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Kevin Kelly quote, Aug 17, 2026

Co-founder, Wired · Aug 17, 2026 · Post, Without a theory of intelligence

Despite the great strides scientists have made in producing AI, we have no theory of intelligence.

Primary source

Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

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As LLMs continue to scale up, the value of any particular source continues to diminish.Sep 7, 2026· Post
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But a secondary revolution will come from using AI as a microscope: we will use it to see our own minds.Aug 17, 2026· Post
I’d bet we learn more about our own brains from building a thousand AIs under a real theory of intelligence than we’ve learned from a century of neuroscience.Aug 17, 2026· Post
In the long term the instrument of AI will probably exceed the importance of the microscope, telescope and cyclotron combined.Aug 17, 2026· Post

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An AI with more real layers can actually be “smarter” in the conventional sense of the term.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
For 100 steps in a row, the AI can shoot delicate subtle ideas from layer to layer at the speed of light. Then there’s one step where it has to encode them into twenty-six glyphs invented by Phoenician turquoise miners in 1800 BC. Then it has to re-encode the Phoenician glyphs into delicate subtle lightspeed ideas before it can do anything else.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post
It is important to not confuse massive steps in inference-time scaling, a dynamic which should be fairly predictable, with being the outputs of RSI, which is highly uncertain.Nathan LambertSep 19, 2026· Post
If you have five hours, you’re probably going to do a lot better. The AI models are pretty similar.Noam BrownSep 17, 2026· Interview
About this quote
Said by
Kevin Kelly, Co-founder, Wired
Where
Without a theory of intelligence
Topics
Research
Source
kk.org/thetechnium/without-a-theory-of-intelligence/

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