ML researcher
I'm the Astera researcher that Nathan spoke to. This is a pretty bad misrepresentation of my views based on a 5 minute conversation that Nathan had with me about this subject (at the end of a technical interview).
A few responses:
For those who don't want to break out a calculator, Wikipedia has it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament#Comparison_with_just_intonation
You can see the perfect fourth and perfect fifth are very close to 4/3 and 3/2 respectively. This is basically just a coincidence and we use 12 notes per octave because there are these almost nice fractions. A major scale uses the 2212221 pattern because that hits all the best matches with low denominators, skipping 16/15 but hitting 9/8, for example.
Imagine you had an oracle which could assess the situation an agent is in and produce a description for an ML architecture that would correctly "solve" that situation.
I think for some strong versions of this oracle, we could create the ML component from the architecture description with modern methods. I think this combination could effectively act as AGI over a wide range of situations, again with just modern methods. It would likely be insufficient for linguistic tasks.
I think that's what this article is getting at. The author is an individual from Uber. Does anyone know if this line of thinking has other articles written about it?
I also go to church regularly. Albeit it is a Unitarian Universalist church, and I am an atheist.
Yes, this is basically what people are doing.