Kind: captions
Language: en
maybe we shouldn't think of AI as our
tool and as our assistant maybe we
should really think of it as our
children
and the same way that
you are responsible for training those
children but they are independent human
beings and at some point they will
surpass you and uh this whole concept of
alignment of basically making sure that
the AI is always at the service of
humans is very self-serving and very
limiting If instead you basically think
about AI as a partner
and AI as someone that shares your goals
but has freedom then we can't just
simply force it to align with ourselves
and we not align with it
so in a way building trust is mutual you
can't just simply like train an
intelligent system to love you when it
realizes that you can just shut it off
the following is a conversation with
minolas callus his fifth time on this
podcast he's a professor at MIT and head
of the MIT computational biology group
he's one of the greatest living
scientists in the world but he's also a
humble kind caring human being that I
have the greatest of honors and
pleasures of being able to call a friend
this is the Lex Friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now dear friends
here's manolas callus
good to see you first of all Alex I've
missed you I think you've changed the
lives of so many people that I know and
it's truly like such a pleasure to be
back such a pleasure to see you grow to
sort of reach so many different aspects
of your own personality thank you for
the love you've always give me a lot of
support and love I just can't I I I'm
forever grateful for that it's lovely to
see a fellow human being who has that
love who basically does not judge people
and there's so many judgmental people
out there and it's just so nice to see
these Beacon of
openness so what makes me one
instantiation of human Irreplaceable do
you think as we enter this increasingly
capable age of increasingly capable AI I
have to ask what do you think makes
humans Irreplaceable so humans are
irreplaceable because of the baggage
that we talked about so we talked about
baggage we talked about the fact that
every one of us
has effectively relearned all of human
civilization in their own way so every
single human has a unique set of genetic
variants that they've inherited some
common some rare and some makers think
differently so make us have different
personalities they say that a a parent
with one child believes in genetics a
parent with multiple children
understands genetics just how different
kids are and my three kids have
dramatically different personalities
ever since the beginning so one thing
that makes us unique is that every one
of us has a different Hardware
the second thing that makes it unique is
that every one of us has a different
software uploading of all of human
Society all of human civilization or
human knowledge we don't we're not born
knowing it we're not like I don't know
uh birds that learn how to make a nest
through genetics and will make a nest
even if they've never seen one we are
constantly relearning all of human
civilization so that's the second thing
and the third one that actually makes
humans very different from AI is that
the baggage we carry is not experiential
baggage it's also evolutionary baggage
so we have evolved through rounds of
complexity
so just like ogres have layers and
Shrink has layers humans have layers
there's the cognitive layer which is
sort of the outer you know most the the
latest evolutionary Innovation this
enormous neocortex that we have evolved
and then there's the emotional uh
baggage underneath that and then there's
all of the fear and fright and flight
and all of these kinds of behaviors so
AI only has a neocortex AI doesn't have
a limbic system it doesn't have this
complexity of human emotions which make
us so I think beautifully complex so
beautifully uh intertwined with our
emotions with our instincts with our you
know sort of gut reactions and all of
that so I think when humans are trying
to suppress that aspect the sort of code
more human aspect towards a more
cerebral aspect I think we lose a lot of
the creativity we lose a lot of the you
know freshness of humans and I think
that's quite Irreplaceable so we can
look at the entirety of people that are
alive today maybe all humans who have
ever lived and map them in this High
dimensional space and there's probably a
center
uh a center of mass for that mapping and
a lot of us deviate in different
directions so the the variety of uh
directions in which we all deviate from
that Center is vast I would like to
think that the center is actually empty
yes that basically humans are just so
diverse from each other that there's no
such thing as an average human
that every one of us has some kind of
complex baggage of emotions intellectual
you know motivational uh behavioral
traits that
um it's not just one sort of normal
distribution we deviate from it there's
just so many dimensions that we're kind
of hitting the sort of sparseness the
the curse of dimensionality where it's
actually quite sparsely populated and I
don't think you have an average human
being so what makes us unique in part is
the diversity
and the capacity for diversity and the
capacity of the diversity comes from the
entire evolutionary history so there's
just so many ways we can vary from each
other yeah I would say not just the
capacity but the inevitability of
diversity basically it's in our Hardware
we are wired differently from each other
my siblings and I are completely
different my kids from each other
completely different my my wife has
she's like number two of six siblings
from from a distance they look the same
but then you get to you know you get to
know them every one of them is
completely different but sufficiently
the same that the differences interplay
with each other so that's the
interesting thing where the diversity is
functional it's useful so it's like
we're close enough to where we notice
the diversity and it doesn't completely
destroy the possibility of like
effective communication interactions so
we're still the same kind of thing so
what I said in one of our earlier
podcasts is that if humans realize that
we're 99.9 percent identical we would
