Ep. 380: ChatGPT is Not Alive!

A couple weeks ago, the biologist Brett Weinstein went on Joe Rogan's podcast. Their conversation turned, as it so often does these days, to the topic of AI. So Weinstein goes on a monologue pretty early in the episode about AI, and it's a monologue that begins as follows. I'm going to play you a clip here from the start of his conversation. Entity.

So you'll hear people say, well, it's not, it's not really thinking, right? It's just figuring out if it was thinking what the next word in the sentence is. Garbage. In some sense, right, Weinstein is right in how he starts the conversation, right? He's saying, look, we can't just saying uh language models predict the next word.

Uh, that's gar that's too dismissive. So while it's true that, yeah, they literally do predict the next word, there is a lot of impressive understanding and processing that goes into actually figuring out what word to to to produce. In fact, writing The New Yorker recently, James Summer argues that we can even think of the processing that goes into predicting next words and language models as thinking, and I think he lays out a good argument for that. Uh so Weinstein, he starts, I think I'm on board with him. But then as he continues in his discussion, he begins to argue that not only is AI doing impressive processing, but is rapidly evolving beyond our ability to control, and that it is, quote, like five minutes in quote away from starting to manipulate us, Weinstein implies that existing LLMs might already be conscious and that we have no real way of testing whether or not this is true.

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