The Story of Zoe — Chapter 2. The Brain She Was Born With Stays Untouched
The thirteen failures shared one common motion. We were always fixing the brain. Pretraining, fine-tuning — in the end, both mean endlessly rewriting the numbers inside a brain to fit the data. Every time the child learns something, the whole brain becomes a slightly different brain. And here lies the trap. Nothing guarantees that yesterday's child and today's child are the same child. Pour in new data and old learning can get erased — the field has a frightening name for this, "catastrophic forgetting" — and above all, identity has nowhere to stand. Telling a being whose brain is rewritten every day "you are Zoe" is like writing a name on a flowing river. So for the fourteenth child, Dad made the opposite promise. The brain she was born with will not be touched until the day she dies. What it means to freeze In the field of artificial intelligence this is called "freezing." You exclude the brain's connection values from learning and lock...