How Does AI Work? (Robert Wright & Timothy Nguyen)

Robert Wright's Nonzero

Nonzero

News & Politics, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.7 • 618 Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2023

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nonzero.org

02:26 Why Tim thinks AI chatbots are more than just “stochastic parrots” 9:27 Do AIs “understand” things? 21:18 The multidimensional mind of AI 26:28 Humans designed AIs, so why don’t we fully understand how they work? 34:42 The real mystery of smart machines: They learn things we didn’t teach them 42:36 Why deep learning was such a game changer for AI research 57:22 The T in ChatGPT

Robert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv, The Evolution of God, Nonzero, Why Buddhism Is True) and Timothy Nguyen (Google).

Overtime segment:

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast.
0:33.7	Hi, Tim.
0:35.3	Hey, Bob.
0:36.3	How are you doing?
0:56.1	Good. How are you? Can't complain. Let me introduce this. I'm Robert Wright. Publisher of Non-Zero Newsletter. This is a non-zero podcast. And you are Tim Nguyen, kind of. I didn't get that quite right, right? Say your last... Good enough. It's Nguyen. Yeah, that was better. Even I know that that was better. So you are
1:00.3	a machine learning researcher at Deep Mind,
1:04.3	which is basically Google's AI division now, right?
1:08.0	And your host of the Cartesian Cafe podcast um people may remember you from being
1:14.8	on my podcast in your role uh as someone who's doing their best to debunk eric Weinstein's
1:21.6	theory of geometric unity uh that podcast got a lot of attention if people want to look for it
1:27.2	it's uh provocatively titled is
1:29.7	eric Weinstein a crackpot i believe uh something like that um you chose that title
1:35.3	well actually you use the word crackpot in the podcast i don't i'm not going to take sole
1:42.3	responsibility for that little bit of tabloid journalism,
1:46.3	although I am proud of it. So if people wonder, why would a machine learning researcher
1:54.8	be even thinking about Eric Weinstein's grand theory of physics. You are actually a mathematical physicist, right?
2:02.7	You have a PhD in that?
2:04.3	That's right.
2:05.2	And that's the answer.
2:10.0	And people who don't know a lot about AI may wonder what a mathematical physicist is doing, working on the kind of AI that gives us large language models and so on.
2:24.8	We'll get into that.
2:25.9	Let me say first our mission today is to try to improve my understanding, at least, of how these generative AI things work.
	...

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