Lex Fridman Podcast #371 - #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. The following is a conversation with Max Tagmark, his third time in the podcast. In fact, his first appearance was episode number one of this very podcast. He is a physicist and artificial intelligence researcher at MIT, co-founder of Future Life Institute, and author of Life Three Point Oh, being human in the age of artificial intelligence. Most recently, he is a key figure in spearheading the open letter calling for a six month pause on giant AI experiments like training GPT Four. The letter reads: "We're calling for a pause on training of models larger than GPT Four for six months. This does not imply a pause or ban on all AI research and development or the use of systems that have already been placed on the market. Our call is specific and addresses a very small pool of actors who possess this capability. " The letter has been signed by over fifty thousand individuals, including eighteen hundred CEOs and over fifteen hundred professors. Signatories include Joshua Benio, Stew Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuliano Harari, Andrew Yang, and many others. This is a defining moment in the history of human civilization, where the balance of power between human and AI begins to shift. And Max's mind and his voice is one of the most valuable and powerful in a time like this. His support, his wisdom, his friendship has been a gift I am forever deeply grateful for. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Notion for project and team collaboration, Inside Tracker for biological data, and Indeed for hiring. Choose Wozniak, my friends. Also speaking of hiring, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring whether it's through Indeed or otherwise. Could Alexfreedom dot com slash hiring. And now on to the full ladders. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Notion. I spoke endlessly about how amazing Notion is, how everybody all the cool kids are recommending it for just basic note taking, but there is so so much more. It's the collaborative aspect of it, the project management aspect of it, the wikis, the document sharing, all of that, all in a simple, powerful, beautifully designed solution. What can I say? On top of this, there is the Notion AI tool. This is the best integration of large language models into a productivity note taking tool. There are so many amazing features. I mean, it is just endless. Go to the website. You can generate entire presentations and reports based on a to do list. You can summarize stuff, you can shorten stuff, you can generate tables based on the description. You can write a summary, you can expand the text, you can change the style of the text, you can fix spelling and grammar, you can translate, you can. Use simpler language, more complicated language, change the tone of the voice, make it shorter longer. Like I said, everything is just so easy to play around with, and all of it. No matter what you are doing, will challenge you to think. How you write it will challenge you to expand the style of your writing. It will save you a lot of time, of course, but I just think it makes you a better thinker and. Productive being in this world, and I think that's such a great integration of AI into the the productivity workflow. To me, it's not enough for a large language model to be effective. At answering questions and having good dialogue, you have to really integrate it into the workflow. And Notion, better than anybody else I've seen, has done that. So if that's interesting to you, Notion AI helps you work faster, write better, and think bigger doing tasks that normally take you hours in just minutes. Try Notion AI for free when you go to Notion dot com slash Lex. That's all lowercase Notion dot com slash Lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This show is also brought to you by Inside Tracker, a service I use to track biological data. It's really good to do that kind of thing regularly to look at all the different markers in your body to understand what could be made better through lifestyle through diet changes. It's kind of obvious that decisions about your life should be made based on the data that comes from your own body, not some kind of population study. Although those are good, not some spiritual guru. Although those are good, not some novel whether it's Harry Potter or Dusty Yevsky. Although those are sometimes good, not your relative who says I heard a guy say that a guy does this thing that is very bro sounds he's sounding. Although sometimes it turns out to be pretty effective. Overall, the best decisions about your life should be based on the things that come from your own body. Inside Tracker uses algorithms to analyze your blood data, DNA data, fitness track data, all that kind of stuff to give you recommendations. You should be doing it. You should be doing it regularly. So it's not just a one time thing, but regularly over time. You see what changes led to improvements in the various markers that come from your body. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker dot com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. I think the most important thing in life, not to quote Conan the Barbarian because that would be very inappropriate to quote at this moment. And it's not actually accurate at all. As a reflection of what's important in life, it's only has comedic value. What I really want to say about what's important in life is the people you surround yourself with, and we spend so much of our time in the workplace seeking solutions to very difficult problems together passionately pursuing ambitious goals, sometimes impossible goals that. Is the source of meaning a sort of happiness for people? And I think part of that happiness comes from the collaboration with other human beings, the sort of professional depth of connection that you have with other human beings of being together through the grind and surviving and accomplishing the goal or failing in a big epic way. Knowing that you have tried together, and so doing that with the right team, I think is one of the most important things in life. So you should surround yourself with the right team. If you are looking to join a team, you