Empirical Findings Generalize Surprisingly Far

Previously, I argued that emergent phenomena in machine learning mean that we can’t rely on current trends to predict what the future of ML will be like. In this post, I will argue that despite this, empirical findings often do generalize very far, including across “phase transitions” caused by emergent behavior.

This might seem like a contradiction, but actually I think divergence from current trends and empirical generalization are consistent. Findings do often generalize, but you need to think to determine the right generalization, and also about what might stop any given generalization from holding.

I don’t think many people would contest the claim that empirical investigation can uncover deep and generalizable truths. This is one of the big lessons of physics, and while some might attribute physics’ success to math instead of empiricism, I think it’s clear that you need empirical data to point to the right mathematics.

However, just invoking physics isn’t a good argument, because physical laws have fundamental symmetries that we shouldn’t expect in machine learning. Moreover, we care specifically about findings that continue to hold up after some sort of emergent behavior (such as few-shot learning in the case of ML). So, to make my case, I’ll start by considering examples in deep learning that have held up in this way. Since “modern” deep learning hasn’t been around that long, I’ll also look at examples from biology, a field that has been around for a relatively long time and where More Is Different is ubiquitous (see Appendix: More Is Different In Other Domains).

Source:

https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/empirical-findings-generalize-surprisingly-far/

Narrated for AI Safety Fundamentals by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.

---

A podcast by BlueDot Impact.

Learn more on the AI Safety Fundamentals website.