Well said. And it makes sense, if you define intelligence as the ability to successfully predict the future.
And how interesting that that is literally how LLMs are trained during pretraining. Like Ilya said: To predict the name revealed as the murderer at the end of a detective novel, you must have followed the plot, have world knowledge about physics, psychology, etc..
And that’s what you’re pointing at here. Testing yourself on the ability to predict during a lecture is like running a loss function to keep you on your toes.
Oh yea. A good detective novel gives the reader all the necessary information to know the answer. Many lousier novels just keep some essential information hidden until the monologue, because they haven’t got a tricky enough mystery, and really shitty ones just accidentally reveal it, often by over-using tropes or having silly patterns like “it’s always the dark and brooding guy”. Ever read any Dan Brown? In Angels and Demons he gives it away on the first page with an anagram.
That monologue curtain pull is a hallmark of Sherlock Holmes. I wouldn’t call Doyle’s books lousy for that though. Creating brain-teasers for the audience isn’t really the point. It’s all about a character Doyle found insufferable but the audience loved!
People who read detective novels do. Every other book the clues are not the point and so they are skipped - or more likely there is no investigation, you are just told and the plot moves on.
If that is true, which sometimes it is, you having suspected about anyone except the actual murderer, and at the same time it is totally obvious who the culprit is on a second reading, then it is a very good plot.
And how interesting that that is literally how LLMs are trained during pretraining. Like Ilya said: To predict the name revealed as the murderer at the end of a detective novel, you must have followed the plot, have world knowledge about physics, psychology, etc..
And that’s what you’re pointing at here. Testing yourself on the ability to predict during a lecture is like running a loss function to keep you on your toes.