should be very selective about that. Or if you look into hiring a team, you should be very selective about that and use the best tools of the job. I've used Indeed many many times throughout my life for the teams I've led. Don't overspend on hiring. Visit Indeed dot com slash Lex to start hiring now. That's Indeed dot com slash Lex. Terms and conditions apply. This is the Lex Freedom podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here is Max Tagmark. You were the first ever guest on this podcast episode number one. So first of all, Max, I just have to say thank you for giving me a chance. Thank you for starting this journey. It's been an incredible journey. Just thank you for sitting down with me and just acting like I am somebody who matters that I am somebody who's interesting to talk to. And thank you for doing it. I meant a lot. Thanks to you for putting your heart and soul into this. I know when you delve into controversial topics, it's inevitable to get hit by what what. Let talks about the slings and arrows and stuff, and I really admire this. It's in an era you know where YouTube videos are too long and now it has to be like a twenty minute TikTok twenty second TikTok clip. It's just so refreshing to see you going exactly against all of the advice and doing these these really long form things and that people appreciate it. You know reality is nuanced and thanks for. Sharing it that way, so let me ask you again the first question I've ever asked on this podcast episode number one: talking to you, do you think there is intelligent life out there in the universe? Let's revisit that question. Do you have any updates? What's your view when you look out to the stars? So when we look out to the stars, if you define our universe the way most astrophysists do not as all of space but the spherical region of space that we can see with our telescopes from which light has a time to reach us since our big bang. I am in the minority. I estimate that we are the only life in this spherical volume that has invented internet radios gotten our level of tech and. If that's true, then it puts a lot of responsibility on us to not mess this one up because if it's true, it means that life is is quite rare and we are stewards of this one. Spark of advanced consciousness, which if we nurture it and help it grow, it eventually life can spread from here out into much of our universe and we can have this just amazing future. Whereas if we instead are reckless with the technology we build and just snuff it out due to stupidity. Or infighting, then maybe the rest of cosmic history in our universe is just going to be a playground of benches. But I do think that we are actually very likely to get visited by aliens. Alien intelligence quite soon, but I think we are going to be building that alien intelligence. So we're going to give birth to an intelligent alien civilization. Unlike anything that human, the evolution here on Earth was able to create in terms of the path, the biological path it took. Yeah, and it's going to be much more alien than a cat or even the most exotic animal on the planet right now. Because it will not have been created through the usual Darwinian competition where it necessarily cares about self preservation, afraid of death. Any of those things, the space of alien minds that you can build is just so much faster than what evolution will give you. And with that also comes a great responsibility that for us to make sure that the kind of minds we create are this kind of minds that. It's good to create minds that will share our values and and be good for humanity and life and also mind create minds that don't suffer. Do you try to visualize the full space of alien minds that AI could be? Do you try to consider all the different kinds of intelligences? So generalizing what humans are able to do to the full spectrum of what intelligent creatures entities could do. I try, but I would say I fail. I mean, it's very difficult for human mind to really grapple with something so completely alien. I mean, even for us, right? If we just try to imagine, how would it feel if we were completely indifferent towards death. Or individuality, if we even if you just imagine that for for example. You could just copy my knowledge of how to speak Swedish. Boom! Now you can speak Swedish, and you could copy any of my cool experiences and then you could delete the ones you didn't like in your own life just like that. It would already change quite a lot about how you feel as a human being, right? You probably spend less effort studying things if you just copy them and you might be less afraid of death because if the plane you on starts to crash, you just be like, oh shucks, I am going to I haven't backed my brain up for four hours. So I am going to lose this all these wonderful experiences of this flight. We might also start feeling more like compassionate maybe with other people if we can so readily share each other's experiences and our knowledge and feel more like a hive mind. It's it's very hard though I I really. Feel very humble about this to to grapple with it, how it might actually feel. The the one thing which is so obvious though, which I think is just really worth reflecting on is because the mind space of possible intelligence is so different from ours. It's very dangerous if we assume they're going to be like us or anything like us. Well, there is the entirety of human written history has been through poetry, through novels, been trying to describe through philosophy. Trying to describe the human condition and what's entailed in it, like just like you said, fear of death and all those kinds of things. What is love and all of that changes. Yeah, if you have a different kind of intelligence, yeah, all of it, the entirety, all those poems. They're trying to sneak up to what the hell it means to be human. All of that changes how AI concerns and existential crises that AI experiences how that clashes with the human existential crisis the human condition. Yeah, it's hard to hard to fathom hard to predict. It's hard, but it's fascinating to think about. Also, even in the best case scenario where we don't lose control of over the ever more powerful AI that we're building to. Other humans whose goals