Meta NeuroScientist SHOCKED Me: Scale Alone Won’t Create Consciousness! David Sussillo - #543

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Physics, Natural Sciences, Science

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2026

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 David Sussillo spent years training neural networks at Google Brain and now leads research at Meta Reality Labs. His verdict on the path to artificial consciousness might surprise you. In this conversation, we discuss why scaling transformers alone won't produce conscious AI, how recurrent neural networks differ from the transformer architectures powering today's LLMs, the FORCE algorithm he developed to train RNNs, what his work on Meta's EMG wristband reveals about AI and biological signals, Rich Sutton's Bitter Lesson and whether we're locked into a GPU-transformer paradigm, and why studying the brain may be the only way out of AI's current limitations. David is also the author of Emergence, a braided memoir that tells the story of his path from foster care to the frontier of neuroscience and AI research. David Sussillo is a research scientist at Meta Reality Labs and an adjunct professor at Stanford University. He completed his PhD at Columbia University under Larry Abbott and previously worked at Google Brain. Key Takeaways: 00:00 Scale alone won't produce consciousness — here's why 00:25 The "bitter lesson": big data crushes every algorithmic invention 01:15 How hallucinations were discovered early at Google 05:00 The lock-in problem: why LLM + GPU may cap AI's ceiling 08:25 What Meta's neural wristband is actually trying to solve 11:20 Rich Sutton's bitter lesson explained 14:15 "More is Different" — why you can't reduce complexity upward 28:30 The book Emergence — two stories braided into one 36:00 Why mentorship matters more than intelligence for at-risk kids 47:00 Stability over intensity: what kids in foster care actually need ➡️ Follow David Sussillo 🌐 Website / Research: Meta Reality Labs 📚 Emergence (memoir): https://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Memoir-Boyhood-Computation-Mysteries/dp/1538768577 🎓 Stanford / Columbia / Carnegie Mellon Alumni ✍️ Email: davidsussillo@gmail.com 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://x.com/SussilloDavid Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I don't think scale alone, just transformers and lots and lots of data from the internet
0:04.8	is going to get you to any form of consciousness. My cat is conscious, it snuggles, it's there,
0:10.6	it's present, it's embodied. I was a bet that like there was still something to learn from the
0:14.5	brain that would inform AI, I have to say, that I wasn't not successful. These things would
0:18.8	just generate complete nonsense. If you add three periods to it or a backslash, they would just go crazy.
0:23.6	Every time there's algorithmic invention, big data just comes and crushes it.
0:28.6	That's Dr. David Ceciloh, neuroscientist, former Google Brain researcher,
0:33.6	Columbia-trained PhD, who's now at Meta Reality Lab.
0:36.6	So what he told me about the limits of AI might change how you look and maybe feel and fear about what's coming next.
0:43.9	Let's go.
0:44.6	David Sassila, welcome down to San Diego all the way up, down from the Bay Area.
0:48.6	Thank you for having me, Brian.
0:49.8	Appreciate it.
0:50.4	You're the author of the second most difficult type of book to review and to cover on
0:55.4	the podcast, which is a memoir, the first one being a novel, right? You can't really get a novel
1:00.9	fully described without spoiling it unless it's decades old. But this one, a memoir, is really
1:06.6	just a fascinating work of pure love, but it's also a work of science, and we're going to get
1:11.5	into all the mysteries and magic of it. But first thing I want to ask is, when I think about, you know,
1:16.9	how we're using LLMs, and I use them every day, and I love them, and then I have a great deal
1:20.8	of fondness for how they deliver, you know, just incredible products that save me a lot of time and resources. However, they have a stunning number of lacunae of flaws and foibles and gaffes that they make. And first one I think about is sycophanty, which I actually like. I like it my AI to be a little bit, come on, come on. You've got to have a little bit of sycophanty, right? And then the other one is hallucination.
1:45.0	So I asked it once, you know, asked chat cheap, you know, what books is Brian Keating written? Oh, losing the Nobel Prize, into the impossible, a brief history of time. So no, I'd like to have 1% of Stephen Hawking's book sales, but I didn't write that book, right? So is there any hope that, say, R&Ns might be more immune to hallucination or sycophanty,
2:05.8	but let's just stick with hallucination, then, you know, other approaches for, you know,
	...

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