All research directions

04 / Foundations of intelligence

Research agenda

AI’s DWDM moment

What change could unlock substantially more useful intelligence from existing compute?

01 / MOTIVATING OBSERVATION

The motivating analogy is the way wavelength multiplexing expanded the usefulness of installed optical fiber. It prompts a question about AI: where could better organization unlock capacity that is already present?

02 / STARTING CONTEXT

The investigation begins with published work on attention and conditional computation, then asks how routing, memory, reuse, and communication affect a complete system. The DWDM comparison is a prompt for inquiry, not an established equivalence.

03 / WORKING HYPOTHESIS

For a defined workload, reducing unnecessary computation or data movement may improve useful output per unit of hardware. Gains need to hold when latency, quality, and total system costs are included.

04 / PROPOSED INVESTIGATION

  1. Choose a workload and a clear definition of useful output.
  2. Measure where time, energy, memory, and communication are spent.
  3. Compare one architectural intervention with an unchanged baseline.
  4. Report throughput and cost alongside accuracy and latency.

05 / WHAT WOULD CHALLENGE THE IDEA?

An improvement that shifts costs elsewhere, reduces quality, or fails outside a narrow benchmark does not establish a general efficiency gain.

STARTING LITERATURE

External work by other researchers provides context for this direction.

DOCUMENTING THE WORK

Papers, simulations, and video explanations will be linked as this investigation develops.

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Connected questions.

01Foundations of intelligence

The energy cost of intelligence

What does intelligence cost in physical terms?

A framework for comparing the energy required for specific cognitive tasks, with performance, system boundaries, and measurement kept in view.

Research agendaRead the question
02Foundations of intelligence

Quantum-cognitive models

Could a different mathematical language reveal a different way to model cognition?

Explore what quantum probability and related formal models could contribute to learning, memory, and reasoning, alongside explicit classical comparisons.

Research agendaRead the question