Demis Hassabis: belief

Transcript context

…Final question. You’ve been thinking in terms of the end goal of AGI at a time when other people thought it was ridiculous in 2010. Now that we’re seeing this slow takeoff where we’re actually seeing generalization and intelligence, what is like psychologically seeing this? What has that been like? Has it just been sort of priced into your world model so it’s not new news for you? Or actually just seeing it live, are you like “wow, something’s really changed”? What does it feel like? For me, yes, it’s already priced into my world model of how things were going to go, at least from the technology side. But obviously, we didn’t necessarily anticipate that the general public would be so interested this early in the sequence. If ChatGPT and chatbots hadn’t gotten the interest they ended up getting—which I think was quite surprising to everyone that people were ready to use these things even though they were lacking in certain directions, impressive though they are—then we would have produced more specialized systems built off of the main track, like AlphaFold and AlphaGo, our scientific work. I think then the general public maybe would have only paid attention later down the road when in a few years’ time, we have more generally useful assistant-type systems. So that’s been interesting. That’s created a different type of environment that we’re now all operating in as a field. It’s a little bit more chaotic because there’s so many more things going on, and there’s so much VC money going into it, and everyone’s sort of almost losing their minds over it. The only thing I worry about is that I want to make sure that, as a field, we act responsibly and thoughtfully and scientifically about this and use the scientific method to approach this in an optimistic but careful way. I think I’ve always believed that that’s the right approach for something like AI, and I just hope that doesn’t get lost in this huge rush. Well, I think that’s a great place to close. Demis, thank you so much for your time and for coming on the podcast.…

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