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Max Tegmark

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2023-04-13
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2023-04-13
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  1. “That's exactly what neuroscientists do with actual brains. But here you have the advantage that you don't have to worry about measurement errors. You can see what every neuron is doing all the time. And a recurrent thing we see again and again. There's been a number of beautiful papers quite recently by. By a lot of researchers, some of them here, I've been in this area, is where when they figure out how something is done, You can say, oh man, that's such a dumb way of doing it. And you immediately see how it can be improved. Like, for example, there was a beautiful paper recently where they figured out how a large language model stores certain facts, like Eiffel Tower is in Paris. And they figured out exactly how it's stored and the proof that they understood it was they could edit it.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So you can create problems which will fail to solve for that reason. But the fact that it can do so amazing things with this incredibly simple architecture already is quite stunning. And what we see in my lab at MIT when we look inside large language models to try to figure out how they're doing it, that's the key core focus of our research. It's called mechanistic interpretability in Geekspeak. You know, you have this machine that does something smart. You try to reverse engineer how does it do it? Think of it also as artificial neuroscience.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's doing that while servicing a massive number of other humans at the same time. At the same time, it cannot reason as well as a human can on some tasks just because it's obviously a limitation from its architecture. We have in our heads what in GeekSpeak is called a recurrent neural network. There are loops. Information can go from this neuron to this neuron to this neuron and then back to this one. You can like ruminate on something for a while. You can self-reflect a lot. These large language models that are, they cannot, like GPT-4, it's a so-called transformer where it's just like a one-way street of information, basically. In Geek Speak, it's called a feed forward neural network. And it's only so deep. So it can only do logic that's that many steps and that deep and it's not.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, I can absolutely reason. Anyone who hasn't played with it, I highly recommend doing that before dissing it. Can do quite remarkable reasoning. I've had to do a lot of things, which I realized I couldn't do that myself that well, even. And obviously those are dramatically faster than we do too when you watch a type.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And it turns out if you just throw a ton of compute at that and a ton of data, it gets to be frighteningly good, like GPT-4, which I've been playing with so much since it came out, right? There's still some debate about whether that can get you all the way to full human level or not, but yeah, we can come back to the details of that and how you might get the human level AI even if. Large language malls don't.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “A lot of birds use less than half the fuel of a remote controlled plane flying the same distance. For humans, throw a little more money, put a little more fuel in it. Roof, there you go, 100 years earlier. That's exactly what's happening now with these large language models. The brain is incredibly complicated. Many people made the mistake. You're thinking we had to figure out how the brain does human-level AI first before we could build in a machine? That was completely wrong. You can take an incredibly simple... Computational system called the transformer network and just train it to do something incredibly dumb just read a gigantic amount of text and try to predict the next word.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, it flies around the audience. But it took 100 years longer to figure out how to do that than for the Wright brothers to build the first airplane because it turned out there was a much easier way to fly. And evolution picked a more complicated one because it had its hands tied. It could only build a machine that could assemble itself. Which the Wright brothers didn't care about. They can only build a machine that used only the most common atoms in the periodic table. Wright brothers didn't care about that. They could use steel. Iron atoms and it had to be able to repair itself, and it also had to be incredibly fuel efficient”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And on the other side, it's gone much slower than we hoped with. Policymakers and others to actually put the incentives in place to steer this in the good directions. Maybe we should unpack it and talk a little bit about each. So why did it go faster than a lot of people thought them? Hindsight, it's exactly like building flying machines. People spent a lot of time wondering about how the birds fly. And that turned out to be really hard. Have you seen the TED talk with a flying bird?”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Calling for slowdown. So, what Costed them in saying, including myself, have been biting my tongue a lot is that, you know. We don't need to slow down AI development. We just need to win this race, the wisdom race between the growing power of the AI and the growing wisdom with which we manage it. And rather than trying to slow down AI, let's just try to accelerate the wisdom. Do all this technical work to figure out how you can actually ensure that your powerful AI is going to do what you want it to do and have society adapt also with incentives and regulations so that these things get put to good use. Sadly that Didn't pan out The progress on technical AI and capabilities has gone a lot faster than many people thought back when we started this in 2014 turned out to be easier to build really advanced AI than we thought.