Now, if you had the goggles, and you were seeing this in your headset, this could be in 3D...
I find this utterly fascinating to watch. What you really are seeing...After the first few frames, it’s no longer about the original image in any way. It’s, if you like, just a fugue or a fantasia that’s entirely based on things that have been learned by this neural network from all the example images that it’s seen.
It’s a free-associational path through that space of ideas. I also think it’s important to emphasize that this is not somehow drawing from a giant database of images in order to generate this movie. It’s not as if there are 500 terabytes of images, and they’re being pasted on with a Photoshop-like operation at all.
The neural network that makes this is only a few million weights. In other words, it’s encoded in a little brain, if you like, that is about the same size as an ordinary, like as a single picture that you might take with your mobile phone.
It’s just that, instead of the pixels in that picture representing the intensities of the way light fell on one pixel of the sensor, they’re representing the weight of a particular neural connection between one neuron and another. If you come away with one thing from looking at this, what I’d like it to be is really that we start to have these brain-like systems.
I think that this is profound because everything that we have done in human history so far has really been born out of our own minds and our own brains. What we start to have now is a kind of meta technology that allows us to bring the same kind of power to bear to thinking that we have brought to bear on making.
Let me give maybe a simple analogy. We do something like cooking or combustion in our own bodies when we eat. The process of cellular respiration is about taking foods and burning them to make energy for our own bodies.
But when we invented cooking fires and we externalized some of that capability, we were able to eat much better, and we were able to spend much more of our time doing things that weren’t just about getting food. In many ways, the invention of the cooking fire was really the birth of complex human civilization.
I think, in some sense, what we start to see here is the birth of cooking fire, but for thinking.