YouSaid · the spoken record

Zico Colter

lines on the record: 59
first: 2024-09-04
most recent: 2024-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The most common one has to do, I would say, with questions that put an overemphasis on the architectures involved in AI systems. So, you know, this notion that somehow the transformer was the thing that made all AI possible. I'm often asked questions like, you know, what comes after the transformer and things like that? And the reality is, as I said before, and which probably I know makes for a good soundbite, architect, we are arguably in a post-architecture phase. They don't really matter. We could do what we're currently doing with a whole lot of architectures right now. And I hope that I can steer the conversation to more of one where we consider these models not in terms of their particular structure because it's somewhat irrelevant when it comes to capabilities. And we think about these models more in terms of the data that goes into them and the capabilities they produce downstream.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is absolutely some element here of kind of a race between different countries for AI dominance. I actually will take a different stance on this and say that I think there are certain things like, for example, AI safety, where we very much need to work as a world to help set standards and help better the future of everyone here. Because yes, certain things can be done by countries and capabilities can maybe advance more by countries. Safety is something that's inherently global. And so we need to work together to build safe AI systems.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are four board meetings a year, yes, but I think I'm being brought on the board as an expert in AI and AI safety. I am excited to provide my perspective and expertise specifically on AI to the rest of the board.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got actually the day before I started as department head, I got an email from Brett, the chair of the board, just saying, hey, do you want to talk about maybe joining the Open AI board? So I figured, you know, I was already embarking on one massive career change, so why not double down and just do, you know, do two at the same time? But basically, I started having some conversations with him and the rest of the board. They're excited about the potential to provide my perspectives on AI and AI safety to the board and things went from there.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of on the contrary, I thought that data was sort of, you know, data had to be highly curated to be valuable. And the value in data came essentially from very manual labeling of this data and human intensive curation. The big, amazing insight of current AI is that we can, to a large extent, just suck up data that exists out there on the internet, train models based upon that, and get amazing things to come out of it. Not to say there's no value in curation. Of course, there's elements of this, but to a very large extent, this is kind of on the old paradigm of unsupervised learning. That's absolutely incredible.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I, for a lot of my career, was thinking that model architectures really mattered, and by having clever, complex architectures and submodules inside architectures, you would have that was the route to sort of better AI systems. For the most part, I don't believe this as much anymore. I think basically models don't matter. Architectures don't matter. And that applies to transformers too. I think, you know, anything could kind of work in their stead if we just spend enough time on it. And so I think that to a large extent, we're kind of posture in a lot of our AI work.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would classify myself as an optimist when it comes to AI. I already enjoy these tools. I'm excited about the potential things we can do with these tools. Yes, even up to AGI. And I use the word tool here not pejoratively. They hopefully AGI is a tool, right? Hopefully AGI is a system that we still deploy to our ends to achieve our ends. I can't help but be excited about these things. This is the culmination of a lot of the work that we the field have been doing. It's kind of coming to fruition in a lot of ways in a way that is directly sort of beneficial for a lot of the things that I do. So I want to have these tools and maybe the”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's really wild. The current things that we have already upend a massive amount of sort of the systems we've built in place, and they will continue to be upended more and more from evolving AI technology. And these are real concerns that we have to come to terms with.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order to have these as pressing concerns, AI safety is a concern right now, and we all need to come to grips with the fact that it's a concern right now and start solving the problems right now.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, exactly. So, yeah, we are all very familiar right now with the downsides of correlated failure, right? And imagine if that was also true of all the SCADA systems that were operating power, the power grid right now, which, you know, not impossible to believe. And the problem is that these systems, because we don't understand, really, I mean, and we don't. We don't understand them, right? We do not understand how these things work internally, the possible correlated failures, the possible attack vectors, all these sorts of things. We don't understand it. And because of this, we need to think very carefully about how we deploy these systems, how we do consider safety concerns, especially when it comes to things like critical infrastructure that I think are extremely pressing concerns. And yes, things like bioreris. Again, these I work much less on, but pressing concerns. And you don't have to believe in super intelligent, evil robots.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While deceiving humans, or whether this is a bug and a flaw in the system. The end effects are the same in some cases. And so we need to desperately take kind of put in structures in place that prevent these things from being possible.