basically stop fighting with each other
like we are really one human species and
we are so so similar to each other and
if you look at the alternative if you
look at the next thing outside humans
like it's been six million years that we
haven't had a relative so it's it's
truly extraordinary that that we're
we're kind of like this Dot in outer
space compared to the rest of life on
earth when you think about evolving
through rounds of complexity can you
maybe elaborate such a beautiful phrase
beautiful thought that there's layers of
complexity that make so so with software
sometimes you're like oh let's like
build version two from scratch
but this doesn't happen in evolution in
evolution you layer in additional
features on top of old features so
basically when uh like every single time
my cells divide
I'm a yeast like I'm a unicellular
organism and then cell division is
basically identical
every time I breathe in and my lungs
expand
I'm basically you know like every time
my heart beats I'm a fish so basically
that I still have the same heart like
very very little has changed the blood
going through my veins the oxygen the
you know our immune system we're
basically primates our social behavior
we're basically New World monkeys and
all World monkeys we're basically
um this this concept that every single
one of these behaviors can be traced
somewhere in evolution and that all of
that continues to live within us is also
a testament to not just not killing
other humans for God's sake but like not
killing other species either like just
to realize just how united we are with
nature and that all of these biological
processes have never ceased to exist
they're continuing to live within us and
then just the neocortex and all of the
reasoning capabilities of humans are
built on top of all of these other
species that continue to live breathe
divide metabolize
fight off pathogens all continued
insiders so you think the neocortex the
whatever reasoning is that's the the
latest feature in the in the latest
version of this journey it's it's
extraordinary that humans have evolved
so much in so little time
again if you look at the the timeline of
evolution you basically have billions of
years to even get to a dividing cell and
then a multicellular organism and then a
complex body plan and then these
incredible senses that we have for
perceiving the world the fact that bats
can fly and they evolved flight the
evolved sonar in the span of a few
million years I mean it's just the
extraordinary how much Evolution has
kind of sped up and all of that comes
through this
evolvability the fact that we took a
while to get good at evolving and then
once you get good at evolving you can
sort of
you have modularity built in you have
hierarchical organizations built in you
have all of these constructs that allow
meaningful changes to occur without
breaking the system completely if you
look at a traditional genetic algorithm
the way that humans designed them in the
60s
you can only evolve so much and as you
evolve a certain amount of complexity
the number of mutations that move you
away from something functional
exponentially increases and the number
of mutations that move you to something
better exponentially decreases so the
probability of evolving something so
complex becomes Infinity small as you
get more complex but with Evolution it's
almost the opposite
almost the exact opposite that it
appears that it's speeding up exactly as
complex complexity is increasing and I
think that's just the system getting
good at evolving
where do you think it's all headed
do you ever think about where
try to visualize the entirety of The
evolutionary system and see if there's
an arrow to it and a destination to it
so the best way to understand the future
is to look at the past if you look at
the trajectory then you can kind of
learn something about the direction
which we're heading and if you look at
the trajectory of life on Earth it's
really about information processing so
the the concept of the senses evolving
one after the other uh you know being
like bacteria are able to do chemotaxis
basically means moving towards a
chemical gradient and that's the first
thing that you need to sort of hunt down
food the next step after that is being
able to actually perceive light so all
life on this planet and all life that we
know about evolved on this rotating Rock
every 24 hours you get sunlight and dark
sunlight and dark and light is a source
of energy light is also information
about where is up light is all kinds of
you know things so you can you can
basically now start perceiving light
and then perceiving shapes Beyond just
these sort of single photoreceptor you
can now have complex eyes or multiple
eyes and then start perceiving motion or
perceiving Direction perceiving shapes
and then you start building
infrastructure on the cognitive
apparatus to start processing this
information and making sense of the
environment building more complex models
of the environment so if you look at
that trajectory of evolution what we're
experiencing now and humans are
basically according to this sort of
information theoretic view of evolution
humans are basically the next natural
step and it's perhaps no surprise that
we became the dominant species of the
planet because yes there's so many
dimensions in which some animals are way
better than we are but at least on the
cognitive Dimension we're just simply
unsurpassed on this planet and and
perhaps the universe but the the concept
that if you now trace this forward
we talked a little bit about
evolvability and how things get better
at evolving one possibility is that the
next layer of evolution builds the next
layer of evolution and what we're
looking at now with humans in AI is that
having mastered this information
capability that humans have
from this quote-unquote old Hardware
this basically you know biological
evolved system that kind of you know
somehow in the environment of Africa and
then in subsequent environments of sort
of dispersing through the globe was
evolutionarily advantageous
that has now created
technology which now has a capability of
solving many of these cognitive tasks it
doesn't have all the baggage of the
