Karen Hao

And a huge part of the views of the different people in the quotes that you're reading derives from a specific belief that they each have in this question of what is intelligence, what constitutes intelligence.

For Ilya, he has throughout his research career felt that ultimately our brains are giant statistical models.

This is not something that, you know, we actually know, but this is his own hypothesis.

Also the hypothesis of his mentor, Jeffrey Hinton, who also was on this podcast.

This is why they have such a strong conviction in the idea of building AI systems that are statistical models and that this particular approach is going to lead to intelligent systems as we are intelligent.

It's a hypothesis that they have.

It's not one that has been proven by science.

And some people vehemently disagree with them on this particular thing.

But if you step into their shoes and take on that hypothesis...

and assume that it's true, that our brains are in fact statistical engines, and that these systems that they're building are also statistical engines that they're making bigger and bigger and bigger until they become the size of the human brain.

That's why they say...

That making this comparison where the system will become equal to human intelligence and then maybe exceed human intelligence is relevant in their framework.

And Ilya gave a talk at one point at this really prominent AI research conference that happens every year called Neural Information Processing Systems.

It's a mouthful.

But he gave this keynote where he shows this chart of the size of brains and the intelligence of a species.

And it's roughly linear.

The bigger the size of the brain, the more intelligent the species.

And so for him, he thinks he's intelligent.

Building a digital brain because he he thinks brains are just statistical engines.

So from that logic, it's like, OK, if we then build a bigger statistical engine than the human brain, then based on this chart, it will be more intelligent and then we will be subjected to the same treatment that we've subjected humans.