Mustafa Suleyman

It's really going to change the way that we use computers forever.

Thanks, Corey.

Thanks, Grant.

Great to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I mean, maybe sort of let's start by talking about what these language models are doing, because I think it's important for everybody to try to grasp a pretty simple intuition, which is that

The models are generating text by predicting the likelihood of the next word given the previous words in a sentence, the previous words in a prompt, and the previous words that were learned from the statistical structure of the training data that it was trained on.

And it is using that very simple likelihood of next word prediction function to simulate what it's like to have great conversation or to answer complex questions.

And it is just an insanely difficult to grasp intuition.

that that simple function could produce complexity and expertise and emotional support and all of the other skills and attributes that you see in these chatbots today.

So it's first worth just taking a moment to ground on how wild that is.

it really is it is crazy I mean sometimes I have to I say it to remind myself as much as anybody else but then the second thing which is even more crazy is that there is nothing inside it is hollow

Um, there is no pain network.

There is no emotional system.

There is no fight or flight reaction system.

There is no inner will or drive or desire.

Um, and it's difficult for us to grasp that because the only conscious beings that we understand are motivated by a pain network, uh, animals and, you know, other kinds of things included.

And so naturally, we would expect that something that has the hallmarks of intelligence also has the underlying, you know, sort of synthetic physiology that we do.

But it doesn't.

So it's an illusion.