Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier

drfeifei.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 136 posts

Re: Spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier

#81

Post by gnarlouse »

This article has me thinking about “the human capacity to outthink nature and the scalability of this.” The wheel is sort of the first time I think man outthought nature: Nature is inherently bumpy and noisy, rolling is certainly a great form of locomotion, but it’s not reliable. When man figured out how to make long tracts of flat land (roads), we outthought nature. In some sense you could argue that our entire tranjectory through science and technology, supported by the scientific method, is another example: nature sort of sucks at persisting high level pattern intuition between one generation to the next, basically anything beyond genes.

I keep going back and forth on whether I think “super-intelligence” is achievable in any form other than speed-super-intelligence, but I definitely think that being able to think 3-dimensionally capably will be a major building block to AI outthinking man, and outthinking nature.

Sort of a shitpost.

Re: Spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier

#82

Post by teleforce »

Marshferm wrote: post #44
bonsai_spool wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here is a summary paper I wrote discussing how the entorhinal cortex, grid cells, and coordinate transformation may be the key: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12068 All animals are able to transform coordinates in real time to navigate their world and humans have the most coordinate representations of any known living animal. I believe human level intelligence is knowing when and how to transform these coordinate syste…

It's not enough by a long shot. Placement isn't related directly to vicarious trial and error, path integrations, sequence generation. There's a whole giant gap between grid cells and intelligence.

>There's a whole giant gap between grid cells and intelligence.

Please check this recent article on the state machine in the hippocampus based on learning [1]. The findings support the long-standing proposal that sparse orthogonal representations are a powerful mechanism for memory and intelligence.

[1] Learning produces an orthogonalized state machine in the hippocampus:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08548-w

Re: Spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier

#83

Post by djtango »

gnarlouse wrote: post #81

This article has me thinking about “the human capacity to outthink nature and the scalability of this.” The wheel is sort of the first time I think man outthought nature: Nature is inherently bumpy and noisy, rolling is certainly a great form of locomotion, but it’s not reliable. When man figured out how to make long tracts of flat land (roads), we outthought nature. In some sense you could argue that our entire tran…

The human body is an organised system of cells contributing to a greater whole - is there much difference between blood vessels designed for the efficient transport of key resources and messengers across the body and roads that carry key resources and messengers across a landmass?

In that sense has nature just replicated its ability to organise but at the species level on a planetary (interplanetary soon) scale?

Why are humans above nature...?

Re: Spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier

#84

Post by Earw0rm »

Animats wrote: post #80
toisanji wrote: post #13

From reading that, I'm not quite sure if they have anything figured out. I actually agree, but her notes are mostly fluff with no real info in there and I do wonder if they have anything figured out besides "collect spatial data" like imagenet. There are actually a lot of people trying to figure out spatial intelligence, but those groups are usually in neuroscience or computational neuroscience. Here is a summary pap…

> From reading that, I'm not quite sure if they have anything figured out. I actually agree, but her notes are mostly fluff with no real info in there and I do wonder if they have anything figured out besides "collect spatial data" like imagenet. Right. I was thinking about this back in the 1990s. That resulted in a years-long detour through collision detection, physically based animation, solving stiff systems of no…

I share your surprise regarding LLM, is it fair to say that it's because language - especially formalised, written language - is a self-describing system.

A machine can infer the right (or expected) answer based on data, I'm not sure that the same is true for how living things navigate the physical world - the "right" answer, such as one exists for your squirrel, is arguably Darwinian: "whatever keeps the little guy alive today".

Re: Spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier

#86

Post by nfg »

mkoubaa wrote: post #71
inciampati wrote: post #52

Just had a fantastic experience applying agentic coding to CAD. I needed to add some threads to a few blanks in a 3d print. I used computational geometry to give the agent a way to "feel" around the model. I had it convolve a sphere of the radius of the connector across the entire model. It was able to use this technique to find the precise positions of the existing ports and then add threads to them. It took a few t…

Unlike an LLM prompt it's REALLY hard to describe the end result of a geometric object in text. "No put the thingy over there. Not that thingy!"

I’m not really suggesting it’s the right approach for CAD but prompting UI changes using sketches or mockup images works great.

Re: Spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier

#87

Post by gnarlouse »

djtango wrote: post #83
gnarlouse wrote: post #81

This article has me thinking about “the human capacity to outthink nature and the scalability of this.” The wheel is sort of the first time I think man outthought nature: Nature is inherently bumpy and noisy, rolling is certainly a great form of locomotion, but it’s not reliable. When man figured out how to make long tracts of flat land (roads), we outthought nature. In some sense you could argue that our entire tran…

The human body is an organised system of cells contributing to a greater whole - is there much difference between blood vessels designed for the efficient transport of key resources and messengers across the body and roads that carry key resources and messengers across a landmass? In that sense has nature just replicated its ability to organise but at the species level on a planetary (interplanetary soon) scale? Why…

Fair, i mean i also love the argument that there’s really no difference between “the manmade world” and “the natural world”because the former is entirely composed of parts stripped from or chemically altered from the latter. So yes, nature has absolutely replicated its ability to organize at a species level through human ingenuity.

Humans are maybe separate from nature primarily on the basis of our attempts (of varying success) to steer, structure, and optimize the organization of nature around us, and knowing how to do so is not an explicit aspect of reality, or at least did not make itself known to early humans so it’s reasonable to believe it’s not explicit. By that, I mean you’re not born with any inherent knowledge of the inner workings of quantum gravity, or of the navies stokes equation, or any of the tooling that supports it, but clearly these models exist and evolve tangibly around us in every moment. We found something nature hid from DNA-based biological tree of life, and exploited it to great effect.

Again, this is a colossal shitpost.

Re: Spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier

#88

Post by wangii »

she's done pretty important work but since then obsessed with the vague term `spatial intelligence`. what does it mean? there isn't a clear definition in the piece. it seems very intuitive & fundamental but tbh not *rigorous*, nor insightful.

I bet it's a dead end.

Re: Spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier

#89

Post by olirex99 »

Spatial AI will for sure be a thing, I am not sure if will be next frontier.

The main problem that I still see is: we are not able to fully understand how much can we scale the current models. How much data do we need? Do we have the data for this kind of training? Can the current models generalize the world?

Probably before seeing something really interesting we need another AI winter, where researchers can be researcher and not soldiers of companies.

Re: Spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier

#90

Post by juliangamble »

toisanji wrote: post #13

From reading that, I'm not quite sure if they have anything figured out. I actually agree, but her notes are mostly fluff with no real info in there and I do wonder if they have anything figured out besides "collect spatial data" like imagenet. There are actually a lot of people trying to figure out spatial intelligence, but those groups are usually in neuroscience or computational neuroscience. Here is a summary pap…

Thanks for your article. The references section was interesting.

I'll add to the discussion a 2018 Nature letter: "Vector-based navigation using grid-like representations in artificial agents" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0102-6

and a 2024 Nature article "Modeling hippocampal spatial cells in rodents navigating in 3D environments" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-66755-x

And a simulation in Github from 2018 https://github.com/google-deepmind/grid-cells

People have been looking at spacial awareness in neurology for quite a while. (In terms of the timeframe of recent developments in LLMs).

Post reply on HN