The ARC Prize: Efficiency, Intuition, and AGI, with Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

Nathan interviews Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier and co-creator of the ARC Prize, about the $1 million competition for more efficient AI architectures. They discuss the ARC AGI benchmark, its implications for general intelligence, and the potential impact on AI safety. Nathan reflects on the challenges of intuitive problem-solving in AI and considers hybrid approaches to AGI development.

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CHAPTERS:

(00:00:00) About the Show

(00:06:06) The ARC Benchmark

(00:09:34) Other Benchmarks

(00:10:58) Definition of AGI

(00:14:38) The rules of the contest

(00:18:16) ARC test set (Part 1)

(00:18:23) Sponsors: Oracle | Brave

(00:20:31) ARC test set (Part 2)

(00:22:50) Stair-stepping benchmarks

(00:26:17) ARC Prize

(00:28:34) The rules of the ARC Prize

(00:31:12) Compute costs (Part 1)

(00:34:47) Sponsors: Omneky | Squad

(00:36:34) Compute costs (Part 2)

(00:36:40) Compute Limit

(00:41:00) Public Leaderboard

(00:42:58) The current AI ecosystem

(00:47:23) The four steps of solving a puzzle

(00:51:20) Intuition

(00:54:32) Human Intelligence

(00:56:06) Current Frontier Language Models

(00:57:44) Program Synthesis

(01:04:10) Is the model learning or memorizing?

(01:09:51) Improving the ARC dataset

(01:11:34) Step 3: Guessing the Rule

(01:12:51) Dealing with Ambiguity

(01:15:02) Exploring Solutions

(01:17:02) Non-backpropagation evolutionary architecture search

(01:19:49) Expectations for an AGI world

(01:24:11) Reliability and out of domain generalization

(01:28:35) What a person would do

(01:29:51) What is the right generalization

(01:35:32) The ARC AGI Challenge

(01:37:01) Postscript

(01:38:07) DSpi

(01:39:55) Statespace models

(01:43:28) Hybrid models

(01:48:32) FunSearch

(01:50:41) Kolmogorov-Arnold-Networks

(01:54:18) Grokking

(01:55:42) Outro