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Exactly. So, this is very controversial when we talked the first time, we talked about how I was involved in starting the future life institute. We worked very hard on 2014-2015 was the mainstream AI safety. Idea that there even could be risks and that you could do things about them. Before then, a lot of people thought it was just really kooky to even talk about it. And a lot of AI researchers felt. Worried that this was too flaky and could be bad for funding, and that the people who talked about it were just didn't understand AI. I'm very, very happy with. How that's gone, and that now, you know, completely mainstream. You go in any AI conference and people talk about AI safety and it's a nerdy technical field full of equations and blah, blah, blah. As it should be. But there is this other thing which has been quite taboo up until now.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Utterly and totally. Again, we branded ourselves as homo sapiens because it seemed like the basic thing where the king of the castle on this planet were the smart ones. If we can control everything else. This could very easily change. We're certainly not going to be the smartest. The planet is very long if AI, unless AI progress, just halts. And we can talk more about why I think that's true because it's controversial. And then we can also talk about. Reasons you might think it's going to be the best thing ever, and the reason you think it's going to be the end of humanity. Which is, of course, super controversial. What I think we can anyone who's working on advanced AI can agree on is it's much like the film Don't Look Up and that's just really comical how little serious public debate there is about it given how huge it is.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Doesn't look so much like a species yet because it's mostly not embodied in robots That's a technicality which will soon be changed. And this arrival of artificial general intelligence that can do all our jobs as well as us. Probably shortly thereafter, Superintelligence, which greatly exceeds our cognitive abilities, it's going to either be the best thing ever to happen, humanity or the worst. I'm really quite confident that there is. Not that much middle ground there.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I don't want to be the movie spoiler for anyone watching this who hasn't seen it, but if you're watching this, you haven't seen it, watch it. Because we are actually acting out. It's life imitating art. Humanity is doing exactly that right now. It's an asteroid that we are building ourselves. Almost nobody is talking about it. People are squabbling across the planet about all sorts of things, which seem very minor compared to the asteroid that's about to hit us, right? Most politicians don't even have their radar. They think maybe in hundred years or whatever. Right now, we're at a fork on the road. This is the most important fork that humanity has reached in its over 100,000 years on this planet. We're building. Effectively, a new species that's smarter than us.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “It's actually going live in a few hours. I've been having late nights and early mornings. It's been very exciting actually. In short, have you seen Don't Look Up the film?”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, it's made it extremely real They both handled it with such dignity. That was a true inspiration also. They never complained about things. And, you know, when you're old and your body starts falling apart, it's more and more to complain about. They looked at what could they still do that was meaningful. And they focused on that rather than wasting time Talking about or even thinking much about things they were disappointed in. I think anyone can make themselves depressed if they start their morning by making a list of grievances. Whereas if you start your day when the little meditation and just the things you're grateful for, you basically choose to be a happy person.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Even less afraid of other people telling me that I'm an idiot, you know, which happens regularly. And just live my life, do my thing, you know. It made it a little bit easier for me to focus on what I feel is really important.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Think it. Mainly do two things Of them just going through all their stuff after they had passed away and so on just drove home to me how important it is to ask ourselves. Why are we doing the things we do? Because it's inevitable that you look at some things they spent an enormous time on and you ask, in hindsight, would they really have spent so much time on this or would they have done something that was more meaningful? So I've been looking more in my life now and asking why am I doing what I'm doing? And I feel It should either be something I really enjoy doing, or it should be something that I find really, really meaningful because it helps humanity. If it's in none of those two categories, maybe I should spend less time on it. The other thing is dealing with depth up in personal like this. It's actually made me less afraid.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “He replied with a quote from Dante Sagil to Corso Lacidir Lagente. Follow your own path and let the people talk. Go, Dad. This is the kind of thing. He's dead, but that attitude is not.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, you're too kind. But yeah, I mean The good reason to do science is because you're really curious, you want to figure out the truth If you think This is how it is, and everyone else says, No, no, that's bullshit, and it's that way, you know. Sticked with what you think is true. And even if Everybody else keeps thinking it's bullshit. There's a certain. I always root for the underdog when I watch movies. And my dad once, one time, for example, when I wrote one of my craziest papers ever, I'm talking about our universe ultimately being mathematical, which we're not going to get into today. I got this email from a quite famous professor saying this is not only bullshit, but it's going to ruin your career. You should stop doing this kind of stuff. I sent it to my dad. Do you know what he said? What did he say?”