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The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

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

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4637 Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Zico Colter is a Professor and the Director of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University.  His research spans several topics in AI and machine learning, including work in AI safety and robustness, LLM security, the impact of data on models, implicit models, and more.  He also serves on the Board of OpenAI, as a Chief Expert for Bosch, and as Chief Technical Advisor to Gray Swan, a startup in the AI safety space.

In Today's Episode with Zico Colter We Discuss:

1. Model Performance: What are the Bottlenecks:

  • Data: To what extent have we leveraged all available data? How can we get more value from the data that we have to improve model performance?
  • Compute: Have we reached a stage of diminishing returns where more data does not lead to an increased level of performance?
  • Algorithms: What are the biggest problems with current algorithms? How will they change in the next 12 months to improve model performance?

2. Sam Altman, Sequoia and Frontier Models on Data Centres:

  • Sam Altman: Does Zico agree with Sam Altman's statement that "compute will be the currency of the future?" Where is he right? Where is he wrong?
  • David Cahn @ Sequoia: Does Zico agree with David's statement; "we will never train a frontier model on the same data centre twice?"

3. AI Safety: What People Think They Know But Do Not:

  • What are people not concerned about today which is a massive concern with AI?
  • What are people concerned about which is not a true concern for the future?
  • Does Zico share Arvind Narayanan's concern, "the biggest danger is not that people will believe what they see, it is that they will not believe what they see"?
  • Why does Zico believe the analogy of AI to nuclear weapons is wrong and inaccurate?

 

Transcript

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0:00.0

The real negative outcome is that people are not going to believe anything that they see anymore.

0:04.4

Arguably, we are already well along this way, where people basically don't believe anything

0:08.9

that they read or that they see or anything else. It doesn't already conform to their current beliefs.

0:13.7

It didn't even need AI to get there, but AI is absolutely an accelerant for this process.

0:18.3

It is a relatively new phenomenon that we have sort of a record of

0:22.1

objective fact in the world. I mean, things like video didn't exist more than 100 years ago.

0:26.9

Humans evolved at a time during an environment where all we could do was trust our close associates.

0:33.7

That's how we believed things. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and today we are joined by OpenAI's newest board member

0:40.3

and Carnegie Mellon's head of machine learning, Zico Coulter, from the bottlenecks in AI today

0:45.3

to open versus closed systems to the biggest dangers of AI.

0:49.3

This is an incredible discussion.

0:51.3

But before we dive in, when a promising startup files for an IPO or a venture

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1:40.7

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