Two handwavey ideas upon reading this:
- Even for billion-parameter theories, a small amount of vectors might dominate the behaviour. A coordinate shift approach (PCA) might surface new concepts that enable us to model that phenomenon. "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points", said Alan Kay.
- There is analogue of how we come up with cognitive metaphors of the mind ("our models of the mind resemble our latest technology (abacus, mechanisms, computer, neural network)"), to be applied to other complicated areas of reality.
Maybe we can come up with smaller models that perform almost as well as the bigger ones. Could that just be pca of some kind?
Gpt nano vs gpt 5 for example.
I don't disagree, but neither does the article. It's just talking about the fact that we previously considered anything that can't be easily and tersely written down as nearly or entirely intractable. But, as we have seen, the three body problem is not really a hum-dinger as far as the universe goes, it's not even table stakes. We need to be able to do the same kind of energy arbitrage on n-body problems that we do on 2. And now we have the beginnings of a place to toy with more complicated ideas -- since these won't fit on a blackboard.