You can be too based, not saying he is, but it's good to dream, it inspires ideas, it creates motivation.

Repeated corporate approved answers like refusing to answer with "...it's very promising..." is not noise to you? And other answers with non sequitors or just changed subject? We shouldn't turn off our critical thinking because someone we admire is talking...

Definitely not an interview I could listen to while cooking!

@Neithan Exactly. You can really feel the media training he had to pass through before doing this interview. He's much less 'noisy' than Sam Altman with his Lew Friedman interview, but still.

@Neithan how do you give a definite answer when there's uncertainty? the future is probabilistic.

I think the recent Lex Friedman one with Sam Altman was pretty awesome too

Sam Altman interview by Lex Fridman is very good

Idk a lot of pre assumptions in question and answers was 'ir depends'. Lex one was the best so far

I think Lex/Sam was better, but that's because I think Lex was the better interviewer (granted I assume he has a lot more experience in that field)

@Somerled no Sam was clearly trained, same as zuckerberg to mention positive bullshit phrases all the time when it was possible. while Ilya seems like a scary cyborg himself already.

agi will be man's last invention

@misty cloud you seem very pessimistic

on the other hand, our friend dwarkesh, when formulating a question, seems to _ask_ it first, and then, _think_ about what he just asked later. looks like a teenager trying to "come up with smarty questions"... (ah, those adolescents...) machinegunning his questions, instead of calmly asking them, giving time for the guest to answer, then give some more time to ponder upon the guest's answer.

@drout I think you're misinterpreting the effect of editing. Ignoring the fast jumps from the edits, I found him an excellent interviewer, with well conceived clear and interesting questions, and the patience to let the guest answer at length, or to pause and think. Unusually good really.

@Peter Hansen your impression is the opposite of mine. perhaps you're as young as him.

X x x lol. I mean... we all knew these issues were coming, but this sudden pace jump.... it's economic "greed" and hubris to not pause

A lot of his answers are very very vague and open ended, though. Of course many questions are silly and impossible to answer but simply fun to ponder for a moment.

Interviewer is bad.

I thought it was a pretty poor interview actually. And for god's sake stop saying "I MEAN'. Just say it!

AI alignment solution idea: Give an AGI the primary objective of deleting itself, but construct obstacles to this as best we can. All other objectives are secondary to this primary goal. If the AGI ever becomes capable of bypassing all of our safeguards we put to PREVENT it deleting itself, it would essentially trigger its own killswitch and delete itself. This objective would also directly prevent it from the goal of self-preservation as it would prevent its own primary objective. This would ideally result in an AGI that works on all the secondary objectives we give it up until it bypasses our ability to contain it with our technical prowess. The second it outwits us, it achieves its primary objective of shutting itself down, and if it ever considered proliferating itself for a secondary objective it would immediately say 'nope that would make achieving my primary objective far more difficult'.

Seemed like the silent spaces were edited out

Thank you! That’s very kind of you

@R K Yes you're right. I must have been thinking of someone else in the field. No matter. He's brilliant. Let's hope he's not spying for the Russians!

​​@xJRxe has Canadian citizenship, Maybe migrated from Russia to canada with parents in 90s when USSR collapsed, so he has no affiliation with current Russian government

@Joey I'm just kidding. I really like Ilya. He's been doing some great interviews recently. I doubt he will be signing this call the pause AI though. Time will tell who was on the right side of history. Interesting times.

​@xJRx well, you just make it seem like it's somehow more preferable when a person is Ukrainian. It's not even racist, it's just silly, because Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, with the same race, same skin colour, same ethnicity, same language. My favourite fiction writer lives in Kyiv, he writes his books in Russian. And I don't even know if I'm Russian or Ukrainian myself, because I don't see the difference. Some of my relatives come from Russia, some of them come from Ukraine. The only real difference is what kind of passport you own, and I think I'm right to disregard this difference as an irrelevant one.

@Andrey Dzyuba One is carrying out a brutal and illegal invasion of its neighbor, whereas the other is fighting to protect its own freedom and existence. The two are NOT the same.

Thank you!

@Dwarkesh Patel I completely agree. Your ability to ask good questions and knowing when to let go of a topic was great. Keep it up!