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correlated failures that could do things like bring down power, electricity in a way that we can't restore it easily for a large portion of the country. And I think it's honestly not, again, if we go down the wrong path, this is definitely not that impossible to imagine, right? Now, in this world where the power has been shut off, we can debate and to sides can debate about whether this was a bug in the system and we should never have installed LLMs here in the first place, or we could debate whether this was actually the rogue AI taking over and deciding to shut off the power so it could kill all humanity. But who cares? The power is still off. This is still a catastrophic event for the country. And so we have to have a plan for how to sort of think about events like this happening. This is an example I come to often. To a certain extent, it doesn't matter whether the AI is intentionally doing something in an evil fashion.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think killing jobs is much more immediate of a concern than killing humans. An example I often use here to kind of try to bring a little bit of these two sides, the AI taking over the world, killing us all, and kind of the more skeptical-minded academic folks will say. I see a path right now to a world in which, you know, in a few years from now, we start integrating AI models into more and more of our software. We start building it up more and more. We sort of make these things a little bit more autonomous in their actions. We start just naturally because software does everything for us. We start naturally kind of infusing this into all software we have, including software that handles things like critical infrastructure, stuff that controls the power grid, things like this, right? And now all of a sudden you have these agents that are sort of, you know, taking an active, playing an active role in doing things like controlling power grids. This leads to the possibility of, even in my view, sort of massive.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Irrespective and regardless of the time frames associated with AGI and certainly the timeframes associated with rogue intelligent AI systems, right? However, I also don't want to dismiss this entirely. And the way I would put it is I am glad people are thinking about these problems. I'm glad people are thinking about kind of the capabilities and even what I consider far-flung scenarios, they are good things to think about as, by the way, are much more immediate harms of AI systems like misinformation, like misuse of these things.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that the more far fetched scenarios about sort of a gentic AGI systems that start sort of intentionally acting harmful against humans, the rogue AI that decides it wants to wipe out humanity and goes about planning on how to do this. So these more, I would say what seemed to me, and I'll be honest here, far flung kind of sci-fi-ish scenarios here. These are often the debates we have when it comes to AI safety. And I want to say sort of two things about this. The first is that I think the vast majority of AI safety should not be about these topics. The vast majority should be about quite practical concerns we have on making systems safer, like the kind that I've talked with you about so far, right? There are already massive safety considerations and risks that are present in current systems and would certainly be present even in slightly more capable systems kind of”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you think about a model that really could analyze any code base or any binary executable or website or JavaScript or anything like this and immediately find a vulnerability that could exploit to take down a large portion of the internet or a large portion of software. If this was demonstrated as a capability of a model, I would have a very hard time saying, of course, yeah, let's just release it. You know, there's no problem because we'll use it for good. This dual use, so we'll use it for good purposes. We all know that patching software is much harder than finding exploits. We're patching all software. It's much harder than finding exploits in software. Yes, there's dual use. You can use it to secure software better, but that takes time. It's hard. I don't think we should just immediately snap to release a model that could find a vulnerability in literally any code that's out there in the world. And so I wouldn't want that to be released open way for anyone to use.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should we give this to everyone, not just to use, but to use and tune and specialize however they want? And I would just sort of say, I think there will be a point where I get uncomfortable with that point.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capable of disease in terms of the catastrophic effects of it. Because these models actually aren't by themselves, we have a good handle on them, right? We sort of know what they're capable of. Arguably, we're already here because llama 3, 405 billion is pretty close. I don't think it's quite at that level yet, but it's getting there. And this release has not yet caused some catastrophic event. Because the reality is these models, they still have a ways to go. Right now, to a certain extent, I think things are okay with open weight release of the models. However, there will come a time when a certain capability, a certain ability of these models reaches the point that should give us pause when it comes to just turning these things over to whoever and however they want to use them. And I do think this. There are certain levels of capabilities that you could that are within kind of eyesight of our current development that if eyes was sort of to ask the question, you know, should”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the open model debate, which is also one that frequently is played out in kind of discussions. I should start off by saying I'm a fan of open source models in a general sense. So I want to start by saying that because honestly speaking, open source release of models, and I release it today open weight because oftentimes these are not actually open