336 | Anil Ananthaswamy on the Mathematics of Neural Nets and AI

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We all know that artificial intelligence in various forms has been exploding over the last couple years. After decades of effort and various summers and winters in AI research, we clearly have crossed some threshold where AI is being put into use in all sorts of different places. Now, we can debate the words artificial intelligence, right?

Is it really intelligence? You know, that's the large language models, which are a particular approach to AI, which have really gotten all the attention lately, they're based on a broader idea called neural networks or deep learning, which is has been all over the place for a long time. Something like Google Maps uses this kind of technology. But now with the more human like behavior of AI in the form of large language models, they become much more ubiquitous and there's been a wide range of reactions to what is going on.

Some people saying that maybe they'll become super intelligent and take over the world and that's a danger. Other people just complaining that they can't download a new software or an app without it being infused with AI that they don't really want. So I'm not myself very sure what the long-term impact of AI is going to be. um, at least in this sort of large language model incarnation. A couple of years ago, when it first became a big thing, I said that it's probably somewhere between the impact of cell phones and electricity.

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