Will Douglas Heaven

And he's sort of been on a media tour for the last two or three years telling people how...

We might all die from these technologies.

That's a big tangent.

But if you speak to him, he will say it's as if aliens had been dropped into our midst.

These things are really, really smart in a way.

But they're not like us and we don't really know how they work.

So that's, I think, where the alien idea comes from.

We're trying to sort of study these things from the outside in as if they were sort of natural phenomena that just dropped from the sky.

And, you know, now we're trying to figure it all out.

Yeah.

And this is where we bring it all back to, it is just math, right?

We're not sort of really sort of pulling out entrails and, you know, putting in probes into orifices and things.

God, I've taken that metaphor a little too far, maybe, but...

But the biology analogy I think is apt, and many of the researchers themselves actually use this idea.

One of the main companies in this space, Anthropic, they're sort of a rival to OpenAI.

They put out a big piece of research a year or so ago, and they called it On the Biology of Large Language Models.

And the reason why I think they talk in terms of biology is to get across the sense that sort of what we've been talking about.

You know, like...

The scientists studying the anatomy of human bodies 100 plus years ago, they were really trying to follow the processes of where blood flowed in the body, what happened when you pressed this nerve.

It's that kind of research they're doing.