Blake Richards is an Assistant Professor in the Montreal Neurological Institute and the School of Computer Science at McGill University and a Core Faculty Member at MiLA. He thinks that AGI is not a coherent concept, which is why he ended up on a recent AGI political compass meme. When people asked on Twitter who was the edgiest people at MiLA, his name got actually more likes than Ethan, so  hopefully, this podcast will help re-establish the truth.

Transcript: https://theinsideview.ai/blake

Video: https://youtu.be/kWsHS7tXjSU

Outline:

(01:03) Highlights

(01:03) AGI good / AGI not now compass

(02:25) AGI is not a coherent concept

(05:30) you cannot build truly general AI

(14:30) no "intelligence" threshold for AI

(25:24) benchmarking intelligence

(28:34) recursive self-improvement

(34:47) scale is something you need

(37:20) the bitter lesson is only half-true

(41:32) human-like sensors for general agents

(44:06) the credit assignment problem

(49:50) testing for backpropagation in the brain

(54:42) burstprop (bursts of action potentials), reward prediction errors

(01:01:35) long-term credit-assignment in reinforcement learning

(01:10:48) what would change his mind on scaling and existential risk