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “So many things Starters, my fascination for math and the physical mysteries of our universe, the thinking. I got a lot of that from my dad, but I think my obsession for really big questions and consciousness and so on, that actually came mostly from my mom. What I got from both of them, which is a very core part of really who I am, I think, is this. Feeling comfortable with. Not buying into what everybody else is saying. When I think it's right Very much, you know, did their own thing, and sometimes they got flagged for it, and it did it anyway.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Sorry, I'm getting a little emotional here, but a lot of their values and ideas, even jokes and so on, they haven't gone away. Some of them live on. I can carry on some of them and they also live on a lot of other people. So in this sense, even with Life 2.0, we can to some extent already transcend our physical bodies and our death. particularly if you can share your own information your own ideas with many others like you do in your podcast That's the closest immortality we can get with our bio bodies.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Still you And the information pattern is still there. And if you could swap out your arms and whatever. You can still have this kind of continuity. It becomes much more sophisticated sort of way forward in time where the information lives on. I lost both of my parents since our last podcast, and it actually gives me a lot of solace that this way of thinking about them, they haven't entirely died because... A lot of mommy, and that is”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, and I think it's worth. Commenting a bit about what you mean in this context, also, if you swap things out a lot, right? This is controversial, but my Understanding is that Life is best thought of not as a bag of meat or even a bag of Particles, but rather as a system which can process information and retain its own complexity, even though nature is always trying to mess it up. So it's all about information processing. Makes it a lot like something like a wave in the ocean, which is not its water molecules, right? The water molecules bob up and down, but the wave moves forward. It's an information pattern. In the same way Ulex, you're not the same atoms as during the first time you talked you did with me. You've swapped out most of them.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Much more so than even the bacterium. No offense to them. And if you can also swap out your hardware, take any physical form you want, of course, really the sky is the limit.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I think we should be humble and not be so quick. Everything binary and say either it's there or it's not clearly there's a there's a great spectrum and there is even a controversy about whether some unicellular or organisms like amoebas can maybe learn a little bit after all so apologies if I offended any bacteria here wasn't my intent it was more that I wanted to talk up how cool it is to actually have a brain Where you can learn dramatically within your lifetime. And the higher up you get from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0, the more you become the captain of your own ship, the master of your own destiny, and the less you become a slave to whatever evolution gave you, right? Upgrading our software, we can be so different from”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “And Life 3.0 does not exist yet can replace not only its software the way we can, but also its hardware. And that's where we're heading towards at high speed. We're already maybe 2.1 because we can put in a... Artificial knee pacemaker, etc. And if Neuralink and other companies succeed will be life 2.2, et cetera. But the company's trying to build AGI are trying to make is, of course, full 3.0, and you can put that intelligence in something that also has no. Biological basis whatsoever”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Life 1.0 is really dumb, like bacteria, in that it can't actually learn anything at all during the lifetime. The learning just comes from this genetic. Process from one generation to the next life 2.0 is us and other animals which have brains which can learn during their lifetime a great deal You were born without being able to speak English. And at some point, you decided hey, I want to upgrade my software. Let's install an English speaking module.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “That feels like a hopeful direction to me, but that also requires more compassion, not just towards other humans, because they happen to be the smartest on the planet, but also towards all our other fellow creatures on this planet. And I personally feel right now we're treating a lot of farm animals horribly, for example. And the excuse we're using is, oh, they're not as smart as us. But if we admit that we're not that smart in the grand scheme of things either in the post-AI epoch, you know. Shortly, we should value the subjective experience of a cow also.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Would phrase that as rebranding ourselves from Homo sapiens to homo sentience. Right now sapiens, the ability to be intelligence, we've even put it in our species name. We're branding ourselves as the smartest. Information processing entity on the planet, that's clearly going to change if AI continues ahead. So maybe we should focus on the experience. Instead, the subjective experience that we have, homo sentience, and say that's what's really valuable, the love, the connection, the other things. Get off our high horses and get rid of this hubris that only we can do integrals.