Lex Fridman: preference

Transcript context

…I think to the extent that it can predict the next frames in a coherent way, that is a form of understanding, not in the anthropomorphic version of, it’s not some kind of deep philosophical understanding of what’s going on, I don’t think these systems have that, but they certainly have modeled enough of the dynamics, put it that way, that they can pretty accurately generate whatever it is, eight seconds of consistent video that by eye, at least at a glance, is quite hard to distinguish what the issues are. And imagine that in two or three more years’ time, that’s the thing I’m thinking about and how incredible that will look given where we’ve come from the early versions of that one or two years ago. And so the rate of progress is incredible. And I think I’m like you is like a lot of people love all of the stand-up comedians and that actually captures a lot of human dynamics very well and body language, but actually the thing I’m most impressed with and fascinated by is the physics behavior, the lighting and materials and liquids. And it’s pretty amazing that it can do that. And I think that shows that it has some notion of at least intuitive physics, how things are supposed to work intuitively, maybe the way that a human child would understand physics, right, as opposed to a PhD student really being able to unpack all the equations. It’s more of an intuitive physics understanding. Well, that intuitive physics understanding, that’s the base layer, that’s the thing people sometimes call a common-sense. It really understands something. I think that really surprised a lot of people. It blows my mind that I just didn’t think it would be possible to generate that level of realism without understanding. There’s this notion that you can only understand the physical world by having an embodied AI system, a robot that interacts with that world. That’s the only way to construct an understanding of that world. But Veo 3 is directly challenging that it feels like. Yes, and it’s very interesting, even if you were to ask me five, 10 years ago, I would’ve said, even though I was immersed in all of this, I would’ve said, “Well, yeah, you probably need to understand intuitive physics. If I push this off the table, this glass, it will maybe shatter and the liquid will spill out. So we know all of these things.” But I thought that, and there’s a lot of theories in neuroscience, it’s called action in perception where you need to act in the world to really, truly perceive it in a deep way. And there was a lot of theories about you’d need embodied intelligence or robotics or something, or maybe at least simulated action so that you would understand things like intuitive physics. But it seems like you can understand it through passive observation, which is pretty surprising to me. And again, I think hints at something underlying about the nature of reality in my opinion, beyond just the cool videos that it generates. And of course there’s next stages is maybe even making those videos interactive so one can actually step into them and move around them, which would be really mind-blowing, especially given my games background. So you can imagine. And then I think we’re starting to get towards what I would call a world model, a model of how the world works, the mechanics of the world, the physics of the world, and the things in that world. And of course that’s what you would need for a true AGI system.…

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