Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #367

I was not at all surprised re: Altman's ouster, and OpenAI should be both firm and unapolegetic in keeping him out. What took them so long!? I remember when I dumped him myself, after watching Altman's snore-inducing interview on the ever-engaging Lex Fridman podcast: ▶ this video Lex's questions were the only inciteful part; Altman's responses, if you could call them that, were uninteresting to the extreme. This is the billionaire CEO of the hottest tech company around? WTF? Now I can see why Hacker News never changed, still has 1999 interface, etc. If this is leadership, call me an Uber. Ditto Brockman's GPT-4 reveal, all giddy doodads: Oh, look-see, it can compose poems in the style of [sic] dude! nobody cares. Zzzz. Altman is just so damn boring, his energy level and engagement on par with a cup of decaffeinated tea. Listen to him on Fridman. Find a single incite from Altman in the entire 2+ hours that suggests engagement beyond the purely superficial. You can't. You feel actual pain as Fridman works from every side to pull something, anything out of Altman's blasé bleh blah.

Indeed. It's probably what I would do if I were him. Or direct OpenAI entirely into AI safety research and stop doing capabilities research. I watched his interview with Lex Fridman,[1] and I didn't think he seemed very sincere. On the other hand I think there are a lot of people who are very sincere, like Max Tegmark.[2] [1] ▶ this video [2] link

From his interview with Lex Friedman: Quoting what he says [0][1]: > You know, a funny thing about the way we're training these models is I suspect too much of the like processing power for lack of a better word is going into using the models as a database instead of using the model as a reasoning engine. The thing that's really amazing about the system is that it, for some definition of reasoning, and we could of course quibble about it and there's plenty for which definitions this wouldn't be accurate. But for some definition it can do some kind of reasoning. And, you know, maybe like the scholars and the experts and like the armchair quarterbacks on Twitter would say, no, it can't. You're misusing the word, you know, whatever, whatever. But I think most people who have used the system would say, okay, it's doing something in this direction. And I think that's remarkable. And the thing that's most exciting and somehow out of ingesting human knowledge, it's coming up with this reasoning capability. However, we're gonna talk about that. Now, in some senses, I think that will be additive to human wisdom. [0] link [1] ▶ this video

14:17: "I suspect too much of the processing power is going into using the model as a database instead of using the model as a reasoning engine" ▶ this video

Lex Fridman: charisma is a dangerous thing. Flaws in communication style is a feature, not a bug in general, at least for humans in power. ▶ this video

Interesting comment about consciousness being the fundamental substrate of the world and we are in a dream or simulation. That is exactly the Nondualist position. Did he say Bramhan? ▶ this video

Every time Sam asked Lex a question I was excited for some discussion and then disappointed when Lex started talking. He either goes off on random tangent or doesn't get to the heart of the question / debate. Just very shallow and vapid, which is disappointing given the guests and Lex supposedly being of a technical background. I'd rather Joe Rogan interview Lex's guest and that says a lot. Example: ▶ this video He does have interesting guests though that I don't see on other podcasts so maybe he's seen as safe / controllable and is PR approved.

I am trying really hard to understand the AI optimists' perspective, but I am shocked at how hard it is to find people responding to the substantive arguments made about AI existential risk. As far as I'm concerned, you sort of have to address the big, tough points in Bostrom's Superintelligence[1], and probably Yudkowsky's List of Lethalities[2]. They have to do with intelligence explosions, with instrumental convergence, and with orthogonality of goals, and all kinds of deceptive behavior that we would expect from advanced AI. Throw in Bostrom's "Vulnerable World" thought experiment for good measure as well[3]. If you're not addressing these ideas, there's no point in debating. Strawmanning "AI will kill us all" out of contexte will indeed sound like wacko fear-mongering. What surprises me is that everybody's familiar with the "paperclip maximizer" meme, and yet I'm not hearing any equivalently memey-yet-valid rebuttals to it. Maybe I'm missing it. Please point me in the right direction. Aaronson certainly does not address the core theoretical fears. Instead we get: > Would your rationale for this pause have applied to basically any nascent technology — the printing press, radio, airplanes, the Internet? “We don’t yet know the implications, but there’s an excellent chance terrible people will misuse this, ergo the only responsible choice is to pause until we’re confident that they won’t”? We did not have any reason to believe that any of these technologies could lead to an