Zico Colter
speaker
161 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Zico Colter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We do not understand how these things work internally, the possible correlated failures, the possible attack factors, all these sorts of things. We don't understand it.
And because of this, we need to think very carefully about how we deploy these systems, how we do consider safety concerns, especially when it comes to things like critical infrastructure that I think are extremely pressing concerns. And yes, things like bio-risk, again, these I work much less on, but pressing concerns. And you don't have to believe in super intelligent systems.
evil robots, in order to have these as pressing concerns, AI safety is a concern right now. And we all need to come to grips with the fact that it's a concern right now and start solving the problems right now.
Yeah, it's really wild. The current things that we have already upend a massive amount of sort of the systems we've built in place, and they will continue to be upended more and more from evolving AI technology. And these are real concerns that we have to come to terms with.
I would classify myself as an optimist when it comes to AI. I already enjoy these tools. I'm excited about the potential things we can do with these tools. Yes, even up to AGI. And I use the word tool here, not pejoratively. Hopefully, AGI is a tool, right? Hopefully, AGI is a system that we still deploy to our ends to achieve our ends. I can't help but be excited about these things.
This is the culmination of a lot of the work that we in the field have been doing. It's kind of coming to fruition in a lot of ways in a way that is directly sort of beneficial for a lot of the things that I do. So I want to have these tools and maybe this gets to the clear point here. I want to develop and improve safety of these tools and because I want to use them.
It's not that we have some moral imperative that we have to develop these tools. I mean, maybe there are, or we have to develop AI and AGI. Maybe that's true, but that's not what motivates me to develop them, right? I want to develop them because I want to use them and I want to be able to have them to reach that point. They have to be safe, right? It's a condition, it's a necessary condition.
And that's why I work on building and improving the safety of AI systems.
I, for a lot of my career, was thinking that model architectures really mattered. And by having clever, complex architectures and sub-modules inside architectures, that was the route to better AI systems. For the most part, I don't believe this as much anymore. I think basically models don't matter. Architectures don't matter. And that applies to transformers too.
I think, you know, anything could kind of work in their stead if we just spend enough time on it. And so I think that to a large extent, we're kind of post architecture in a lot of our AI work.
Kind of on the contrary, I thought that data was sort of, you know, data had to be highly curated to be valuable. And the value in data came essentially from very manual labeling of this data and human intensive curation.
The big, amazing insight of current AI is that we can, to a large extent, just suck up data that exists out there on the internet, train models based upon that, and get amazing things to come out of it. Not to say there's no value in curation. Of course, there's elements of this, but to a very large extent, this is kind of on the old paradigm of unsupervised learning. That's absolutely incredible.
Um, I got actually the, the, the, the day before I started as department head, I got an email from, from, from Brett, the chair of the board, just saying, Hey, do you want to talk about maybe joining the open AI board? Uh, so I figured, you know, I was already embarking on one massive career change. So why not, why not double down and just do, you know, do two at the same time.
But basically I, I, I started having some conversations with him and the rest of the board. I got very excited about the potential sort of provide my perspectives on AI and AI safety to the board and things went from there.
There are four board meetings a year, yes. But I think I'm being brought on the board as an expert in AI and AI safety. I am excited to provide my perspective and expertise specifically on AI to the rest of the board.
There is absolutely some element here of kind of a race between different countries for AI dominance. I actually will take a different stance on this and say that I think there are certain things like, for example, AI safety, where we very much need to work as a world to help set standards and help better the future of everyone here.
Because yes, certain things can be done by countries, capabilities can maybe advance more by countries. Safety is something that's inherently global. systems.
The most common one has to do, I would say, with questions that put an overemphasis on the architectures involved in AI systems. So, you know, this notion that somehow the transformer was the thing that made all AI possible. I'm often asked questions like, you know, what comes after the transformer and things like that.
And the reality is, as I said before, and which probably I know makes for a good soundbite architect, we are arguably in a post architecture phase, they don't they don't really matter, we could do what we're currently doing with a whole lot of architectures right now.
And I hope that I can steer the conversation to more of one where we consider these models not in terms of their particular structure, because it's somewhat irrelevant when it comes to capabilities. And we think about these models more in terms of the data that goes into them, and the capabilities they produce downstream.
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