Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…So, I want to ask the flyball question that I heard before, of: why should ordinary people care about this book? Like, why should my mom buy and read the book? Yeah. First, let me tell you about the book, what it is. So, you know, these last few years, I've been interviewing AI lab CEOs, researchers, people like you guys, but also scholars from all kinds of different fields, economists, philosophers. And they've been addressing, I think, what are basically the gnarliest, most interesting, most important questions we've ever had to ask ourselves. Like, what is the fundamental nature of intelligence? What will happen when we have billions of extra workers? How do we model out the economics of that? How do we think about an intelligence that is greater than the rest of humanity combined? Is it even a coherent concept? And so, what I'm super delighted with is that with Stripe Press, we made this book where we compiled and curated the best, most insightful snippets across all these interviews. And you can read Dario addressing, why does scaling work? And then on the next page is Demis explaining DeepMind's plans for whether they're gonna go with the RL route and how much of the AlphaZero stuff will play into the next generation of LLMs. And on the next page is, of course, you guys going through the technical details of how these models work. And then there's so many different fields that are implicated. I mean, I feel like AI is one of the most multi-disciplinary fields that one can imagine, because there's no field, no domain of human knowledge that is not relevant to understanding what a future society of different kinds of beings will look like. You're gonna have Carl Shulman talk about how the scaling hypothesis shows up in primate brain scaling from chimpanzees to humans. On the next page might be an economist trying to argue, like Tyler Cowen, explaining why he doesn't expect explosive economic growth, and why the bottlenecks will eat all that up. Um, anyways, so that's why your mom should buy this book. It’s the distillation of all these different fields of human knowledge applied to the most important questions that humanity is facing right now. I do like how the book is sliced up by different topics and across interviews. So it does seem like a nice way to listen to all of the interviews in one digestible way.…

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