previous revolutionary layers but maybe
the next round of evolution on Earth is
self-replicating AI where we're actually
using our current smarts to build better
programming languages and the
programming languages to build you know
chat GPT and that then build the next
layer of software that will then sort of
help AI speed up and it's lovely that
we're coexisting with this AI that sort
of the creators of this next layer of
evolution in this next stage are still
around to help guide it and hopefully
will be for the rest of Eternity as
partners but it's also nice to think
about it as just simply the next stage
of evolution where you've kind of
extracted away the biological needs like
if you look at animals most of them
spend 80 percent of their waking hours
hunting for food or building shelter
humans maybe one percent of that time
and then the rest is left to creative
Endeavors an AI doesn't have to worry
about shelter Etc so basically it's all
living in the cognitive space so in a
way it might just be a very natural sort
of next step to think about Evolution
and that's that's on the on the sort of
purely cognitive side if you now think
about humans themselves
the ability to understand and comprehend
our own genome again the ultimate layer
of introspection
gives us now the ability to even mess
with this Hardware not just augment our
capabilities through interacting and
collaborating with AI but also perhaps
understand the neural Pathways that are
necessary for
you know
empathetic thinking for for justice for
this and this and that and sort of help
augment human capabilities through you
know neuronal interventions through
chemical interventions through
electrical interventions to basically
help steer the human you know bag of
Hardware that we kind of evolved with
into greater capabilities
and then ultimately by understanding not
just the wiring of neurons and the
functioning of neurons but even the
genetic code we could even at one point
in the future start thinking about well
can we get rid of psychiatric disease
can we get rid of neurodegeneration can
we get rid of dementia and start perhaps
even augmenting human capabilities not
just
getting rid of disease
can we Tinker with the genome with the
hardware
or getting closer to the hardware
without having to deeply understand the
baggage
in the way we've disposed of the baggage
in our software systems with AI
to some degree not fully but to some
degree can we do the same with the
genome or is the genome deeply
integrated into this bag I wouldn't want
to get rid of the baggage the baggage
what makes this awesome so the fact that
I'm sometimes angry and sometimes hungry
and sometimes angry
is perhaps contributing to my creativity
I don't want to be dispassionate I don't
want to be another like you know robot I
you know I want to get in trouble and I
want to sort of say the wrong thing and
I want to sort of you know make an
awkward comment and sort of push myself
into
you know reactions and responses and
things that
can get just people thinking differently
and
I I think our society is moving towards
a humorless uh space where everybody's
so afraid to say the wrong thing that
people kind of start quitting on mass
and start like not liking their jobs and
stuff like that maybe we should be uh
kind of embracing that human aspect a
little bit more in all of that baggage
aspect
and uh not necessarily thinking about
replacing it on the contrary like
embracing it in sort of this coexistence
of the cognitive and the emotional hard
words so embracing and celebrating the
diversity
that Springs from the baggage versus
uh kind of uh pushing towards and
empowering this kind of pull towards
Conformity yeah and in fact with the
Advent of AI I would say and these
seemingly extremely intelligent systems
that sort of conform can perform tasks
that we thought of as extremely
intelligent at the blink of an eye
this might democratize
intellectual Pursuits instead of just
simply wanting the same type of brains
that you know carry out
specific ways of thinking we can like
instead of just always only wanting say
the mathematically extraordinary to go
to the same universities what you could
see simply say is like who needs that
anymore you know we now have ai maybe
what we should really be thinking about
is the diversity and the power that
comes with the diversity where AI can do
the math and then we should be getting a
bunch of humans that sort of think
extremely differently from each other
and maybe that's the true cradle of
innovation
but
AI can also these large language models
can also be with just a few prompts
essentially fine-tuned to be diverse
from the center
so the prompts can really take you away
into unique territory you can ask the
model to act
in a certain way and it will start to
act in that way is that possible that uh
the language models could also have some
of the magical diversity that makes us
so damn interesting so I would say
humans are the same way so basically
when you when you sort of prompt humans
to basically you know you know give an
environment to act a particular way
they change their own behaviors and
um you know the old saying is show me
your friends and I'll tell you who you
are
more like show me your friends and I'll
tell you who you'll become so it's not
necessarily that you choose friends that
are like you but I mean that's the first
step but then the second step is that
you know the kind of behaviors that you
find normal in your circles are the
behaviors that you'll start espousing
and that type of meta Evolution where
every action we take not only shapes our
current action and the result of this
action but it also shapes our future
actions by shaping the environment in
which those future actions will be taken
every time you you carry out a
particular Behavior it's not just a
consequence for today but it's also a
consequence for tomorrow because you're
reinforcing that neural pathway so in a
way self-discipline is a self-fulfilling
prophecy
and by
behaving the way that you want to behave
and choosing people that are like you
and sort of exhibiting those behaviors
that are
sort of desirable
you end up creating that that
environment as well so it is the kind of
life itself is a kind of prompting
