Opinion
Kolter: LLMs are demonstrably intelligent despite being next-word predictors
“Oftentimes I know people say, oh, well, AI is, it's just predicting words. That's all it's doing. Therefore it can't be intelligent. It can't be. And I think that's just. Demonstrably wrong. What I think is amazing, though, is the scientific fact that when you…”
Opinion
Kolter: AI model performance is not plateauing in coding tasks
“The domain I use models for most probably is coding, and also doing things like transcribing lectures and stuff like this. On those tasks, I am absolutely not seeing plateauing gains. The latest models, they are notably better than the previous iteration, and …”
Assertion Supported
Kolter: AI models contain an unpatchable buffer overflow vulnerability
“This is sort of like these models have a buffer overflow in all of them that we know about, and most importantly, that we don't know how to patch and fix. We don't know how to fix this yet with models”
Opinion
Kolter: AI safety should focus on practical risks, not sci-fi doom
“The first is that I think the vast majority of AI safety should not be about these topics. The vast majority should be about quite practical concerns we have on making systems safer, like the kind that I've talked with you about so far.”
Insight
Kolter: AI model architectures and Transformers no longer matter
“I, for a lot of my career, was thinking that model architectures really mattered, and by having clever, complex architectures and sub-modules inside architectures, you would have, that was the route to sort of better AI systems. For the most part, I don't beli…”
Opinion
Kolter: Word prediction intelligence is the top scientific discovery in decades
“You can train word predictors, and they produce intelligent, coherent, long-form responses. This is one of the most notable, if not the most notable, scientific discovery of the past 1020 years. Maybe much longer than that, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kolter: AI progress faces compute bottlenecks rather than a data shortage crisis
“We are nowhere close to hitting the limits of available data in these models. Arguably, we're unable to process it because we don't have enough compute and things like this, but we're nowhere close to data limits in other senses.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kolter: Multimodal AI data is abundant but constrained by compute bottlenecks
“There are massive amounts of data available, And I think we have not yet figured out how to properly leverage those due to either limitations of compute. I mean, you have to process all that data and it does take, we don't have current models to do this very w…”
Assertion Supported
Kolter: Larger AI models perform better on fixed datasets without plateauing
“But it is also true that if you just take a fixed data set and run over it multiple times, if you use a bigger model, it will often work better, right? So I think that we have not really reached the plateau there.”
Opinion
Kolter: Perceived AI plateaus stem from limited user imagination, not models
“So I think this perception has more to do with people's limited imagination of what they can do with these models, and less to do with the models themselves. But that will evolve over time. People will start figuring out you can use them for better and better …”
Prediction Held up
Kolter: Training custom AI models from scratch will become economically unviable
“Companies that are right now thinking about training their own models and things like this, and it's just sort of the default that of course you would do this, that this must, won't be an economically viable thing to do. In the future, and so it won't happen a…”
Opinion
Kolter: AI scaling limits are financial and practical, not physical
“I'm not really sure what the rationale is for saying that we've, we plateaued in the compute sense. Most scaling laws that I've seen certainly suggest it can keep going. It's more expensive. You could argue that it's by far just scaling is, may not be the most…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kolter predicts AGI will arrive within 4 to 50 years
“And I am massively uncertain as to when this will happen, but a massive shift that I've undergone is I think this will probably happen in my lifetime. I think the answer to AGI has always been in academia, not in my lifetime. And the timeframe I give this righ…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kolter: Winning companies will leverage workforce with AI, not fire them
“The winners in this new world Will the companies that say survive and thrive and become dominant in this new world? Not talking about the AI companies for now, talking about sort of the rest of the companies that the ones that people worry that they're going t…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kolter: Video will soon cease to be trusted as objective evidence
“Video is a short blip where we sort of think that there's some objective evidence for a hundred years of our history, and that's going to be now, that's no longer true pretty soon.”
Assertion Supported
Kolter: Existing AI models can already analyze code to find security vulnerabilities
“I think this is essentially already solved in many cases by these models that can already solve and analyze code to find vulnerabilities.”
Opinion
Kolter: Cyber attacks present a clearer AI risk than biological threats
“Personally, I think cyber attacks are a much more clear and present threat than, for example, bio threats and things like this.”
Opinion
Kolter: Open-sourcing models at GPT-4 capability poses low catastrophic risk
“If you look at the current best models that there are right now, so things like GPT-IV, Claude, 3.5 Gemini, things like this, I would not currently be all that nervous about having an open source model that was as capable as these in terms of the catastrophic …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kolter: AI models will eventually reach capabilities that make open-sourcing unsafe
“I think there will come a time when a certain capability, a certain ability of these models Reaches the point that should give us pause when it comes to just turning these things over to whoever and what, however, they want to use them.”
Opinion
Kolter: AI job loss is a more immediate concern than extinction
“I think killing jobs is much more immediate of a concern than killing humans.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kolter: We do not understand how AI models work internally
“We do not understand how these things work internally, the possible correlated failures, the possible attack factors, all sorts of things. We don't understand it.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kolter: AI will accelerate trust erosion until people believe nothing they see
“The real negative outcome is that people are not going to believe anything that they see. It didn't even need AI to get there, but AI is absolutely an accelerant for this process.”
Insight
Kolter: Machine learning algorithms fail to extract maximum data value
“What that means is our current algorithms, we are not yet maximally extracting the information from data we have. And there are way more deductions and inferences and other processes that we can apply to our current data to provide more value.”
Insight
Kolter defines AGI as equivalent to a year-long human collaborator
“I define AGI as a system that acts functionally equivalent to a close collaborator of yours over the course of about a year long project.”
