Introduction

When I’m in the lab staring at the buzzing GPU servers, I often wonder: am I smarter, or are these machines smarter? At least when it comes to rendering tasks, it’s clear that I can’t compete with these machines. After all, whether the human eye has millions or billions of pixels^[1], I surely couldn’t outperform eight A100 GPUs working together. Similarly, if I were tasked with memorizing billions of faces, it would be completely impossible.

Intelligence and Wisdom

Intelligence is related to the frequency of information processing rather than the outcome of that processing.

We can define intelligence by the rate of information operations per unit of time, also known as frequency of elemental information operations. For simplicity, let’s call these information operations “ops.” Elemental operations mean ops cannot be subdivided into smaller computational units.

Let’s imagine we discover a new alien microorganism with a very simple nervous system, just a light receptor and a flagellum that controls forward or backward movement. When it sees blue (assuming blue represents food), it sends a forward signal to swim toward the food; when it sees red (assuming red represents a predator), it sends a backward signal.

In this simple example, we've constructed a basic intelligent system that processes environmental signals and responds to them.

A drawing of a person with arms and legs

Description automatically generated

Now, imagine we find another alien microorganism with a similar structure, but it sends a backward signal when it sees food and a forward signal when it sees predators. How should we evaluate the intelligence of these two organisms?

In modern AI technology, if our model has a high error rate in a binary classification task, we can simply invert the output to achieve a high accuracy rate (ignoring the cost of inversion for now). Thus, these two alien organisms actually possess the same level of intelligence because they process information at the same rate per unit of time—despite their vastly different outcomes.

However, the latter would be eliminated by natural selection. The issue is not that it “lost” in terms of intelligence, but rather that it lacks "wisdom." It’s not that the latter is less intelligent, but that it lacks the wisdom to adapt to natural selection.

Intelligent Models and the Wisdom of Natural Selection

When building AI models, we don’t always choose the most complex models; rather, we focus on se...

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