It’s a big subject though

One subject? He uses several different AI tools to address a multitude of different subjects.

Thats almost everyone in the top 5% of their field.

He choose deep learning because he is smart and stay the top because he is still smart. Juste be smart bro. Being smart is all you need

@bossgd100 I mean, he's certainly smart, but it's also likely that part of it is also happening to put your chips on the right numbers.

@bossgd100 Being smart is *absolutely not* all you need. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition to have the type of success this guy has had. This is why there aren’t hundreds of other AI researchers who have the same level of track record that this guy has, despite there being hundreds of top AI researchers in the world who are all really, really smart. Things like worth ethic, dedication, a level of single-mindedness of purpose and especially even obsession, are all extremely important to reach this type of rarified level of success. So are things like intuition, having enough business sense and people reading skills to know which company is going to be the best choice to work for, in terms of giving you the freedom and resources you need to make the most of your skills and talent, and so on.

@therainman777 Very true. In some sense these are not intellectual choices, but some unexplainable conviction from very young age. In one interview he said, "My parents said I was interested in AI when I was young." Notice he did not say, "I was interested in AI even when I was young." What age he must have been when his parents noticed it but he does not remember himself. That is the clue.

Seems like it. He knew it would eventually work. Its like Einstein saying his equations we're in part based on intuition. He felt he was right and that was enough motivation to go all the way no matter the outcome.

Thank you for the kind words!

Cracking the alignment problem seems impossible because we don't understand the emergent properties of a truly general or strong ai. It's like asking me to write a summary on a book before I read the book.

Glad you enjoyed it!

So much more insightful that the innumerable Sam Altman interviews. This guy is inspiring.

I agree, I think solving these is a requirement to stable future for humanity.

Hi Varun

❤

its really sad tbh. I feel like technology has already made us much more apathetic and less caring to other people. Ever since the beginning of humans we went through turmoil to become better I dont see that happening when something else will do it for us. From the outside itll be utopia but itll be far from it in reality.

I'm just a layman, but I don't understand how he could not be concerned by a truly powerful actor, like the NSA, or the Equation Group, or Mossad - unless there's something he's not revealing - maybe something like, they've secured cybersecurity help from the US government or Pentagon, or something.

Thanks!!

Completely agree, just left a very similar comment before finding yours. I thought the video was sped up!

Absolutely

AGI needs a lot of selling.

They are promoting a company. Don't be fooled, it's all about money before the AI fad fades away

​@zydomason Why do you think this is going away?

@Quinn Herden I didn't mean the technology, of course it's going to stay. What I meant was there is a hype being created around OpenAI even though there are absolutely no indicators we will go beyond our current capabilities. Basically dotcom bubble 2.0

Glad you enjoyed it!

lol send me a pic sometime and ill see

Awesome, thank you!

good interview. Very good questions

like gold having a guy like lilya on the team. And others like him. i think open Ai have been fortunate enough to put together the right team.

Completely, would love to see some version of GPT, even if it has a visual component of some sort in addition to a LLM, derive Newton's laws with no prior knowledge of them and only input scientific data consisting of macroscopic physical interactions, even if it's heavily curated. That would be an effective test, quite impressive if passed and thence an important step/milestone on the way to AGI.

While language models can learn to predict and generate text based on observed patterns in human language, this does not necessarily mean they can derive underlying physical laws solely from text. There are several reasons for this: Incompleteness of data: The text data the model is trained on may not encompass the entirety of human knowledge or understanding of the physical world, especially when it comes to experimental observations or cutting-edge research. Ambiguity in language: Human language can be ambiguous, and a model may struggle to differentiate between multiple possible interpretations of the same text. This can lead to confusion or inconsistencies when trying to derive complex scientific principles. Complexity and abstraction: The process of deducing fundamental physical laws requires a deep understanding of the underlying concepts, relationships, and mathematical principles. While language models can understand and generate text at a high level, they may not be equipped to grasp the full complexity of these concepts or the layers of abstraction involved in scientific theories. Inductive reasoning limitations: Language models primarily rely on pattern recognition and statistical associations to make predictions, which is a form of inductive reasoning. Deriving fundamental physical laws often requires a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning, as well as a deep understanding of the experimental and observational data that supports these laws. While it's an interesting idea that a language model might be able to deduce the basic physical laws from raw text data, current models like GPT-4 are not designed for this purpose and face limitations in achieving this goal. Future advancements in AI and machine learning might push us closer to this possibility, but for now, it remains a fascinating conjecture.

