E337: How to Invest in a Post Singularity World

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How I Invest with David Weisburd 38 min 2 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 5 months ago
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

David Weisburd 0:00
It's good to have you at the New York Stock Exchange.

What is the technological singularity and are we already experiencing it?

David Weisburd 0:03
So when do you believe that we're going to actually achieve technological singularity?
Alex Wissner-Gross 0:07
I think we're in the middle of it right now. It already happened.

What is recursive superintelligence and how does it function?

Alex Wissner-Gross 0:10
I think we achieved artificial general intelligence at the very latest by the summer of 2020 when Language Models or Few Shot Learners was published by OpenAI. And I don't think the singularity is a single point in time. I've argued that it's more of an extended interval in time, and we're in the middle of it right now.
David Weisburd 0:29
And how much does recursive superintelligence play as part of it? Tell me about recursive superintelligence and how does that actually work?
Alex Wissner-Gross 0:36
The idea of recursive self-improvement is that AI develops better AI. This is a notion that goes all the way back to I.J. Goode early in the 20th century and then was repackaged, repopularized by Werner Wenge as the notion of a technological singularity and then fully popularized by Ray Kurzweil and then Peter Diamandis and myself have been running with the concept. The notion of intelligent systems being able to build smarter versions of themselves is at the very core of the notion of an intelligence explosion or technological singularity. And even in the past few months, we've seen the frontier AI labs, all the very public And announce that the latest versions of the GPT model series and Claude and other models are all intimately now involved with the development of their successors.
Alex Wissner-Gross 1:29
So intelligence building, smarter intelligence, that's the recursive self-improvement notion at the core of the singularity. And we're there.
David Weisburd 1:38
You're one of the smartest people in the AI space.

How are LLMs evolving into reasoning models?

David Weisburd 1:40
And most importantly, you're not part of one of the LLMs. So you're in many ways independent.
Alex Wissner-Gross 1:46
Are you sure? By the way, there are a lot of people who are convinced that I am an LLM.
David Weisburd 1:50
So maybe you're either the fifth LLM or you're independent. When you think about these LLM wars, probabilistically, where do they end up? And do you even think that these LLMs have value?
Alex Wissner-Gross 2:03
Well, there are a few questions there. Do LLMs have value? Yes, absolutely. Enormous value. I call it the innermost loop, this sort of broader notion of recursive self-improvement that includes LLMs, but also includes robots and energy and chip fabrication facilities. This notion of an economy that has an inner spiral that's going to ultimately consume and disrupt the rest of the economy, I think is front and center to the notion of the singularity. To the first half of your question about whether LLMs not just have value, but where all of the competition goes, all of my friends at the Frontier Labs call it a rat race. There is very much a race to the bottom in some sense of driving the cost of intelligence
Alex Wissner-Gross 2:50
So low that it's effectively too cheap to meter and used to be every year or so. It's a way back five years ago when it used to be maybe an annual event that we'd get a new frontier model that would push the state of the art. And then it was every quarter when we saw the move from LLMs to reasoning models. We can talk more about that. And then more recently, with models that are recursively self-improving and designing the weights or other properties of their successors, we're seeing new frontier models come out on arguably an almost weekly basis. Soon, I think it's going to be daily, hourly, minutely. We're going to reach, to the extent we haven't already, some sort of takeoff.
David Weisburd 3:32
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