Zico Kolter is the head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the OpenAI board of directors.
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?”