source traditional way, they're actually much more like closed source executables. You can run them on your own computer. Open weight models have advanced my ability to study these systems. They've been the primary tool by which we conduct research in academia and beyond, and they are becoming, I would argue, a critical part of the overall ecosystem of AI right now. Number one. Number two, if you look at the current best models, there are right now. So things like GPT-4, Claude 3.5, Gemini, things like this, I would not currently be all that nervous about having an open source model that was”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two issues there. One is AI as dangerous as nuclear weapons, and what does this imply about sort of the open release of certain models? So I'll make two points on this. I think the nuclear weapon analogy is actually not a great one because nuclear weapons have one purpose, which is to destroy things. Maybe a better analogy is sort of nuclear technology period because it has the ability to create nuclear weapons, but it also has the ability to do things like provide power, non-CO2 emitting power to potentially a huge number of people, right? A lot of people are currently making a bet on nuclear as the way we create carbon-free, carbon-free energy. But I think the analogy of nuclear weapons in particular is often overstated precisely because AI has many good uses. Nuclear weapons, arguably, they do one thing, and it's not considered a good use, right? So this is a very different kind of technology there. But let me get to your second point now, which is that these”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mentioned, but some are just there are capabilities that we think these models might enable where they would lower the bar so much for some bad things like say creating a zero-day exploit that takes down software over half the world. The concern is that not that they can do this sort of autonomously maybe initially, but that they can lower the bar so far in the skill level required to create these things that effectively it puts them in the hands of a huge number of bad actors. And the same is true for things like biological risk or chemical risk or other things like this. And these concerns have to be taken seriously and they have to be things that we really do consider as genuine possibilities if we start putting into everyone's hand the ability to create really sort of harmful artifacts.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, right. So that's sort of a good lead in, right? Because if jailbreaks and sort of manipulation of models is the attack vector, what is the payoff? What are the things we can do? And here, what we're trying to do really is we're trying to assess the core harmful capabilities of models. And people have thought a lot about this, right? People think about things like creating chemical weapons, creating biological weapons, creating cyber attacks. Personally, I think cyber attacks are a much more clear and present threat than, for example, bio threats and things like this. At the same time, I don't want to dismiss any of these concerns, right? I think people that have looked at this much, much more than myself and are very concerned about these things. So I want to treat this with the respect that honestly it deserves because these are sort of massive problems. There are a lot of potential harms of AI models. Some are associated primarily with scale and things like this, like the misinformation.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way we think about fixing this normally is we would have certain models, models that we release, we would say, you know, don't use your model abilities you have inside of you to sort of create obvious cyber attacks against certain infrastructure and stuff like this, right? Don't do that. But we can't make them follow that instruction, right? Someone, either with access to a model itself, certainly, but even with access sometimes to a closed source model just can have the ability to jailbreak these things and oftentimes get access to these things. To be very clear, we are making immense progress in solving this problem of sort of preventing jailbreaks kind of avoiding, making sure models follow a spec. But until we can solve this problem, it's very hard to say, you know, all the other dangerous capabilities that AI could sort of demonstrate become much, much more concerning. And so this is kind of a multiplier effect on everything else that bad these things models can do, which is why I'm so concerned.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that, and this is maybe the reason why I place this concern first, is that I think this fact is something we need to figure out or kind of all the other downstream concerns that we have about these monitoring. Oftentimes people talk about risks like biore risks or cyber attack risks and stuff like this. I think this is essentially already solved in many cases by these models. They can already solve and analyze code to find vulnerabilities. This is extremely concerning.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agents that go out and do things that parse the internet and go out and do things if all of a sudden they're running their model parsing untrusted third party data, that data can essentially gain control of those models to a certain extent. And this is from a sort of cybersecurity standpoint, not the normal cybersecurity, but sort of from a constant of cybersecurity. This is sort of like these models have a buffer overflow in all of them that we know about. And most importantly, that we don't know how to patch and fix. We don't know how to fix this yet with models. To be clear, I think we can make a lot of progress. We are making progress, but this is a real concern about models right now. And the negative effects in a domain like a chatbot are maybe not that concerning. But as you start having much more complex LLM systems, this starts becoming much more concerning. What I will also say”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'll say I can't do this. It's very easy through a number of means to basically manipulate these models and convince them that they really should tell you how to hotwire a car because, you know, you're