Evidence receipt / uncertainty
Published · transcript-backedDwarkesh Patel: uncertainty
22 May 2025 Dwarkesh Podcast Is RL + LLMs enough for AGI? — Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken
“Sometimes it goes off the rails, obviously, but I don't know… You could make a theoretical argument that you teach a kid to make a lot of money when he grows up and a lot of smart people are imbued with those values and just rarely become psychopaths or something.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Dwarkesh Patel
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- uncertainty
- Recorded
- 22 May 2025
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…Totally. I feel like we optimize humans for specific objectives all the time. Sometimes it goes off the rails, obviously, but I don't know… You could make a theoretical argument that you teach a kid to make a lot of money when he grows up and a lot of smart people are imbued with those values and just rarely become psychopaths or something. But we have so many innate biases to follow social norms. I mean Joe Heinrich's The Secret of our Success is all about this. Even if kids aren't in the conventional school system, I think it's sometimes noticeable that they aren't following social norms in the same ways. The LLM definitely isn't doing that. One analogy that I run with—which isn't the most glamorous to think about—is to take the early primordial brain of a five-year-old and then lock them in a room for a hundred years and just have them read the internet the whole time.…
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