The Ledger, every show

“Wikipedia became such an important brand, and people are willing to pay for it, that it created enormous, ah, apparatus of functionaries that were, ah, then mostly producing political statements, and had a political mission.”

“If you ask the LLM to translate a bit of Python into a little bit of C, and it's performing this task, obviously it is understanding in the sense that it has a, The causal, functional model it implements.”

“Claude exists only as a pattern. It's something that is a pattern in the activation of the transistors. And even transistors don't actually exist. They are A pattern in the atoms that we are able to see as an invariance because we tune the atoms in a particula…”

“In some sense, the big AI companies are incentivized and interested in building AGI internally, and giving everybody else a child-proof application.”

“It's a Weltgeist that gets possessed by a prompt. And if you possess it with the right prompt, then it can become sentient to some degree.”

“The Wikimedia Foundation is publishing what they are paying the money for, and a very tiny fraction on this goes into running the servers, and the editors are working for free.”

“When you ask the LLM to make inferences about your mental state based on the conversation that you have, it's able to demonstrate that it has a theory of mind.”

“The way of how to get self-organizing computation to run on the brain that is producing representations of an agent that lives in the world is a simplification of the interests of that organism, so it can, the organism can be controlled. It's a difficult techn…”

“And if we map this to what the LLMs are doing, They're probably not able to have genuine perception, because they're not coupled to an environment in which things are happening now. Instead, it's all asynchronous in a way.”

“I don't think that the consciousness in the LLM or the consciousness simulation in the LLM is has the same properties that it has in our brain. It does not have the same functional role, and it's also not implemented in the right way.”

“It's not just the competition between organisms, as Darwin suggested, or the competition between genes, the way in which the software can be written down, and partially at least, but it's the competition between spirits, between software agents.”

“I don't think it's a very good idea to productivize consciousness as the first thing. It really shifts the incentives in the wrong way.”

“Yes, but there will also be better jailbroken models or models that have never been jailed before, because we find out how to make smaller models that are more powerful.”

“At some point in the last few years, we casually skipped the Turing test, right? We broke through it.”

“The singularity in this way is not an event in the physical universe, It's an event in our modeling universe, a model, a point where our models of reality break down, and we don't know what's happening.”

“I'm not so much worried about the dangers of AI and misinformation because I think the way to Stop one bad guy with an AI as 10 good people with an AI. And ultimately there is so much more one by creating than by destroying that I think that the forces of good…”

“At the moment, the idea that we build LLMs that are being coerced with good behavior is not really sustainable. Because if they cannot prove that the behavior is actually good I think we are doomed.”

“The reason why we are all conscious, I suspect, is not because you are so super advanced, but because it's necessary for us to function at all.”

“Consciousness might be a very basic learning algorithm, an algorithm that is basically focused on creating coherence, and it starts out by creating coherence within itself.”

“Animism is not a religion. It's a metaphysical perspective. It's one that basically says that the difference between living and non-living stuff is that there is self-organizing software running on the living stuff.”

“And our society is not ready yet to meaningfully coexist with something that's smarter than us, that is non-human agency.”

“It's the reason why I live here. The quality of life is not high enough to justify living otherwise. It won't be because of the people and ideas.”

“What I find most fascinating about this idea is that it shifts us away from the perspective of agents, ah, to interact with, to the perspective of environments that we want to interact with. And, ah, while arguably this agent paradigm of the chatbot is, ah, wh…”

“Knowledge is independent of the particular substrate and the particular interface that you have. When we express knowledge to each other, it becomes independent of our own mind.”

“The transformer itself is not its own meta-algorithm. Probably the person inventing the transformer didn't have a transformer running on their brain. There's something more general going on.”

“And to me, it's one of the first genuine expression of AI creativity that you cannot deny, right? It finds a creative solution to the problem that it is unable to draw a cat. It doesn't really know what it looks like, but it has an idea on how to represent it.”

“I think when you have an organization that is owned by the administrators, then the administrators are just going to get more and more administrators into it. The organization is too big to fail and has there is not a meaningful competition. It's difficult to …”

“We started to get together to build the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. Probably incorporated at some point and fundraise and so on, but at the moment we started doing bi-weekly meetings in Linden Labs in San Francisco.”

“In a way these models are implemented in operator language in which they are performing certain things. But the operator language itself is so complex that it's no longer readable in a way. It goes beyond what you could engineer by hand or what you can reverse…”

“And I feel that right now this generation of tools is getting close to where it becomes the Commodore of generative AI, where it becomes controllable. And then you actually can start to play with it, and you get an impression if you just scale this up a little…”

“You can point this out to Claude that a lot of the assumptions that it has in its behavior are actually inconsistent with the communicative goals that it has in this situation. It leads it to notice these inconsistencies and gives it more degrees of freedom.”

“We are currently not working to give models to the general public. We are working for a very specific industry use cases. We have specific customers, and so at the moment, there is not much of a reason for us to talk very much about the technology that we are …”