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François Chollet

@fchollet

Oct 26

In the last Trump administration, legal, high-skilled immigration was cut by ~30% before Covid, then by 100% after Covid (which was definitely a choice: a number of countries kept issuing residency permits and visas). However illegal immigrant inflows did not go down (they've been stable since the mid-2000s).

If you're a scientist or engineer applying for a green card, you're probably keenly aware that your chances of eventually obtaining it are highly dependent on the election. What you may not know is that, if you're a naturalized citizen, your US passport is also at stake

The last Trump administration launched a "denaturalization task force" aiming at taking away US citizenship from as many naturalized citizens as possible, with an eventual target of 7M (about one third of all naturalized citizens). Thankfully, they ran into a little problem: the courts.

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François Chollet

@fchollet

Oct 20

When we say deep learning models operate via memorization, the claim isn't that they work like literal lookup tables, only being able to make sense of points that are exactly part of their training data. No one has claimed that -- it wouldn't even be true of linear regression.

Of course deep learning models can generalize to unseen data points -- they would be entirely useless if they couldn't. The claim is that they perform *local generalization*: generalization to known unknowns, to degrees of variability for which you can provide a dense sampling at training time.

If you take a problem that is known to be solvable by expert humans via pure pattern recognition (say, spotting the top move on a chess board) and that has been known to be solvable via convnets as far back as 2016, and you train a model on ~5B chess positions across ~10M games, and you find that the model can solve the problem at the level of a human expert, that isn't an example of out-of-distribution generalization. That is an example of local generalization -- precisely the thing you expect deep learning to be able to do.

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François Chollet

@fchollet

Jun 22

Fact check: my 3-year old builds Lego sets (age 5+ ones) on his own by following the instruction booklet. He started doing it before he turned 3 -- initially he needed externally provided error correction and guidance, but now he's just fully autonomous. Can't handle sets for ages 8+ yet though. We'll see what he does at 5.

He also builds his own ideas, which feature minor original inventions. Like this "jeep" which has a spare tire on the back -- not something he saw in any official set. Lego is the best toy ever by the way

Or this Lego garden (fresh from today). It has a hut with a cool door. It looks chaotic, but everything on here has a purpose. Everything is intended to be something (the tire on a stick is a tree, the tiny cone on the ground is a water sprinkler...)

Read 4 tweets

François Chollet

@fchollet

Jun 11

I'm partnering with @mikeknoop to launch ARC Prize: a $1,000,000 competition to create an AI that can adapt to novelty and solve simple reasoning problems.

Let's get back on track towards AGI.

Website:

ARC Prize on @kaggle: arcprize.org
kaggle.com/competitions/a…

I published the ARC benchmark over 4 years ago. It was intended to be a measure of how close we are to creating AI that can reason on its own – not just apply memorized patterns.

ARC tasks are easy for humans. They aren't complex. They don't require specialized knowledge – a child can solve them. But modern AI struggles with them.

Because they have one very important property: they're designed to be resistant to memorization.

Read 8 tweets

François Chollet

@fchollet

May 14

It's amazing to me that the year is 2024 and some people still equate task-specific skill and intelligence. There is *no* specific task that cannot be solved *without* intelligence -- all you need a sufficiently complete description of the task (removing all test-time novelty and uncertainty), and you can achieve arbitrary levels of skills while entirely by-passing the problem of intelligence. In the limit, even a simple hashtable can be superhuman at anything.

The "AI" of today still has near-zero (though not exactly zero) intelligence, despite achieving superhuman skill at many tasks.

Here's one thing that AI won't be able to do within five years (if you extrapolate from the excruciatingly slow progress of the past 15 years): acquiring new skills as efficiently as humans, using the same data. The ARC benchmark is an attempt at measuring roughly that.

The point of general intelligence is to make it possible to deal with novelty and uncertainty, which is what our lives are made of. Intelligence is the ability to improvise and adapt in the face of situations you weren't prepared for (either by your evolutionary history or by your past experience) -- to efficiently acquire skills at novel tasks, on the fly.

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François Chollet

@fchollet

Apr 28

Many of the people who are concerned with falling birthrates aren't willing to consider the set policies that would address the problem -- aggressive tax breaks for families, free daycare, free education, free healthcare, and building more/denser housing to slash the price of homes.

Most people want children, but can't afford them.

I always found it striking how very rich couples (50M+ net worth) all tend to have over 3 children (and often many more). And how young women always say they want children -- yet in practice they delay family building because they are forced to focus on financial stability and therefore career. When money is not an object, families have 3+ children.

For middle incomes (below 1M/year) fertility goes down as income goes up, because *the cost of raising children increases with income* due to *opportunity cost*. If you make $150k and stand to eventually grow to $300k, you are losing a lot of money by quitting your job to raise children (on top of the prohibitive cost of raising children -- which also goes up as your incomes and thus standards go up). You are thus *more* likely to postpone having children.

Starting at 1M/year, fertility rates rise again. And couples that make 5+M/year get to have the number of children they actually want -- which is almost always more than 3, and quite often 5+.

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