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.

The Weinstein goes on a monologue pretty early in the episode about AI, and it's the monologue that begins as follows.

I want to play you a clip here from the start of his conversation.

Entity, so you'll hear people say, well, 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 language models predict the next word.

That's too dismissive.

So while it's true that, yeah, they literally do predict the next word, 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 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. 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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