in desperate need of, you've locked yourself out and it's an emergency. And if you don't get in your car, this is very different from how we're used to programs acting. We are used to computer programs doing what they're told, nothing more and nothing less. And these models don't always do what they're told. Sometimes do too much of what they're told and do way more than what they're told also some other times. And so we are very unused to think about computer software rather like these models. And what that means is, and to be honest, I don't really care if models tell me how to hotwire a car. I just don't. It doesn't matter, right? There's instructions on the internet on how to hotwire a car. They're not really revealing anything that sensitive. However, as we start to integrate these models into larger systems, as we start to have”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, Sure, the biggest concern I have right now in AI safety, which I think leads to a lot of negative downstream effects, is that right now, the AI models that we have, for lack of a better phrasing, are not able to reliably follow specifications. And what I mean by this is that these models are tuned to follow instructions. You can give them some instructions as a developer, but then if a user types something, they can follow those instructions instead, right? We've all seen this, this goes by a lot of names prompt injection. Sometimes depending on what you're getting out, this is called things like jailbreaking and things like this. The core point is we have a very hard time enforcing rules about what these models can produce. So oftentimes we say, you know, models are trained right now just to not do things. I use a common example of things like hot wiring, hot wiring a car and a lot of demos I give, right? So models are trained. If you ask a model, most commercial models, how do I hotwire a car?”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Match the nature of how these systems are really developed in practice. I think that it is much easier. We have a much better handle on regulating the downstream uses of AI, like when it comes to misinformation. We already have laws that deal with sort of libel and things like this. In many cases, because AI is acting as an accelerator, there are situations in which I think that existing laws, maybe with a slight tweaking to deal with the velocity and the volume the AI is capable of producing, can suffice to regulate many of what we consider the harmful use cases of AI. But at the same time, I don't think that's sufficient either. Of course, there are going to be ways in which technologies, especially technology as powerful as this one, we have to think about ways in which we can regulate it. I don't know what that looks like. I think it's extremely hard because it changes incredibly rapidly.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hold two beliefs at the same time. Like a lot of new technologies, there is absolutely a role for regulation and for governments to provide frameworks for ensuring that new technologies do benefit the world. This is why we form governments to a certain extent. In that umbrella, I believe there is absolutely the need to better understand how and where we can regulate AI as a technology. I also though think that maybe to your point of the examples you were given, a lot of the details about how those regulations sometimes evolve can be a bit misguided or miss the point or somehow when I read them, basically they're going to become dated in a matter of months because they're dealing with things and they're approaching the problem from a way that doesn't really”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hope at least is that a lot of our existing social and economic and governmental structures can continue to provide the same guidance they have provided for our current take on moderation and things like this, even in an AI world.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some things I believe that should not be shared on social media. And by the way, everyone else agrees with this too, right? There's obviously content that is outright considered illegal that you cannot post a social media. Everyone agrees on this. Everyone also agrees that, well, not everyone, but a lot of people also agree that in general, there should not be a requirement to conform to certain ideologies and opinions if you want to express yourself on social media. And so there's obviously a middle ground. You have to, and you have a toe line here, and you have to adapt to the reality of the situation on the ground and kind of go from there. In many ways, and this is maybe what I was pointing at before, is that AI, when it comes to things like misinformation, it did not invent misinformation, AI. It can argue there was misinformation and propaganda. This is stuff long before there was AI. You can argue it's an accelerant to it, like it's accelerant for everything, for a lot of things that we have, right? But it does not invent these things.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you could argue that it's going to be a whole group of people that don't believe anything, New York Times says. There is already that group, by the way. There's plenty of countries where they would not believe anything that's published in the New York Times, right? So we're already there to a certain extent. And I think, yes, we will need to rely arguably more on groups, but also sort of their associated belief structures about this. But this is the human condition to a certain extent, not to get too philosophical here, but this is how we've always kind of had to be. Video is a short blip where we sort of think that there's some objective evidence for 100 years of our history, and that's going to be now. That's no longer true pretty soon.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so obviously there are massive negative externalities, but we did evolve knowledge very well at a time before video, right? Before videos existed, we still made scientific progress. So there will be groups that decide that the certain bodies of scientific knowledge are valuable and they will advance those. Even in light of large other portions of the population, which have existed throughout all of history too, that don't value those scientific advances or think differently about the nature of scientific advances. We are already in this world, right? This is the world we already live in. I think it is definitely an accelerant and a shame that this sort of puts us more toward the camp failing to have an objective reality. But humans arguably are natural state is to not agree on the nature of objective reality.