Paul Bloom: belief

Transcript context

…Now, the day we’re taping this, coincidentally, is the same day that GPT-4o came out, which probably you haven’t played around with yet. It’s only been out for about an hour. I was with it before taping. It seems to me amazing, but how good are LLMs as therapists? There’ve been experiments which have pitted them against people in short-term interactions. You talk about your troubles, and then you get a person like me to give a response. Then you get GPT-4o to respond. Over and over and over again, people rate the AI responses more empathic, more understanding. Now, I think that this is impressive. I think what we have yet to see is whether they could have a long, sustained conversation, holding in memory over multiple sessions. Part of me being a good therapist, and actually just being a good friend, is I remember what you’re worried about. I could go back to it. I could talk about it and so on. I don’t think they’re at that stage yet. I don’t see any reason why they can’t get there. There’s a version of GPT-4 which does have memory. It’s only been, I think, for about a week, and I haven’t tested it yet. I don’t know how good the memory is. Some people prefer to turn the memory off, actually, [laughs] but it’s very much on the verge of being here. Say, two, three years from now, what percentage of therapy done do you think will be done with humans rather than LLMs? Because the LLM is free, and you can stay at home. You can with the therapist with Zoom, but the LLM is super easy.…

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