Max Tegmark

Yeah, it flies around the audience.

But it took 100 years longer to figure out how to do that than for the Wright brothers to build the first airplane because it turned out there was a much easier way to fly.

And evolution picked the more complicated one because it had its hands tied.

It could only build a machine that could assemble itself.

which the Wright brothers didn't care about.

They can only build a machine that use only the most common atoms in the periodic table.

Wright brothers didn't care about that.

They could use steel, iron atoms, and it had to be able to repair itself.

And it also had to be incredibly fuel efficient.

A lot of birds use less than half the fuel of a remote control plane flying the same distance.

For humans, throw a little more, put a little more fuel in a roof, there you go, 100 years earlier.

That's exactly what's happening now with these large language models.

The brain is incredibly complicated.

Many people made the mistake of thinking we have to figure out how the brain does human-level AI first before we could build in a machine.

That was completely wrong.

You can take an incredibly simple computational system called a transformer network and just train it to do something incredibly dumb.

Just read a gigantic amount of text and try to predict the next word.

And it turns out, if you just throw a ton of compute at that and a ton of data, it gets to be frighteningly good, like GPT-4, which I've been playing with so much since it came out, right?

And...

There's still some debate about whether that can get you all the way to full human level or not.