Cameron Berg: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, go for it. Cool. yeah so we talk about it more in the film but but i was at open a eyes dev day in twenty twenty four and i i had an opportunity at the after party to to chat with sam. I I sort of went directly up to him and I, I wanted to know sort of what he thought about about AI consciousness and about these questions and how plausible he found them. I won't spoil everything we talked about in the in the doc, but it was a pretty wild conversation. Sam, Sam, I said, hey, like, you know, great job today. I would love to talk to you consciousness. And he looks me in the eye and he goes come with me. He was with a couple people and he was come with me and I was like, OK, Sam Altman And we walked into a into another room. It was like a bar with a restaurant and the restaurant was closed. So we went down and sat at one of the tables and we just sat there for probably between 5:00 and 10:00 minutes. And we just spoke about these issues. He was not, you know, it was not the vibe of Cameron. You're a crazy person. What kind of questions are you asking? It was he has thought about it. This is this is clearly a live issue. We talked about differences. We don't even say this in the doc, but the more technical audience, we talked about differences between like plausibility of consciousness in training versus deployment. He like basically agreed with, I don't put words in his mouth or get sued, but he basically agreed with the training process being a more plausible target of a more plausible place where consciousness might be going on. Then then even in deployment, he seemed maybe like somewhat impressed that like I was drawing that distinction. And yes, fundamentally he started explaining why he's like not deeply concerned about all of this on some like pretty, let's just say interesting and in my view, somewhat shaky philosophical grounds. And I'll leave that for the doc because it's a pretty wild, pretty wild thing for the CEO of the most powerful tech company in the world by many measures to to say he thinks is true about reality. But yeah, it was a pretty, it was a pretty remarkable interaction. I took a selfie with him and I walked away. And that was that. And I was sort of like, holy crap. And and we, you know, we emailed back and forth in the intervening time. And like many things at these major companies, he said he was interested in talking more. He was interested in in engaging on this further. He clearly thought it was a real issue, but you know, falls off the priorities list. And that was the end of our of our interaction. And so that's, that's what happened with Sam and that and a bunch of other really cool stuff is, is featured in the doc. the whole point of doing this is at least this was milo 's milo 's creative child. And I didn't have much of A say any in him making it either way. I had to say in how I was represented and that's about it. ole point of doing this is at least this was milo 's milo 's creative child. And I didn't have much of A say any in him making it either way. I had to say in how I was represented and that's about it. But the reason I I gladly and enthusiastically participated in it is because I do think these are really important questions, like pretty fundamental essential civilization level questions. and i don't think the only people who should be talking about it are a thousand dudes in san francisco or even the people who are you know AI insiders and who if like if you understood eighty to ninety percent of this podcast this film i think you will like it and enjoy it. But it's not for that kind of person. It's for people who are interested in the stuff. They know AI is sort of crazy. They don't really know what's going on. we do a little bit of the alignment one oh one sort of stuff but mostly it's centered on this consciousness question. And it's for people who are smart. But it is it is meant to engage a much larger audience to understand the core questions that are being asked right now. And I think that's an important thing to do because this is a civilization level problem. And I think all of our civilizations should be participating and trying to find the solution. I don't as much as I I do deeply respect than people I've named in this podcast, Jack Lindsay and Kyle Fish and Rob Long at Ilios and you know, people doing this good work. i don't think this should be a decision that four people or a dozen people or even a hundred people make. This needs to be a conversation that we have collectively as a species, and I'm all for attempts to open up this conversation to a wider audience and get people involved in realizing the actual stakes of what's going on right now.…

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