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “For me personally, I have to confess the challenge is one of the things that really makes my life feel Meaningful I go hike a mountain with my wife Maya. I don't want to just press a button and be at the top. I want to struggle and come up there sweaty and feel, wow, we did this in the same way. I want to constantly work on myself to become a better person if I say something in anger that I regret. I want to go back and really work on myself rather than just tell an AI from now on, always filter what I write so I don't have to work on myself because then I'm not growing.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “If I realized that my parents couldn't be bothered struggling a little bit to write 200 words and outsource that to their computer, I would feel really offended, actually. So I wonder if eliminating too much of this struggle from our existence. You think that would also take away a little bit of”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “It's hard, but it's fascinating to think about also even in the best case scenario where we don't lose control over the ever more powerful AI that we're building to other humans whose goals we think are horrible and where we don't lose control to the machines. Provides the things we want. Even then, you get into questions you touched here. Maybe it's the struggle that it's actually hard to do things is part of the things that give us meaning as well, right? So, for example, I found it so shocking that this new Microsoft GPT-4 commercial that they put together has this woman talking about showing this demo how she's going to give a graduation speech to her beloved daughter. And she asks GPT-4 to write it.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Feel very humble about this to grapple with it, how it might actually feel. The one thing which is so obvious though, I think it's just really worth reflecting on is because the mind space of possible intelligence is so different from ours, it's very dangerous if we assume they're going to be like us or anything like us.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Would already change quite a lot about how you feel as a human being, right? You probably spend less effort studying things if you just copy them and you might be less afraid of death because if the plane you're on starts to crash, you just be like, oh, shucks, I haven't backed my brain up for four hours. So I'm going to lose all this wonderful experiences of this flight. We might also start feeling More compassionate maybe with other people if we can so readily share each other's experiences and our knowledge and feel more like a hive mind. It's very hard though I really...”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Try, but I would say I fail. I mean, Very difficult for a human mind. Really grapple with something so completely alien. I mean, even for us, right, if we just try to imagine how would it feel if we were completely indifferent towards death or individuality, even if you just imagine that, for example, Could just copy my knowledge of how to speak Swedish. Boom, now you can speak Swedish. And you could copy any of my cool experiences, and then you could delete the ones you didn't like in your own life, just like that.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Yeah, and it's going to be much more alien than a cat or even the most exotic animal on the planet right now because it will not have been created through the usual Darwinian competition where it necessarily cares about self-preservation, afraid of death, any of those things. The space of alien minds that you can build is just so much vaster than what evolution will give you. And with that also comes a great responsibility for us to make sure that the kind of minds we create are the kind of minds that... Good to create minds that will. Share our values and be good for humanity and life. And also create minds that don't suffer.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Help it grow. Eventually, life can spread from here out into much of our universe, and we can have this just amazing future. Whereas if we instead are reckless with the technology we build and just snuff it out due to stupidity. In fighting, then. Maybe the rest of Cosmos make history in our universe is just going to be a play for empty benches. But I do think that we are actually very likely to get visited by aliens quite soon. But I think we are going to be building that alien intelligence.”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “So when we look out to the stars, You define our universe the way most astrophysicists do, not as all of space, but the spherical region of space, that we can see with our telescopes from which light has the time to reach us since our Big Bang. In the minority, I'm Estimate that we are the only life in this spherical volume that has invented internet radio has gotten our level of tech. And if that's true. Then it puts a lot of responsibility on us to not mess this one up. In that case, if it's true, it means life is quite rare and we are stewards of this one spark of advanced consciousness, which if we nurture it, then...”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Thanks to you for putting your heart and soul into this. I know when you delve into controversial topics, it's inevitable to get hit by what... Hamlet talks about the slings and arrows and stuff, and I really admire this. In an era, you know, where YouTube videos are too long and now it has to be like a 20 minute TikTok 20 second TikTok clip. It's just so refreshing to see you going exactly against all of the advice and doing these really long form things and that people appreciate it. Reality is nuanced. And thanks for. Sharing it that way”

    2023-04-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source