That would be like explaining a baking recipe by starting with protons and electrons.
State-of-the-art machine learning architectures aren't actually that complex. Diffusion models and transformers can be explained to a bright high schooler. I'm sure Archimedes and Euclid would have no problem understanding them.
What they might have a problem understanding (or even imagining) is the mind-boggling amount of computation required to make those systems do anything useful. Getting Llama to produce a single token of text takes more calculations than all of humanity did by hand during all of Classical Antiquity.
I think the quartz sand metaphor was to illustrate how advanced our silicon-based technology has become, not just the ML parts.
Imagine all the stuff... transistors, Turing/Von Neumann machines, lithography, theoretical computer science, OS and compilers, the Internet... and lastly there's modern day machine learning that builds on top of all the above.
The base level stuff isn't exactly protons and electrons, but given the nanometer scale of our chips, it's not that far away from the truth, and we (humanity) has somehow built amazing stuff on top of that.
The basic of concept how such a thing is powered (electricity) is so far removed from anything people did in ancient times that it would be hard to get them to understand that neither gods nor magic are invovled.
Smart "intellectual" people would certainly be willing to challenge basically everything they assume about nature, but I don't think your run of the mill farmer would be able to do that.
Electricity isn't much different from water. The concept of a water mill has been around a long time. So understanding the functional ideas wouldn't be all that difficult. As far as Gods I think you will have a tough case minimizing their involvement even today.
It's simple, really; we flatten the rock, write on it with fire and acid, put lightning inside it, teach it many things, and make it speak to us from afar. See? No magic at all.
> That would be like explaining a baking recipe by starting with protons and electrons
It would be like explaining a baking recipe just talking about wheat and flour and heat. The point is that from first principles, ML is a huge jump. From first principles, baking is not.
