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AI is impressive, but it's not transcendent by Clayton Chansey, read by the author.

I recently came across a paper with an interesting title, a taxonomy of transcendence.

Authored by researchers affiliated with several of the world's leading artificial intelligence

laboratories, the paper has an audacious title that demands attention. Transcendence

is a word that has carried the weight of human longing from millennia, the aspiration to

participate in a reality that exceeds the boundaries of ordinary existence, to encounter the

divine. Mystics have spent lifetimes pursuing it.

Philosophers have written libraries attempting to define it,

and now it appears in the title of a machine learning paper.

The authors write,

Our goal is to describe the circumstances in which a model,

trained to mimic multiple people is capable

of transcending its sources by outperforming each individual. In this framing, transcendence refers to an achievement

the moment when an algorithm's outputs exceed the average performance of its

training data. The word is hollowed out and repurposed as a technical term. What once pointed to

the infinite now describes a benchmark. This misappropriation is mostly accidental. It's the excited semantics of young but well-paid

data scientists and engineers with insufficient training in philosophy and religion, who are

nevertheless building tools that raise philosophical and religious questions. But beyond mere

ignorance, it also reflects something deeper,

the underlying ideology driving the race towards artificial, general intelligence.

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