I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

I will be frank that I worry about a company, a guy who owns a company that builds both rockets and reckless AI and

like what he could do to us. Maybe I won't name him, but you know who I'm talking about.

So there are, you know, some individuals in a great deal of power who are reckless with respect

to AI that could cause some pretty bad things. I think there are very real risks. I don't

happen to think that extinction is one of them. I think, you very real risks. I don't happen to think that extinction

is one of them. I think, you know, it's very unlikely to anything will literally extinguish the very

resourceful and distributed human species. But the probability that it might cause a lot of harm is very high.

That's Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist who for the last 20 years or so

has been a vocal, relentless, and often gleeful critic of the way artificial intelligence is being pursued.

His favorite target is the current crop of bots based on large language models or LLMs, bots like chat GPT.

This should be very interesting because you're a noted skeptic of AI, particularly large

language models.

So before I hear the full-on skepticism, what do you like about AI?

Anything?

Yeah, there's two things I like about it. One is, I think people are starting to take the scientific applications more seriously.

That doesn't necessarily mean using large language models. So I think the best scientific application right now is AlphaFold, which has some elements of large language models in it, but it's not just

the chat bot and you type in and say, hey, what does my protein look like? That's the one that goes

from a nucleotide sequence and predicts the three-dimensional structure. It's a very focused model

that works on a very particular problem and does it well. And I love it. I think AlphaFold is probably

the best contribution of AI to science so far. And then I it. I think Alpha Fold is probably the best contribution of

AI to science so far. And then I also like that after five years of, I don't know if I can say this on

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