mechanism super complex the friends you
choose the environments you choose the
way you modify the environment that you
choose yes but that seems like that
process is much less efficient than a
large language model you can literally
get a large language model through a
couple of prompts to be
a mix of Shakespeare and David Bowie
right you can very aggressively change
in a way that's stable and convincing
you really transform
through a couple of prompts the behavior
of the model
into something very different from the
original so well before
Chachi PT yeah I would tell my students
just ask you know what would Manali say
right now and you you guys all have a
pretty good emulator of me right now yes
and uh I don't know if you know the
programming Paradigm of the rubber
duckling where you basically explain to
the rubber duckling that's just sitting
there exactly what you did with your
code and why you have a bug and just by
the act of explaining you'll kind of
figure it out yes I woke up one morning
from a dream where I was giving a
lecture in this Amphitheater and one of
my friends was basically giving me some
deep evolutionary Insight on how cancer
genomes and cancer cells evolve and I
woke up with a very elaborate discussion
that I was giving and a very elaborate
set of insights that he had
that I was projecting onto my friend in
my sleep and obviously this was my dream
so my own neurons were capable of doing
that but they only did that Under The
Prompt of you are now piyush Gupta
you are a professor in cancer genomics
you're an expert in that field what do
you say so I feel that we all have that
inside us that we have that capability
of basically saying I don't know what
the right thing is but let me ask my
virtual legs what would you do and
virtual X would say be kind I'm like oh
yes
or something like that and even though I
myself might not be able to do it
unprompted
and uh the my favorite prompt is think
step by step and I'm like you know this
also works on my 10 year old
when he tries to solve a math equation
all in one step I know exactly what
mistake you'll make but if I prompt it
with oh please think step by step then
you sort of gets in a mindset and I
think it's also part of the way that
Chachi PT was actually trained this
whole sort of human in the loop
reinforcement learning
has probably reinforced these types of
behaviors whereby having this feedback
loop you kind of aligned AI better to
the prompting opportunities by humans
yeah prompting human like reasoning
steps the step-by-step kind of thinking
yeah it does seem to be I suppose it
just puts a mirror to our own
capabilities and so we can be truly
impressed by our own cognitive
capabilities because the variety of what
you can try because we don't usually
have this kind of we can't play with our
own mind
rigorously
through python code right yeah so this
allows us to really play with
um all all of human wisdom and knowledge
or at least knowledge at our fingertips
and then mess with that little mind that
can think and speak in all kinds of ways
what's unique is that as I mentioned
earlier every one of us was trained by
different subset of human culture
and Chachi PT was trained on all of it
yeah and the difference there is that it
probably has the ability to emulate
almost any every one of us yeah the fact
that you can figure out where that is in
cognitive behavioral space just by a few
prompts it's pretty impressive but the
fact that that exists somewhere is you
know absolutely beautiful and
the fact that it's encoded in an
orthogonal way from the knowledge I
think is also beautiful the fact that
somehow through these extreme
overparameterization of AI models it was
able to somehow figure out that context
knowledge and form are separable and
that you can sort of describe scientific
knowledge in a haiku in the form of I
don't know Shakespeare or something that
tells you something about the um the
decoupling and the decouplerability of
these types of aspects of human psyche
and that's part of the science of this
whole thing so these large language
models are you know days old
in terms of this kind of leap that
they've taken and it'll be interesting
to do this kind of analysis on them of
contact of the separation of context
form and knowledge where exactly does
that happen yeah there's already sort of
initial investigations but it's very
hard to figure out where is there a
particular uh parameter set of
parameters that are responsible for a
particular piece of knowledge or a
particular context or a particular style
speaking so with convolutional neural
networks interpretability had many good
advances because we can kind of
understand them there's a structure to
them there's a locality to them and we
can kind of understand the different
layers have different sort of ranges
that they're looking at so we can look
at activation features and basically see
where you know where does that
correspond to
with large language models
it's perhaps a little more complicated
but I think it's still achievable in the
sense that we could kind of ask well
what kind of prompts does this generate
if I sort of drop out this part of the
network then what happens and sort of
start getting at a language to even
describe these types of aspects of human
be behavioral psychology if you wish
from the spoken part in the language
part and the advantage of that is that
it might actually teach us something
about humans as well like you you know
we might not have words to describe
these types of aspects right now but
when somebody speaks in a particular way
it might remind us of a friend that we
know from here or there there and if we
had better language for describing that
these Concepts might become more
apparent in our own human psyche and
then we might be able to encode them
better in machines themselves I mean
both probably you and I
would have certain interests with the
base model would open Echo as the base
model which is before the the alignment
of the
reinforcement learning with human
feedback and and before the
AI safety based kind of censorship of
the model
it would be fascinating to explore to
investigate the ways that the model can
generate hate speech
the kind of hate that humans are capable
