Understanding AI "Understanding" (Robert Wright & Nathan Labenz)
Robert Wright's Nonzero
Nonzero
4.7 • 618 Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2024
⏱️ 117 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
028 Nathan's podcast, The Cognitive Revolution 3:50 The enduring enigmas of AI 7:39 Conceptualizing how LLMs conceptualize 16:22 Do AIs actually understand things? 33:08 Why AI doesn’t need to be superhuman to be revolutionary 43:40 Human vs AI representations of the world 57:09 Thinking through high-dimensional AI brain space 1:05:22 Nathan on AI risk: Doomer? Accelerationist? Both? 1:21:59 The open source question and Cold War II 1:41:34 Do LLMs “naturally” learn human values? 1:45:20 Mamba: a new approach to building large language models
Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Nathan Labenz (Cognitive Revolution, Waymark AI). Recorded August 06, 2024.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods
The Cognitive Revolution podcast: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ Waymark AI: https://waymark.com/
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nonzero.org/subscribe
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero podcast. You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast. |
| 0:27.1 | Hi, Nathan. |
| 0:30.7 | Hi, Bob. |
| 0:32.1 | How you doing? |
| 0:33.7 | I'm doing great. |
| 0:34.7 | Good morning. |
| 0:35.9 | Good morning to you. |
| 0:54.8 | Let me introduce this. I'm Robert Wright, publisher of Non-Zero Newsletter to which everyone should subscribe. And this is a non-zero podcast. You're Nathan LeBenz. You're both an entrepreneur and a podcaster. You founded a company called Waymark. Is that right? |
| 0:55.6 | That uses AI now, didn't originally, |
| 0:58.8 | uses AI to help companies come up with, like, |
| 1:01.9 | video marketing plans and so on. |
| 1:05.7 | And so you're writing the wave. |
| 1:09.4 | You're writing the AI wave. |
| 1:11.7 | And your podcast has really been valuable to me, cognitive revolution. |
| 1:18.2 | Although my comprehension rate is like maybe 65% on a good day. |
| 1:22.3 | Because your podcast is, you know, it's, I don't want to say quite that it's for insiders, but, |
| 1:30.1 | you know, it's, you tell me what, what your kind of business model is, but it's pretty |
| 1:35.5 | high-level discussion. You tend to have entrepreneurs and a lot of actual kind of AI |
| 1:41.3 | engineer type scientists, and you understand all this stuff. |
| 1:46.2 | And so you speak at a reasonably high level. |
| 1:48.7 | And the way this conversation came about is I was listening to one of your conversations |
| 1:52.0 | was fascinated by the subject because it's something of great interest to me. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Nonzero, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Nonzero and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.