Acknowledgements

The vision here was midwifed originally in the wild and gentle radiance that is Abram's company (though essentially none of the content is explicitly his).

The PIBBSS-spirit has been infused in this work from before it began (may it infuse us all), as have meetings with the Agent Foundations team at MIRI over the past ~2 years.

More recently, everyone who has been loving the High Actuation project into form (very often spontaneously and without being encumbered by self-consciousness of this fact):^[1] individuals include Steve Petersen, Mateusz Baginski, Aditya Prasad, Harmony, TJ, Chris Lakin; the AISC 2024 team, Murray Buchanan, Matt Farr, Arpan Agrawal, Adam, Ryan, Quinn; various people from Topos, ALIFE, MAPLE, MATS, EA Bangalore. Published while at CEEALAR.

Disclaimers

Very occasionally there are small remarks/questions from a remarkable human named Steve, since this and the next two posts are an edited transcript of me giving him a talk. I left them in to retain the conversational tone. Steve has also consistently been a fantastic ground for this channeling.
I use the term “artefact” a fair amount in this sequence. Unfortunately for you and me, Anthropic also recently started using "artifact" in a different way. I'm using "artefact" in the common sense of the word. The British spelling should help remind of the distinction.

Taking Intelligence Seriously

Sahil:

I gave a talk recently, at an EA event just two days ago, where I made some quick slides (on the day of the talk, so not nearly as tidy as I’d like) and attempted to walk through this so-called “live theory”^[2].

Maybe I can give you that talk. I'm not sure how much of what I was saying there will be present now, but I can try. What do you think? I think it'll take about 15 minutes. Yeah?

Steve:

Cool.

Sahil:

Okay, let me give you a version of this talk that's very abbreviated.

So, the title I’m sure already makes sense to you, Steve. I don't know if this is something that you know, but I prefer the word “adaptivity” over intelligence. I'm fine with using “intelligence” for this talk, but really, when I'm thinking of AI and LLMs and “live” (as you’ll see later), I'm thinking, in part, of adaptive. And I think that connotes much more of the relevant phenomena, and much less controversially.

It’s also less distr...

Futurism