of it would be fascinating or the kind
of uh of course like uh sexual language
or the kind of romantic language or the
all kinds of ideologies can I get it to
be a communist can I get it to be a
fascist can I get it to be a capitalist
can I get it to be all these kinds of
things and see which parts get activated
or not because it would be fascinating
to sort of explore at the individual
mind level and at a societal level where
do these ideas
um take hold what is the fundamental
core of those ideas maybe the communism
fascism capitalism democracy are all
actually connected by the fact that the
human heart the human mind is drawn to
ideology
to it's a centralizing idea and maybe we
need a neural network to remind us of
that I like the concept that the human
mind is somehow tied to ideology and I
think that goes back to the the
promptability of jcbt the fact that you
can kind of say well think in this
particular way now and the fact that
humans have infected words for
encapsulating these types of behaviors
and it's hard to know how much of that
is innate and how much of that was like
passed on from language to language
but basically if you look at the
evolution of language you can kind of
see how young are these words in the
history of language Evolution that
describe these types of behaviors like
you know kindness and anger and jealousy
Etc
if these words are very similar from
language to language it might suggest
that they're very ancient if they're
very different it might suggest that
this concept may have emerged
independently in each different language
and so forth so
looking at the phylogeny the history The
evolutionary traces of language at the
same time as people moving around that
we can now Trace thanks to genetics
is a fascinating way of understanding
the human psyche and also understanding
sort of how these types of behaviors
emerge
and to go back to your idea about
sort of exploring the system unfiltered
I mean in a ways the psychiatric
hospitals are filled of those be full of
those people so basically people whose
mind is uncontrollable yes who have kind
of gone adrift in specific locations of
their psyche and I I do find this
fascinating basically
you know watching movies that are trying
to capture the essence of troubled minds
I think is teaching us so much about our
everyday selves because many of us are
able to sort of control our minds and
are able to have somehow somehow hide
these emotions and
but every time I see somebody who's
troubled I I see versions of myself
maybe not as extreme but I can sort of
empathize with these behaviors and
you know I see bipolar I see
schizophrenia I see depression I see
autism I see so many different aspects
that we kind of have names for and
crystallize in specific individuals
and I think all of us have that all of
us have sort of just this
multi-dimensional brain and genetic
variations that push us in these
directions environmental exposures and
traumas that push us in these directions
environmental behaviors that are
reinforced by the kind of friends that
we chose or friends that we were stuck
with because of the environments that we
grew up in so in a way a lot of these
types of
behaviors
are within the Vector span of every
human it's just that the magnitude of
those vectors is generally smaller for
most people
because they haven't inherited that
particular set of genetic variants or
because they haven't been exposed to
those environments basically or
something about the mechanism of
reinforcement learning with human
feedback didn't quite work for them so
it's fascinating to think about that's
what we do we have this capacity to have
all these
psychiatric or behaviors associated with
psychiatric disorders but we through the
alignment process as we go through their
parents we kind of we know to suppress
them yeah we know the kind of control
every human that grows up in this in
this world spends several decades being
shaped into place yeah and without that
you know maybe we would have the
unfiltered lgbt4
every baby is basically a raging
narcissist
not all of them not all of them believe
it or not it's it's remarkable like I I
remember like watching my kids grow up
and again like yes part of their
personality stays the same but also in
different phases to their life they've
gone through these dramatically
different types of behaviors and you
know my daughter basically saying
you know basically one one kid saying oh
I want the bigger piece the other one's
saying oh everything must be exactly
equal and the third one saying I'm okay
yeah you know I might have to have the
smaller part don't worry about me even
in the early days in the early years of
developed yeah it's just extraordinary
to sort of see these dramatically
different like I mean my wife and I uh
you know are are very different from
each other but we also have you know six
million variants six million loci each
if you wish if you just look at common
variants we also have a bunch of rare
variants that are inherited in more
mendelian fashion and now you have you
know an infinite positive number of
possibilities for each of the kids so
basically it's two to the Six Million
Just from the common variance and then
if you like layer in the the rare
variants so let me talk a little bit
about common variance and rare variants
so if you look at this common variance
they're generally weak effect because
selection selects against strong effect
variance so if something like has a big
risk for schizophrenia it won't rise to
high frequency so the ones that are
common are by definition by selection
only the ones that had relatively weak
effect and if all of the variants
associated with personality with
cognition and all aspects of human
behavior where weak effect variants then
kid would basically be just averages of
their parents
if it was like thousands of loci just by
lower of large numbers the average of
two large numbers would be you know very
robustly close to that middle
but what we see is that kids are
dramatically different from each other
so that basically means that in the
context of that common variation you
basically have rare variants that are
inherited in a more mendelian fashion
that basically then sort of govern