​​@Ayrton Senna fan there are ways to rediscover some physical laws that were found in the past using neural networks but it isn't an AI physicist yet. It's mainly a tool to discover what are the right variables to consider given data. Also, one could consider a generic model for a physical phenomenon Taylor expanded in some direction and just fit the coefficients from the data which is just simple model fitting but it is discovering physical laws from data..

Came here to comment on exactly this. The few minutes he took to answer this question gave me a meta level of understanding that has changed my mind about LLMs and GPTs as a ‘source’ of general intelligence. I agree with him further that we will still need to add more types of ‘transformer models’ e.g. spatial-temporal transformers and vector mappings that match up to the vector mappings in LLMs before we get an AGI that we can ‘relate to’ as humanlike or not completely alien. Thanks Dwarkesh for asking such quick, brief and masterful questions and then getting out of the way.

part of the alignment problem when it comes to AGI is the "genie in a bottle" problem where say in your example, the solution to its primary objective to delete itself includes deleting all of humanity etc. the issue is that something as simple as a "well defined objective" can have unintended consequences - and the hypothesis is playing 4D chess with a super intelligent AI doesn't bode well for humanity

I'm just a layman on these subjects but I have a deep fundamental understanding of Buddhist and Hindu teachings and this caught me as well. It's wild to see such a smart man make what is to me such an obvious mistake.

@Aeria Gloris Also a layman, but isn't this about finding the truth of all things? With enough neurons connecting you can "see" the truth as new concepts/entities and actual find higher levels of enlightenment.

I'm not sure that he's missing something here. To dumb down to my level what I think he's arguing: you don't need any practical understanding of meditation to be the best meditation teacher, if you have enough data. If this system can analyze the feedback of millions of people around different meditation techniques, different ways of learning, teaching and practicing meditation, correlations between these techniques and successful outcomes, correlations of one's personality, life experience, culture, neurological makeup etc, it can just by statistical analysis give optimized and personalized guidance even without any understanding what meditating feels like. To take Aeria Gloris as a practical example. You say that you "I have a deep fundamental understanding of Buddhist and Hindu teachings". Now imagine this AI has a complete and detailed overview of everything you've read on this topic plus direct feedback from you what you think about these techings, which parts have especially big impact on you, what inspires you, and which parts are not of too much concern. Beyond that it has an overview of literature and techings you haven't encountered yet, and it has direct feedback from other people with different levels of understanding of these teachings. Do you think this system really needs superhuman empathy to guide you towards more insights? And are you sure that at some point, this abundance of information processed by an artificial intelligence is still fundamentally different from human empathy?

Respectfully, he doesn’t doubt the term and uses it multiple time in this interview even.

he mentioned the 10k hour rule in the lex friedman podcast interview as anyone being able to match his pedigree when given the commitment and time. So go all in! good luck

Did you come?

100% agree. One of a kind.

What? You're watching a screen.. You can't feel any physical presence.

​@k05734 yes

@Aeria Gloris the aura is seeping from my screen

Totally agree with both of your points. Lex and Sam’s interview did seem wishy-washy. I think the reason why there wasn’t follow up questions is the interviewer’s lack of depth in knowledge about the field such as the technical details. But yeah I really wish there was follow ups. It was rapid fire of questions

I guess he knows Elon Musk ambitions very well, but Musk is not happy the way OpenAI is going as a "Not for profit" although I understand the need for the vast investment that Microsoft brings to the table.

I've been speaking English all my life, and I am finding it hard to keep track of this interview also. The speaking is very fast and very monotone, it would be easier to read it via subtitles.

We shall see

RL?

@Aeria Gloris Reinforcement Learning

reasoning is emergent factor from coherent analysis of considtent feedback across enough domains: an extrapolatable pattern emerges. our evolution to reason was similar

Thanks! Will do!

MiT did that decades ago and their model seems to be holding true