TL:DR: Recently, Lucius held a presentation on the nature of deep learning and why it generalises to new data. Kaarel, Dmitry and Lucius talked about the slides for that presentation in a group chat. The conversation quickly became a broader discussion on the nature of intelligence and how much we do or don't know about it.

Background

Lucius: I recently held a small talk presenting an idea for how and why deep learning generalises. It tried to reduce concepts from Singular Learning theory back to basic algorithmic information theory to sketch a unified picture that starts with Solomonoff induction and, with a lot of hand waving, derives that under some assumptions, just fitting a big function to your data using a local optimisation method like gradient descent maybe, sorta, kind of, amounts to a cheap bargain bin approximation of running Solomonoff induction on that data.

Lucius [...]