likely many different aspects of human
behavior human biology and human
psychology
and that's again like if you look at
sort of a person with schizophrenia
their identical twin
has only 50 chance of actually being
diagnosed with schizophrenia so that
basically means there's probably
developmental uh exposures environmental
exposures trauma all kinds of other
aspects that can shape that and if you
look at siblings for the common variance
it kind of drops off exponentially as
you would expect with you know sharing
50 of your genome 25 of your genome you
know 12.5 of your genome Etc with more
and more distant cousins
but the fact that siblings can differ so
much in their personalities that we
observe every day it can't all be
nurture basically you know we we've like
again as parents we we spend enormous
amount of energy trying to fix quote
unquote the nurture part trying to you
know get them to share get them to be
kind get them to be open get them to
trust each other like you know like
overcome the prisoner's dilemma uh of
you know if everyone fans from
themselves we're all going to live in a
horrible place but if we're a little
more altruistic then we're all going to
be in a better place and I think
it's not like we treat our kids
differently but but they're they're just
born differently so in a way as a
geneticist I have to admit that there's
only so much I can do with nurture that
nature definitely plays a big component
the the selection of variants we have
the common variance and the rare
variants
what uh what can we say about the
landscape a possibility they create
if you can just Linger on that so the
selection of rare variants is divine how
how do we get the ones that we get is it
just
Laden in that giant evolutionary baggage
so I'm gonna talk about regression why
do we call it regression and
the concept of regression to the mean
the fact that when fighter pilots in a
dogfight did amazingly well they would
give them rewards and then the next time
they're in dogfight they would do worse
so then you know the Navy basically
realized that wow this or at least
interpreted that as wow we're ruining
them by praising them and then they're
going to perform Wars the statistical
interpretation of that is regression of
the mean the fact that you're an
extraordinary pilot you've been trained
in an extraordinary fashion
if that pushes your mean
further and further to extraordinary
achievement
and then in some dogfights you'll just
do extraordinarily well
the probability that the next one will
be just as good is almost nil
because this is the peak of your
performance
and just by statistical odds the next
one will be another sample from the same
underlying distribution which is going
to be a little closer to the mean
so regression analysis takes its name
from this type of realization in the
statistical world now if you now take
um humans you basically have
people who have achieved extraordinary
achievements
uh Einstein for example
you know you would call him for example
the epitome of human intellect
does that mean that all of his children
and grandchildren will be extraordinary
geniuses
probably means that they're sampled from
the same underlying distribution
but he was probably a rare combination
of extremes in addition to these common
variants
so you can basically interpret your kids
variation for example as well of course
they're going to be some kind of sample
from the average of the parents with
some kind of deviation according to the
specific combination of rare varians
that they have that they have inherited
so you know given all that the you know
the possibilities are endless as to sort
of where you should be but you should
always interpret that with well it's
probably an alignment of nature
and nurture and the Nature has both a
common variance that are acting kind of
like the law of large numbers and the
rare variants that are acting more in
the mendelian fashion and then you layer
in the nurture which again in everyday
action we make we shape our future
environment
but the genetics we inherit are shaping
the future environment
of not only us but also our children
so there's this weird nature nurture
interplay and self-reinforcement
where you're kind of shaping your own
environment but you're also shaping the
environment of your kids and your kids
are going to be born in the context of
your environment that you've shaped but
also with a bag of genetic variants that
they have inherited
and there's just so much complexity
associated with that when we start
blaming something on nature it might
just be nurture
it might just be that well yes they
inherited the genes from the parents but
they also you know were shaped by the
same environment so it's very very hard
to untangle the two and you should also
always realize that nature can influence
nurture nurture can influence nature or
at least be correlated with and
predictive of and so on so forth so I
love thinking about that distribution
that you mentioned and here's where I
can be my usual ridiculous self
and uh
I sometimes think about that army of
sperm cells
however many hundreds of thousands there
are
and I kind of think of all the
possibilities there
because there's a lot of variation and
one gets to win
is that not a random one it's a totally
ridiculous way to think about no not at
all so I would say evolutionarily we are
a very slow evolving species basically
the generations of humans are a terrible
way to do selection what you need is
processes that allow you to do selection
in a smaller tighter Loop yeah and part
of what
if you look at our immune system for
example
it evolves at a much faster Pace than
humans evolve because there is actually
an evolutionary process that happens
within our immune cells as they're
dividing there's basically vdj
recombination that basically creates
this extraordinary wealth of antibodies
and antigens against the the environment
and basically all these antibodies are
now recognizing of these antigens from
the environment and they
send signals back that cause these cells
that recognize the non-self to multiply
so that basically means that even though
viruses evolve at millions of times
faster than we are
we can still have a component of
