Arvind Narayanan
speaker
255 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard 25 Jan
Arvind Narayanan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Making models bigger and bigger doesn't seem to be working anymore. I think new developments have to come from different scientific ideas. Maybe it's agents, maybe it's something else.
I think our intuitions are too powerfully shaped by sci-fi portrayals of AI. And I think that's really a big problem. This idea that AI can become self-aware. When we look at the way that AI is architected today, that kind of fear has no basis in reality. Maybe one day in the future, people are going to build AI systems where that becomes at least somewhat possible. And we should have...
visibility, transparency, monitoring regulation around these systems to make sure that developers don't. But that would be a choice. That's a choice that society can make, that governments and companies can make. It's not that despite our best efforts, AI is going to become conscious and have agency and do things that are harmful to humanity.
That whole line of fear, I think, is completely unfounded.
Because the gap between benchmarks and the real world is big and it's only growing bigger. As AI becomes more useful, it's harder to figure out how useful it is based on these artificial environments.
I would resign. I don't think I would be a good CEO. But if there were one thing I could change about OpenAI, I think the need for the public to know what is going on with AI development overrides the commercial interests of any company. So I think there needs to be a lot more transparency.
So my hope is that the kind of thing we saw in the movie Her, not the sci-fi aspects of it, but the more kind of mundane aspects of it where you give your device a command and it interprets it in a pretty nuanced way and does what you want it to do, right? Book flight tickets, for instance, or really build an app based on what you want it to look like.
So these are things that are potentially automatable, don't have like massively dubious societal consequences. Those are the things that I hope can happen.
I do find it interesting that NVIDIA itself has been trying to migrate really, really hard out of hardware into becoming a services company.
A lot of technologists kind of have a disdain for policy. They see policymakers as, well, morons, to put it bluntly. But I don't think that's the case. I think there are a lot of legitimate reasons why policy is very slow and doesn't often go in the way that a tech expert might want it to. And that's the 90% frustration. And the reason I say it's only 90% is that the other 10% is really worth it.
We really need policy. And despite how frustrating it is, we need a lot of tech experts in policy.
I have to say, I really like Jan LeCun's perspectives on various things, including his view that LLMs are, quote unquote, off-ramp to superintelligence that, you know, in other words, we need a lot more scientific breakthroughs, as well as tamping down the fears of super advanced AI.
It's weird for me to be saying this, but I have to say, think of the children. I'm never asked this because, and what I mean by that is that AI, the role of AI in kids' lives, kids who are born today, for instance, is going to be so profound. And it's something that technologists should be thinking about. Every parent should be thinking about.
Policymakers should be thinking about because it can be profoundly good or profoundly bad or anything in between. And both as a technologist and as a parent, I think about that a lot.
This has been really, really fun. I apologize for rambling occasionally, but I hope that it's, yeah, I'm really looking forward to hearing it when it's out there.
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