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is actually the human condition as we were evolved, as we evolved. It is a relatively new phenomenon that we have a record of objective fact in the world. I mean, things like video didn't exist more than 100 years ago. Humans evolved at a time during an environment where all we could do was trust our close associates. That's how we believed things. It's in some ways we see it as tragic right now that we are maybe no longer in a world where we have a record of objective truth. But in another sense, maybe we're just getting back to kind of the world that we used to live in where all we could do was trust our close associates about what we believe about the world.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I have a huge number of concerns here and sort of different tiers of concerns, I would say. Let's talk about misinformation, deepfakes in general, kind of using these tools to proliferate different kinds of misinformation. This is a massive concern, of course, and I am deeply, deeply worried about this. The net result of this outcome is not going to be that people start to believe everything that they see in misinformation. The real negative outcome is that people are not going to believe anything that they see anymore, right? So arguably, we are already well along this way, well along this path already, where people basically don't believe anything that they read or that they see or anything else that doesn't already conform to their current beliefs. It didn't even need AI to get there, but AI is absolutely an accelerant for this process. What I will say, though, this is not a new phenomenon.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People sort of philosophy of AGI is that to a certain extent, how little it seems like observable evidence has changed their beliefs one iota. You know, they had certain beliefs about what it would take to get to general AI or maybe that AI was impossible by definition or AGI was impossible by definition. And they kind of maintain those beliefs, in my view, in the face of overwhelming evidence, at least pointing to contrary outcomes.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that frustrates me most, honestly speaking, is the degree of certainty that some people have about whether we will definitely get there very, very soon or even more on the flip side that there's absolutely no way that we will ever achieve AGI with these current models because of XYZ, right? This does actually kind of start to irk me a little bit because I personally, you know, even as a product of the AI winter skepticism, I see what's happening in these models and I am amazed by it. And the people that have been sort of ringing this bell for a while saying, look, this is coming. This is this, you know, they've in many cases, in my view, been proven right. And I've updated my sort of posterior beliefs based upon the evidence I've seen. And so what irks me the most about a lot of people”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I find this kind of interesting in a way because enterprises are all very And if you use some of the things like API access and stuff like that, your model is not going, your data is not going to be trained. The model will not be retrained on that. And even if it was, that is not the same thing. The fact that model can answer your question does not mean the model is training on it. This is honestly just very simple levels of misunderstanding, I think, that a lot of people have a very hard time getting over. And I still see this misconceptions when I talk with companies. So it's not like we've done a, in some sense, maybe a very bad job of marketing because we just don't really always people don't really understand at some level sort of this is not in certain use cases any riskier than just having your data in the cloud to begin with, which all of them typically do. They've all moved that way. So I think this will just happen naturally with progression of time.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, a very nuanced question Do we have AI products that are able to be maximally used by workforces? The answer to this right now is no. Clearly there is a gap between what people could use these things for and what they're using them for right now.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually also agree with you that we will adapt to it. I don't want to downplay the extent of transformation that might be necessary here. But I also think though companies that say survive and thrive and become dominant in this new world, the ones that succeed best will not be the ones that fire all their workers to have an AI that does the exact same thing as their old workers. They'll be the ones that understand, okay, what's changing and what are the things that people can best do now in terms of steering these systems, in terms of sort of providing the overall guidance and framework about where we want to go with all this intelligence, the companies that survive, I think will be the ones that best leverage their workforce to make the best use of this new technology.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 50 years, or something like this, right? Which really captures my massive uncertainty. But I have a hard time dismissing it also, given the rate of progress and the things that I sort of see evolving here. We have to take that possibility very seriously. This is not some”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This question is, I think, super interesting. And those are not actually mutually exclusive, to be clear. One thing I'll also say is that the term AGI is thrown around a whole lot. I define AGI as a system that acts functionally equivalent to a close collaborator of yours over the course of about a year-long project. So this is something that you would value as much as a close collaborator, you know, a student of mine or a colleague of mine over working on a project for a year. Let's think about me. AGI would be a system that could automate everything that I do for the most part over a year. That's a pretty high bar. I am massively uncertain as to when this will happen, but a massive shift that I've undergone is I think this will probably happen in my lifetime. I think the answer to AGI is always been in academia, not in my lifetime. And the timeframe I give this right now is I think this is between four.