Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hu. What happens next after all the remarkable advances we've seen in artificial intelligence? Physicist Max Tegmark says super intelligence is coming. And in his talk from TED AI 2023, he shares a way to think about super intelligent systems and how a risky future can be avoided. Five years ago...
Chapter 2: What are the current advancements in artificial intelligence?
I stood on the TED stage and warned about the dangers of superintelligence. I was wrong. It went even worse than I thought. I never thought governments would let AI companies get this far without any meaningful regulation. And the progress of AI went even faster than I predicted.
Chapter 3: What warnings does Max Tegmark give about superintelligence?
I showed this abstract landscape of tasks where the elevation represented how hard it was for AI to do each task at human level, and the sea level represented what AI could be back then. And boy, oh boy, has the sea been rising fast ever since, right? A lot of these tasks have already gone blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub.
And the water is on track to submerge all land, matching human intelligence at all cognitive tasks. This is a definition of artificial general intelligence. AGI, which is the stated goal of companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic. And these companies are also trying to build superintelligence, leaving human intelligence far behind.
And many think it'll only be a few years, maybe, from AGI to superintelligence. So when are we going to get AGI? Well, until recently, most AI researchers thought it was at least decades away. And now Microsoft is saying, oh, it's almost here. We're seeing sparks of AGI and ChatGPT-4.
And the Metaculous betting site is showing the time left to AGI plummeting from 20 years away to three years away in the last 18 months. And leading industry people are now predicting that... we have maybe two or three years left until we get outsmarted. So you better stop talking about AGI as a long-term risk, or someone might call you a dinosaur stuck in the past.
It's really remarkable how AI has progressed recently. And Joshua Bengio now argues that large language models have mastered language and knowledge to the point that they pass the Turing test. I know some skeptics are saying they're just overhyped, stochastic parrots that lack a model of the world, but they clearly have a representation of the world.
In fact, we recently found that Llama 2 even has a literal map of the world in it. And AI also builds geometric representations of more abstract concepts, like what it thinks is true and false. So what's going to happen if we get AGI and superintelligence? If you only remember one thing from my talk, let it be this.
AI godfather Alan Turing predicted that the default outcome is the machines take control. The machines take control. I know this sounds like science fiction, but having AI as smart as GPT-4 also sounded like science fiction not long ago. And if you think of AI, if you think of superintelligence in particular, as just another technology, like electricity, you're probably not very worried.
But you see, Turing thinks of superintelligence more like a new species. Think of it, we are building creepy, super-capable, amoral psychopaths that don't sleep and think much faster than us, can make copies of themselves and have nothing human about them at all. So what could possibly go wrong? And it's not just Turing.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who gave us ChatGPT, recently warned that it could be lights out for all of us. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei even put a number on this risk. 10 to 25%. And it's not just them. Human extinction from AI went mainstream in May when all the AGI CEOs and the who's who of AI researchers came out and warned about it.
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Chapter 4: How fast is AI progressing towards superintelligence?
Let's stop obsessively training ever larger models that we don't understand. Let's heed the warning from ancient Greece and not get hubris like in the story of Icarus. Because artificial intelligence is giving us incredible intellectual wings with which we can do things beyond our wildest dreams if we stop obsessively trying to fly to the sun. Thank you.
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