Rory Stewart

Hi, Rory here.

This week, The Rest Is AI is returning with another extraordinary episode.

It's very exciting.

Matt Clifford and I are sitting down with Yoshua Bengio, who is one of the most famous figures in the whole of AI, extraordinary computer scientist, Turing medalist.

And one of the people who, having designed and built these models, is most worried about them and is now going around the world sounding the alarm bells about their power, about their deceptiveness, about the way that he thinks that they could pose literally an existential threat to humanity unless they're regulated.

He's not all doom gloom.

He remains optimistic about how much benefit AI could provide if properly controlled.

He's volunteering to build a new, safer AI model and locate it, if necessary, in Europe.

But my goodness, it's an important lesson if you're interested in public policy and the power of these models.

Here's a taste of the episode.

Please do sign up at therestispolitics.com to hear the full episode.

It's just been given a much more general prompt.

Tell us a little bit about what may or may not be going on there, how we understand what might be happening there.

One ways in which these things might be deceptive in a straightforward way is that the large language model, the chat GBT five or whatever is trained.

And one of the things that's trained on is to be polite and cheerful with humans so that we use it.

You know, we, we don't want the, when I say, you know,

tell me about Professor Bengio's research record for it to say, well, I don't really know, but roughly speaking on the basis of my training, I would estimate when the 98% probability he's published this, it says, thank you very much.

What an excellent question.

You're a genius.

And here's everything that you need to know about him, right?