Thank you for the excellent writeup of some extremely interesting work! Do you have any opinions on whether binary networks and/or differentiable circuits will play a large role in the future of AI? I've long had this hunch that we'll look back on current dense vector representations as an inferior way of encoding information.
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Well, I'm not an expert. I think that this research direction is very cool. I think that, at the limit, for some (but not all!) applications, we'll be training over the raw instructions available to the hardware, or perhaps even the hardware itself. Maybe something as in this short story[0]:
> A descendant of AutoML-Zero, “HQU” starts with raw GPU primitives like matrix multiplication, and it directly outputs binary blobs. These blobs are then executed in a wide family of simulated games, each randomized, and the HQU outer loop evolved to increase reward.
I also think that different applications will require different architectures and tools, much like how you don't write systems software in Lua, nor script games mods with Zsh. It's fun to speculate, but who knows.
[0]: https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy