence will always be just as soulless and unfulfilling as artificial flavors.
Intelligence is the manifold that these brute-force algorithms learn.
Of course we don’t brute-force this in our lifetime. Evolution encoded the coarse structure of the manifold over billions of years. And then encoded a hyper-compressed meta-learning algorithm into primates across millions of years.
Fitting a manifold to a bunch of samples does not allow you to understand what can happen in the universe. For example, if you train a regular diffusion model on correct sudokus, it will produce sudokus with errors because it does not understand the rules.
You raise a good point for the diffusion case, which trains only on positive examples, but generally speaking negative examples will warp the manifold appropriately.