ourselves which is environmentally
facing which is sort of evolving at not
the same scale but very rapid pace
sperm expresses perhaps the most
proteins of any cell in the body
and part of the thought is that this
might just be a way to check that the
sperm is intact in other words if you
waited until that human has a liver and
starts eating solid food and you know
sort of filtrates away
you know uh or or kidneys or stomach Etc
basically if you waited until these
mutations you know manifest late late in
life then you would end up not failing
fast and you would end up with a lot of
failed pregnancies and a lot of later
onset you know psychiatric illnesses Etc
If instead you basically Express all of
these genes at the sperm level and if
they misform they basically cause the
sperm to then you have at least
on the male side the ability to exclude
some of those mutations and on the
female side as the egg develops
there's probably a similar uh process
where you could you could sort of weed
out eggs that are just not you know
carrying beneficial mutations or at
least that are carrying highly
detrimentations so you can basically
think of the evolutionary process in a
nested Loop basically where there's an
inner loop where you get many many more
iterations to to run and then there's an
outer loop that moves at a much slower
pace
and going back to uh uh the next step of
evolution of possibly designing systems
that we can use to sort of complement
our own biology or to sort of eradicate
disease and you name it or at least
mitigate some of the I don't know
psychiatric illnesses neurodegenerative
disorders Etc
you can basically and also you know
metabolic immune cancer you name it
simply engineering these mutations from
rational design
might be very inefficient If instead you
have an evolutionary Loop where you're
kind of growing neurons on a dish and
you're exploring evolutionary space and
you're sort of shaping that one protein
to be better adapt that sort of I don't
know recognizing light or permutating
with other neurons Etc you can basically
have a smaller evolutionary Loop that
you can run thousands of times faster
than the speed it would take to evolve
humans for another million years so I
think it's important to think about sort
of this evolvability
as a set of nested structures that allow
you to sort of test many more
combinations but in a more thick setting
yeah that's fascinating the the
mechanism there is uh for sperm to
express proteins to create a testing
ground early on
uh so that the
the failed designs don't make it yeah I
mean in design of Engineering Systems
fail fast is one of the principles you
learn like basically you assert
something why do you assert that because
if that something ain't right you better
crash now then sort of let it cross at
an unexpected time
and in a way you can think of it as like
20 000 assert functions assert protein
can fold assert protein can fold and if
any of them fail that's perm is gone
well I just like the fact that I'm the
winning sperm and the results of the
winner winning hashtag winning my wife
always plays me this French song that
actually sings about that it's like you
know remember in life we were all the
first one time
so these once at least one time you were
the first I should mention it's just a
brief tangent back to the place where we
came from which is the base model that I
mentioned for openai which is before the
reinforcement learning with human
feedback
and you kind of give this metaphor of it
being kind of like a psychiatric
hospital I like that because it's
basically all of these different angles
at once like you basically have the more
extreme versions of human psyche so the
interesting thing is
well I've talked with folks in open AI
quite a lot and they say it's extremely
difficult to work with that model yeah
kind of like it's extremely difficult to
work with some humans the parallels
there are very interesting because once
you run the alignment process it's much
easier to interact with it but it makes
you wonder what the capacity with the
underlying capability of the human
psychias as in the same way that what is
the underlying capability of a large
language model and remember earlier when
I was basically saying that
um part of the reason why it's so prompt
malleable is because of that alignment
problem that alignment work it's kind of
nice that the engineers at open AI have
the same interpretation that you know in
fact it is that and
um these whole concept of easier to work
with
um
I wish that we could work with more
diverse humans
in a way
and and sort of that's one of the
possibilities that I see with the Advent
of these large language models the fact
that
it gives us the chance to both dial down
friends of ours that we can't interpret
or that are just too edgy to sort of
really truly interact with where you
could have a real-time translator
just the same way that you can translate
English to Japanese or Chinese or Korean
by like real-time adaptation you could
basically suddenly have a conversation
with your favorite extremist on either
side of the spectrum and just dial them
down a little bit
of course not you and I but uh you could
have friends that are who's a complete
uh but it's a different base
level so you can actually tune it down
to like okay they're not actually being
an there this is uh they're
actually expressing love right now it's
just that this is a they have their way
of of doing that and they probably live
in New York uh if we're just to pick a
random location so so yeah so you can
basically layer out contexts you can
basically say oh let me change New York
to Texas and let me change you know uh
extreme left extreme right or somewhere
in the middle or something and
um I also like the concept of being able
to
um
listen to the information without being
dissuaded by the emotions in other words
everything humans say has an intonation
has some kind of background that they're
coming from it reflects the way that
they're thinking of you reflects the
impression that they have of you and all
of these things are intertwined
but being able to disconnect them being
able to sort of
I mean self-improvement is one of the
things that I'm constantly working on
and being able to receive criticism