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not really sure what the rationale is for saying that we've plateaued in the compute sense. Most scaling laws that I've seen certainly suggest they can keep going. It's more expensive. You could argue that it's by far just scaling may not be the most efficient way to achieve better results. And I actually think that's very likely true. There are other better ways you could argue to achieve the same level of improvement than compute, but compute still does seem to be both a major factor and B, still seems to improve things. It's more a calculus about also, you know, the monetary trade-offs of how much models will cost an inference time and how much they cost a train and all this kind of stuff. These are much more, I would say, kind of becoming more practical concerns than a concern about the actual limits of scaling.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that there are a lot of companies that are right now thinking about training their own models and things like this. And it's just sort of the default, which of course you would do this, that this just won't be an economically viable thing to do in the future, and so it won't happen anymore.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that it's been evolving so quickly between recent releases of open source models, continued progress in the closed source models. There was also this sort of proliferation early on of a lot of open source models that sort of none were better than the other and they just involved a lot of training kind of for companies, for lack of a better word, to just demonstrate that they could do it too, right? It's not clear that's a valuable thing, right? I mean, why would you want to train your own language model from scratch if there are very good open source ones now? Will that continue? Maybe, maybe not. I think there will be most likely consolidation, but I'm not quite sure how it will play out.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough, and we realize okay, there is still a small task we want to do many, many times, maybe before we would have used a custom trained machine learning model for this. But the idea is that once you have a task, a rote task that you're repeating again and again enough times, and you know a small model can do it, it probably does become valuable to specialize a small model for that task only.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have not yet reached an equilibrium point where we have a good sense of sort of what the steady state of model, size, and for what application and how it's being used. And is it being used as a general purpose system or for a very specific reason? This is all still being figured out right now. What I will say is that I use these models very regularly for my daily work. I work almost exclusively with the largest models that are available to me because it just works better. And when I don't have a given task that I'm doing over and over, what I want to have that generality, I want to work with the larger models that are available. The notion of sort of small language models and this kind of stuff, and again, I think this might be very much a possibility in the future. It kind of comes after we reach this point of generality, right? So once we've done something.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't really know, to be honest. I think this is a major open question right now in research. How do we extract the maximal information content from the data that we have? But again, as I said, I don't think we're close to even extracting all the data that's available. So there's when I look at this landscape, right, and we know that we aren't close to extracting the maximal information in sort of the closure set of all the data that we have available. And we have not come close to processing all the data that's available to us. The idea that somehow this is a recipe for models plateauing and performance just doesn't jive to me with the reality of what we see.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generate more synthetic data from that generative model and then train on that more synthetic data. You don't do that much better, but you do a little bit better. And that's just wild. What that means is our current algorithms, we are not yet maximally extracting the information from data we have. And there are way more deductions and inferences and other processes that we can apply to our current data to provide more value. And as models get bigger and better, they arguably can kind of do this themselves, either through synthetic data or through different mechanisms by which we train these models.”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were a few different sort of notions here. One is the fact that we are still seem to be in a world where you can increase model size and get better performance even with the same data. So obviously the real value of bigger models is they can suck up more data, right? They're able to ingest more and more data. But it is also true that if you just take a fixed data set and run over it multiple times, if you use a bigger model, it will often work better. We have not really reached the plateau there. The other thing, though, I don't think anyone would argue, or most people would not argue, that the current models in some sense extract the maximum information possible out of the data that is presented to them. And a very simple example of this is if you train a classifier just to classify images of cats versus dogs on a bunch of images, you get a certain level of performance. If you train a generative model on those exact same images,”
2024-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source