Demis Hassabis: belief

Transcript context

…I want to ask about memory. You had this fascinating paper in 2007 where you talked about the links between memory and imagination and how they, in some sense, are very similar. People often claim that these models are just memorizing. How do you think about that claim? Is memorization all you need because in some deep sense, that’s compression? What’s your intuition here? At the limit, one maybe could try and memorize everything but it wouldn’t generalize out of your distribution. The early criticisms of these early systems were that they were just regurgitating and memorizing. I think clearly in the Gemini, GPT-4 type era, they are definitely generalizing to new constructs. Actually my thesis, and that paper particularly that started that area of imagination in neuroscience, was showing that first of all memory, at least human memory, is a reconstructive process. It’s not a videotape. We sort of put it together back from components that seem familiar to us, the ensemble. That’s what made me think that imagination might be the same thing. Except in this case you’re using the same semantic components, but now you’re putting it together in a way that your brain thinks is novel, for a particular purpose like planning. I do think that that kind of idea is still probably missing from our current systems, pulling together different parts of your world model to simulate something new that then helps with your planning, which is what I would call imagination. For sure. Now you guys have the best models in the world with the Gemini models. Do you plan on putting out some sort of framework like the other two major AI labs have? Something like “once we see these specific capabilities, unless we have these specific safeguards, we’re not going to continue development or we’re not going to ship the product out.”…

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