from people who really hate you is
difficult because it's layered in with
that hatred but deep down there's
something that they say that actually
makes sense or people who love you might
layer it in a way that doesn't come
through but if you're able to sort of
Disconnect that emotional component from
the sort of self-improvement
and basically when somebody says whoa
that was a bunch of did you
ever do the control this and this and
that you could just say oh thanks for
the very interesting presentation uh you
know I'm wondering what about that
control then suddenly you're like oh
yeah of course I'm gonna rather control
that's a great idea yeah instead of that
was a bunch of BS you're like ah you're
sort of hitting on the brakes and you're
trying to push back against of that so
any kind of criticism that comes after
that is very difficult to interpret in a
positive way because it helps reinforce
the negative assessment of your work
when in fact if we disconnected the
technical component from the negative
assessment then
you're embracing the negative then
you're embracing the technical component
you're going to fix it whereas if it's
coupled with and if that thing is real
and I'm right about your mistake then
it's a it's a bunch of BS then suddenly
you're like you're gonna try to prove
that that mistake does not exist
yeah it's fascinating to like carry the
information this is what you're
essentially able to do here is you carry
the information in the rich complexity
that information contains so it's not
actually dumbing it down in some way
exactly still expressing it but taking
off but you can die the the the the
emotional emotional side yeah which is
probably so powerful for the internet or
for social networks again when it comes
to understanding each other one like for
example I don't know what it's like to
go through life with a different skin
color
I don't know how people will perceive me
I don't know how people will respond to
me
we don't often have that experience
but in a virtual reality environment or
in a sort of AI interactive system you
could basically say okay now make me
Chinese or make me South African or make
me you know uh Nigerian
you can change the accent you can change
layers of
that contextual information and then see
how the information is interpreted and
you can re-hear yourself through a
different angle you can hear others you
can have others react to you from a
different package
and then hopefully we can sort of build
empathy by learning to disconnect all of
these social cues that we get from like
how a person is dressed you know if
they're wearing a hoodie or if they're
wearing a shirt or if they're wearing a
you know jacket you get very different
emotional responses that you know I wish
we could overcome as humans and perhaps
large language models and augmented
reality and deep fakes can kind of help
us overcome all that in what way do you
think
these large language models and the
thing they give birth to in the AI space
will change this Human Experience The
Human Condition
the things we've talked across many
podcasts about that makes life so damn
interesting and Rich
love fear fear of death all of it uh if
we could just begin kind of thinking
about how does it change
for the good and the bad The Human
Condition
Human Society is extremely complicated
we have come from
a hunter-gatherer Society to an
agricultural and farming Society
where the goal of most professions was
to eat and to survive
and with the Advent of Agriculture the
ability to live together in societies
humans could suddenly be
valued for different skills
if you don't know how to hunt
but you're an amazing potterer then you
fit in society very well because you can
sort of make your pottery and you can
barter it for rabbits that somebody else
caught and the person who hunts the
rabbits
doesn't need to make Bots because you're
making all the parts and that
specialization of humans is what shaped
modern society
and with the Advent of currencies and
governments and you know credit cards
and Bitcoin you basically now have the
ability to exchange value for the kind
of productivity that you have so
basically I make things that are
desirable to others I can sell them and
buy back food shelter Etc
with AI
the concept of I am my profession
might need to be revised
because I defined my profession in the
first place I something that Humanity
needed that I was uniquely capable of
delivering but the moment we have ai
systems able to deliver
these goods for example writing a piece
of software or making a self-driving car
or interpreting the human genome
then that frees up more of
human time for other Pursuits
this could be Pursuits that are still
valuable to society I could basically be
10 times more productive at interpreting
genomes and do a lot more
or I could basically say oh great the
interpreting genomes part of my job now
only takes me five percent of the time
instead of 60 of the time
so now I can do more creative things I
can explore not new career options but
maybe new directions from my research
lab I can sort of be more productive
contribute more to society
and if you look at this giant
pyramid that we have built on top of the
subsistence economy
what fraction of U.S jobs are going to
feeding all of the US less than two
percent
basically the the gain in productivity
is such that 98 of the economy is beyond
just feeding ourselves and that
basically means that
we kind of have built these system of
interdependencies of needed or useful or
valued Goods that sort of make the
economy run that the vast majority of
wealth goes to other
what we now call needs but used to be
wants so basically I want to fly a drone
I want to buy a bicycle I want to buy a
nice car I want to have a nice home I
want to Etc so
and and then sort of what is my direct
contribution to my eating I mean I'm I'm
doing research on the human genome I
mean this will help humans it will help
all Humanity but how is that helping the
person who's giving me poultry or
vegetables so in a way I see AI as
perhaps leading to a dramatic rethinking
of human society
if you think about sort of the economy
being based on intellectual Goods that
I'm producing
what if AI can produce a