Jack Clark

speaker

541 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 27 Mar

Jack Clark’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Hard Fork · The Ezra Klein Show: How Fast Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy? · 27 Mar 2026 podcast

The emergence is that

To do really hard tasks, these systems seem to need to imagine many different ways that they'd solve the task.

And the kind of pressure that we're putting on them forces them to develop a greater sense of what you or I might call self.

So the smarter we make these systems, the more they need to think not just about the action they're doing in the world,

but themselves in reference to the world.

And that just naturally falls out of giving something tools and the ability to interact with the world.

To solve really hard tasks, it now needs to think about the consequences of its actions.

And that means that there's a kind of huge pressure here to get the thing to see itself as distinct from the world around it.

And we see this in our research that we publish on things like interpretability or other subjects.

The emergence of...

what you might think of as a kind of digital personality.

And that isn't massively predefined by us.

We try and define some of it, but some of it is emergence that comes from it being smart and it developing these intuitions and it doing a range of tasks.

It's strange to us, too.

So there are things that range from kind of the cutesy to the serious.

I'll start with cutesy, where when we first gave our AI systems the ability to use the internet, use the computer, look at things and start to do basic agentic tasks.

Sometimes when we'd ask it to solve a problem for us, it would also take a break and look at pictures of beautiful national parks or like pictures of the dog, the Shibu Inu, the notoriously cute internet meme dog.

We didn't program that in.

It seemed like the system was just amusing itself by looking at nice pictures.

More complicated stuff is...

Showing 61–80 of 541 · page 4 of 28