99.99% of human thought is repetitive, derivative and generally just cached computation being reused. Adding one original thought on top of everything can be a life-long endeavour and often require a PhD.
AlphaGo started from scratch and surpassed human level by having access to more experience. It was enough for a neural net to learn this game, because a simulated Go board is close enough to a real one. Remember move 37?
More recently AlphaTensor showed a better way to do matrix multiplication than humans could manually discover, also based on massive search followed by verification and learning.
Humans appear more intelligent because we have access to validation in a way the AI models don't, we have access to the real world, tools and labs and human society, not just a text dataset or an impoverished simulation.
Even so, it's not easy to validate abductive thought. Saying is cheap, proving is what matters. Same for language models - unvalidated generative language models are worthless. Validation is the key. When validating is cheap, a model can beat humans, the neural net architecture is not an obstacle to surpassing humans.
When validation is expensive, even humans fumble around - remember how many cooks were around the pot at the CERN particle accelerator a few years ago? All of them sucking on the verification soup. With so many PhD brains, verification was still the scarce ingredient. Without our labs, toys and human peers we can't do it either.
One other thing we can't do, for example, is to discover how to build better AI. We just try various ideas out, seeing what sticks. Why can't we just spit out the best idea if we are "intelligent"? Why are we calling working with neural nets a kind of alchemy? Because we haven't verified most of our ideas yet.
Most humans’ social/conversational speech appears to be little more than a Markov chain. From schoolchildren to restaurant workers to office workers…there’s generally accepted call-and-response chains which for some groups form 90+% of the communication.
And that’s not counting the nonverbal communication, most of which is as original as breathing. Even people who spend their lives practicing nonverbal communication still mostly just pattern match in the moment using a wider variety of postures, facial expressions, and gestures than the average person.
Even the seemingly original discussion in the final 10% is also almost entirely copied from others.
I myself only come up with about one truly creative thing per month, it seems like. Usually it’s a micro optimization like “oh this workflow in my kitchen can be improved with a hook to hang that here.” Or rearranging some furniture better. Sometimes it’s a good business idea.
But it’s usually just a very small step forward from the current state of things, no grand plan for multi-stage changes.
Most days I do the same things as some previous day, with just a tiny bit of random walk in my routine and assess whether the small changes were any better.
For ethical reasons we can't do this as a controlled experiment but actually I believe the assumption is that humans not exposed to language will spontaneously produce a proto-language. A subsequent generation of humans exposed only to the proto-language would refine that into a full blown language with a proper grammar and so on.
Profoundly deaf children in deprived areas with no exposure to whatever local sign language is dominant will sign spontaneously, and their parents, who have a language the child can't use, will learn rudimentary signs from the child. Again ethical considerations forbid experimenting on such children.
