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Carl Shulman

Published podcast speaker

Claims
45
Episodes
2
Shows
1
Named items
0

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What Carl said.

12 transcript-backed records

01 / evaluation

This whole procedure of humans providing compute and supervising the thing and then building new technologies, building robots, constructing things with the AI's assistance, that can all proceed and appear like it's going well, appear like alignment has been nicely solved, appear like all the things are functioning well. And there's some reason to do that because there's only so many giant server farms.

“This whole procedure of humans providing compute and supervising the thing and then building new technologies, building robots, constructing things with the AI's assistance, that can all proceed and appear like it's going well, appear like alignment has been nicely solved, appear like all the things are functioning well. And there's some reason to do that because there's only so many giant server farms.”
Speaker
Carl Shulman
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

02 / evaluation

If we can probe the thoughts and motivations of an AI and discover wow, actually GPT-6 is planning to takeover the world if it ever gets the chance. That would be an incredibly valuable thing for governments to coordinate around because it would remove a lot of the uncertainty, it would be easier to agree that this was important, to have more give on other dimensions and to have mutual trust that the other side actually also cares about this because you can't always know what another person or another government is thinking but you can see the objective situation in which they're deciding.

“If we can probe the thoughts and motivations of an AI and discover wow, actually GPT-6 is planning to takeover the world if it ever gets the chance. That would be an incredibly valuable thing for governments to coordinate around because it would remove a lot of the uncertainty, it would be easier to agree that this was important, to have more give on other dimensions and to have mutual trust that the other side actually also cares about this because you can't always know what another person or another government is thinking but you can see the objective situation in which they're deciding.”
Speaker
Carl Shulman
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

03 / evaluation

Given that this all happens almost immediately people who might otherwise have enjoyed the basic income may object and say no, no, this is no good and they might respond by saying, well something like the subdivision before maybe there's a restriction, there's a distribution of wealth and then when one has a child there's a requirement that one gives them a certain minimum a quantity of resources and one doesn't have the resources to give them that minimum standard of living or standard of wealth yeah one can't do that because of child slash AI welfare laws.

“Given that this all happens almost immediately people who might otherwise have enjoyed the basic income may object and say no, no, this is no good and they might respond by saying, well something like the subdivision before maybe there's a restriction, there's a distribution of wealth and then when one has a child there's a requirement that one gives them a certain minimum a quantity of resources and one doesn't have the resources to give them that minimum standard of living or standard of wealth yeah one can't do that because of child slash AI welfare laws.”
Speaker
Carl Shulman
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

04 / evaluation

A quite early example of this is Collin Burn’s work, doing unsupervised identification of some aspects of a neural network that are correlated with things being true or false. I think that is important work.

“A quite early example of this is Collin Burn’s work, doing unsupervised identification of some aspects of a neural network that are correlated with things being true or false. I think that is important work.”
Speaker
Carl Shulman
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

05 / evaluation

There's a Potemkin village in front of us. But now we think we're successfully aligning our AI, we think we're expanding its capabilities to do things like end disease, for countries concerned about the geopolitical military advantages they're expanding the AI capabilities so they are not left behind and threatened by others developing AI and robotic enhanced militaries without them.

“There's a Potemkin village in front of us. But now we think we're successfully aligning our AI, we think we're expanding its capabilities to do things like end disease, for countries concerned about the geopolitical military advantages they're expanding the AI capabilities so they are not left behind and threatened by others developing AI and robotic enhanced militaries without them.”
Speaker
Carl Shulman
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

06 / evaluation

Imagine there's some software program being proposed for use in government and humans cannot follow the details of all the code but they can be told properties like, this involves a trade-off of increased financial or energetic costs in exchange for reducing the likelihood of certain kinds of accidental data loss or corruption. So any property that we can understand like that which includes almost all of what we care about, if we have delegates and assistants who are genuinely trying to help us with those we can ensure we like the future with respect to those.

“Imagine there's some software program being proposed for use in government and humans cannot follow the details of all the code but they can be told properties like, this involves a trade-off of increased financial or energetic costs in exchange for reducing the likelihood of certain kinds of accidental data loss or corruption. So any property that we can understand like that which includes almost all of what we care about, if we have delegates and assistants who are genuinely trying to help us with those we can ensure we like the future with respect to those.”
Speaker
Carl Shulman
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

07 / evaluation

Because things like designing the custom curriculum maybe some humans put some work into that but you're not going to employ billions of humans to produce it at scale and so it winds up being a larger share of the progress than it was before.

“Because things like designing the custom curriculum maybe some humans put some work into that but you're not going to employ billions of humans to produce it at scale and so it winds up being a larger share of the progress than it was before.”
Speaker
Carl Shulman
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

09 / evaluation

There were Winograd schemas, catastrophic forgetting, quite a number and they have repeatedly gone away through scaling. So there's a picture that we're seeing supported from biology and from our experience with AI where you can explain — Yeah, in general, there are trade-offs where the extra fitness you get from a brain is not worth it and so creatures wind up mostly with small brains because they can save that biological energy and that time to reproduce, for digestion and so on.

“There were Winograd schemas, catastrophic forgetting, quite a number and they have repeatedly gone away through scaling. So there's a picture that we're seeing supported from biology and from our experience with AI where you can explain — Yeah, in general, there are trade-offs where the extra fitness you get from a brain is not worth it and so creatures wind up mostly with small brains because they can save that biological energy and that time to reproduce, for digestion and so on.”
Speaker
Carl Shulman
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

10 / evaluation

You see bits of tool use in some other primates who have an advantage compared to say whales who have quite large brains partly because they are so large themselves and they have some other things, but they don't have hands which means that reduces a bunch of ways in which brains can pay off and investments in the functioning of that brain.

“You see bits of tool use in some other primates who have an advantage compared to say whales who have quite large brains partly because they are so large themselves and they have some other things, but they don't have hands which means that reduces a bunch of ways in which brains can pay off and investments in the functioning of that brain.”
Speaker
Carl Shulman
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

11 / evaluation

I think that's a bit lower now as we get towards the end of Moore's law although interestingly not as much lower as you might think because the growth of inputs has also slowed recently.

“I think that's a bit lower now as we get towards the end of Moore's law although interestingly not as much lower as you might think because the growth of inputs has also slowed recently.”
Speaker
Carl Shulman
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

12 / evaluation

The way to think about it is — we have a process now where humans are developing new computer chips, new software, running larger training runs, and it takes a lot of work to keep Moore's law chugging (while it was, it's slowing down now).

“The way to think about it is — we have a process now where humans are developing new computer chips, new software, running larger training runs, and it takes a lot of work to keep Moore's law chugging (while it was, it's slowing down now).”
Speaker
Carl Shulman
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast
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