Zico Kolter, CMU Machine Learning Department head and OpenAI board member, reflects on how his perspective on neural network architectures evolved during a quick-fire round with Harry Stebbings.
“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 believe this as much anymore. I think basically models don't matter, architectures don't matter, and that applies to Transformers, too. I think, you know, anything could kind of work in their stead if we just spend enough time on it and so I think that, to a large extent, we're kind of post Architecture in a lot of our AI work.”
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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…”
Zico KolterSep 4, 2024▶ 3:06Zico Kolter: OpenAI's Newest Board Member on The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | E1197 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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AssertionSupported
Kolter: AI models contain an unpatchable buffer overflow vulnerability
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Zico KolterSep 4, 2024▶ 52:21Zico Kolter: OpenAI's Newest Board Member on The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | E1197 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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“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?”
Zico KolterSep 4, 2024▶ 3:46Zico Kolter: OpenAI's Newest Board Member on The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | E1197 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
AssertionNot 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.”
Zico KolterSep 4, 2024▶ 6:58Zico Kolter: OpenAI's Newest Board Member on The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | E1197 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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