Can open-ended intelligence growth be reduced to closed-loop optimization?

jzl86 · x · 2026-11-15

In a discussion responding to Caleb Watney, sebkrier frames the crux: whether open-ended intelligence growth reduces to closed-loop optimization over an internal learning metric, or whether discovering better algorithms and real-world competence still depends on the 'rubber hitting the road' — an environment acting as a rate limiter. Abstracting to 'pretraining loss + in-context learning is all you need' treats general intelligence as a compact mathematical learning rule waiting in a sandbox, which he can't disprove but finds unconvincing.

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