Michael I. Jordan: belief

Transcript context

…Rich Sutton is quoted quite a lot in respect of design versus evolve. And I watched a wonderful talk by David Deutsch the other day, he was kind of talking about explanations. And he said that, you know, physicists obviously go for these principled low level explanations. But sometimes you get these high level course screenings that are just really good, and maybe economics is 1 of those. But what do you say to folks from Silicon Valley like Ilya Sutzkevar, and they're they're just talking about human value functions and and they're saying, okay, you've these LLMs and we just turn them into multi agent systems and we get all of the economic stuff that you're talking about for free. What would you say to those people? I mean, just not a good way to think about engineering. I mean, if you were a chemical engineer back in the forties and fifties, saying we're just gonna throw a lot of stuff together and make it work. Well, you could do it, but you'd get a lot of explosions and a lot of economically nonviable things, you'd hurt a lot of people. And I think a lot of these people are not thinking about all the people that are being hurt already of Facebook and so on. It's damaged a lot of young people. A lot of teenagers are having mental health problems. And this is just not something that isn't talked about by computer scientists at all. And now we're talking about yet another level of displacement of jobs may go away, but that's tough. It'll create new ones, of course, like always. You know, I just don't like to talk that way. And, you know, so you gotta say, well, step back a moment. What is your point? Are you trying to create a new kind of market where people could come in and have their talents valued and appreciated and or bids could be put out for things that people might need, and collaborations could emerge, and there could be producer consumer relationships being explored and understood and developed, and this could all be a mix of computation and humans. I think eventually we'll all kind of merge, but along the way, just doing something so disruptive with all of these metaphors that's not good social science or not good mathematics, It's just metaphors. And yes, you can build it because the previous generation of people created these amazing things that collect data. And we can do gradient descent on it and ad hoc architectures. And yes, that works. It's amazing. But let's not give so much credit to the people that did that. It's the people 20, 30 years ago who did that. So the current generation is just way too know, there's not much thought going on, not much intellectual stuff. It's just yeah. It's possible to build it. It's possible to steal the data from wherever you want to because that's what the Internet allowed to happen and not return any value to the person who originated the data. It's possible to run greedy descent on that but you need huge amounts of money but it's now possible to get it from people who aren't thinking very deeply. And so maybe seeming more dark than I want to. I mean, there's a lot of good builders. But we also, every previous era of engineering development, electrical engineering, chemical, mechanical and all, had some builders, but they had a lot of concepts and they had a lot of thinkers. In fact, all of those engineering disciplines had something like Maxwell's equations or Newton's equations to help them kinda here, no. It's just people that are very smart and who can code, and then have lots of intuitions, and and it seems to and I don't ever see anything that feels deeply intellectual to me. It feels like science fiction. Well, suppose another thing that doesn't help is that these these systems are like soup, and there's even a field called mechanistic interpretability that tries to kind of dig into the soup and and it's almost like they're they're searching for UFOs. They're trying to find these principled circuits that do reasoning or or do whatever the thing is. And I guess you could say cynically that it's not like when engineers build a bridge.…

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