What Is Intelligence? (2024) (mitpress.mit.edu)

In What Is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas argues that prediction is the core of intelligence — a continuity running from molecules and organisms to societies and modern AI. Building on the “predictive brain” hypothesis and recent surprises from large next-token-predicting neural networks, the book contends that prediction-based systems naturally exhibit the hallmarks of general intelligence. Agüera y Arcas combines his AI experience (including work on LLMs, on-device AI, and privacy-preserving methods) with wide-ranging literature in neuroscience, biology, physics and philosophy to propose a unified, computational account of life and mind. The significance for AI/ML is twofold: conceptually, it reframes intelligence as an evolved computational strategy centered on modeling and forecasting, making the emergence of capable neural systems less mysterious; practically, it presses researchers to treat models as agents with ethical, epistemic and potentially conscious dimensions. Technical implications explored include how predictive architectures relate to learning laws, the entropic and temporal foundations of modeling, and how models map to reality — all with consequences for debates about free will, consciousness and AI governance. The book is positioned as a provocative synthesis that challenges conventional boundaries between biological and artificial cognition and urges the community to rethink both theory and responsibility.