u/oravecz

Occasionally, the police will ask the public to help on a case - either searching for a missing person or asking for information leading to the arrest of a criminal.

On Reddit, we have all seen the power of crowd sourcing a logic puzzle or riddle, the identification of numerous people, places, and things, and demonstrations of very specific knowledge.

Why haven’t the police thought to open source cold cases? Post all of the interviews, photos, and notes to a Google Doc folder and allow threaded conversations and the unique insights and thought patterns of the masses take over.

Do you think some cases might be solved, or will every case turn into a multitude of conspiracy theories?

Yann LeCun bet a billion dollars that it can. He left Meta arguing today’s chatbots are a dead end, and that real intelligence comes from “world models,” systems that learn how the physical world works rather than just predicting the next word.

Two things nag at me.

First, how do we even measure it? Every famous AI test is basically a language exam. But a world model doesn’t write essays, it predicts what happens next. So either these systems slip past the tests we trust, or we have no good way to score them yet.

Second, LeCun says you can’t reach real intelligence through language alone. Probably right. But isn’t the reverse just as true? Could anything that masters physics but can’t grasp language really be called intelligent? So much of human thought, math, planning, culture, rides on words.

My gut says neither pure chatbot nor pure world model gets us there. The winner is some marriage of the two.

So maybe the question isn’t chatbots versus world models. It’s how the two work together.

Is language the engine of thought, or just a handy way to talk about it?

I will be painting the front of our house because there IDs significant deterioration on the south facing Hardieplank. It was painted three years ago, but the company refuses to call me back to honor a warranty. I think they only used one coat.

This will be my first time painting on a 20’ ladder. I’m wondering if there are some must have products to make painting with a brush and roller safe and efficient while on an extension ladder?