we think are horrible, and where we don't lose control to the machines, and AI provides the things we want. Even then, you get into questions. Do you touched here? You know, maybe the struggle that it's actually hard to do things is part of the things that gives us meaning as well, right? So. For example, I found it so shocking that this new Microsoft GPT Four commercial that they put together has this woman talking about. Showing this demo how she's going to give a graduation speech to her beloved daughter, and she asks GPT Four to write it. It was freaking two hundred words or so. If I realized that my parents couldn't be bothered struggling a little bit to write. Two hundred words and outsource that to their computer, I would feel really offended actually. And so I wonder if eliminating too much of the struggle from our existence. Do you think that would also take away a little bit of? What means to be human? Yeah, we can't even predict. I had somebody mentioned to me that they use they started using. Chat GPT with a three point five and not four point oh to write what they really feel to a person. And they have a temper issue, and they're basically trying to get Chat GPT to rewrite it in a nicer way to get the point across, but rewrite in a nicer way. So we're even removing the inner asshole from our communication. So I don't you know there is some positive. Aspects of that, but mostly it's just the transformation of how humans communicate, and it's scary because so much of our society is based on this glue of communication. And if that we're now using AI as the medium of communication that that does the language for us. So much of the emotion that's laden in human communication, so much of the intent. That's going to be handled by outsource AI. How does that change everything? How does that change the internal state of how we feel about other human beings? What makes us lonely? What makes us excited? Yeah, what makes us afraid? How we fall in love? All that kind of stuff. Yeah, for me personally, I have to confess the challenge is one of the things that really makes my life feel meaningful. You know, if I go hiking mountain with my wife Maya, I don't want to just press a button and be at the top. I want the struggle and come up there sweaty and feel wow we did this in the same way. I want to constantly work on myself to become a better person. If I say something in anger that I regret, I want to go back and and really work on myself rather than just tell an AI to from now on always filter what I write so I don't have to work on myself. Because then I am not growing. Yeah, but then again, it could be like with chess. An AI once significantly obviously supersedes the performance of humans. It will live in its own world and provide maybe a flourishing civilizations for humans, but we humans will continue hiking mountains and playing our games even though AI is so much smarter, so much stronger, so much superior in every single way, just like with chess. Yeah, that that I mean that's one possible hopeful trajectory here is that humans will continue to human. And AI will just be a kind of a medium that enables the human experience to flourish. Yeah, I would phrase that as rebranding ourselves from Homo Sapiens to Homo Sentience. You know, right now, Sapiens the ability to be intelligent. We even put it in our species name. We're branding ourselves as the smartest. Yeah, information processing entity on the planet that's clearly going to change if AI continues ahead. So maybe we should focus on the experience instead, the subjective experience that we have. Homo Sentience and and say that's what's really valuable—the love, the connection, the other things. Get off our high horses and get rid of this hubris that only we can do. We do integrals. So consciousness, the subjective experience is a fundamental value to what it means to be human. Make that make that the priority. That feels like a hopeful direction to me, but that also requires more compassion not just towards other humans because they happen to be the smartest on the planet, but also towards all our other fellow creatures on this planet. And I personally feel right now we're. Treating a lot of farm animals horribly, for example, and the excuse we're using is oh they're not as smart as us, but if we admit that we're not that smart in the grand scheme of things either in the post AI epoch, you know. Then surely we should value the subjective experience of a cow also. Well. Allow me to briefly look at the book, which at this point is becoming more and more visionary that you've written, I guess over five years ago Life Three Point Oh. So, first of all, Three Point Oh, what's One Point Oh, what's Two Point Oh, what's Three Point Oh, and how has that vision sort of evolved? The vision in the book evolved to today. Life One Point Oh is really dumb, like bacteria, and that it can't actually learn anything at all during the lifetime. The learning just comes from this genetic process from one generation to the next. Life Two Point Oh is us and other animals which have a brains which can learn during their lifetime a great deal. And so. And you know you were born without being able to speak English, and at some point you decided hey I want to upgrade my software, let's install an English speaking module. So you did, and Life Three Point Oh which does not exist yet can can replace not only its software the way we can but also its hardware. And that's where we're heading towards at high speed. We're already maybe Two Point One because we can you know put in an artificial knee, pacemaker, etc etc and if Neuralink and other companies succeed, we'll be Life Two Point Two etc. But the what the companies trying to build AGI are trying to make is of course full Three Point Oh and you can put that intelligence in something that also has no. Biological basis whatsoever. So less constraints and more capabilities, just like the leap from One Point Oh to Two Point Oh. There is nevertheless you speaking so harshly about bacteria so disrespectfully about bacteria. There is still the same kind of magic there. That permeates Life Two Point Oh and and Three Point Oh. It seems like maybe the thing that's truly powerful about life, intelligence and consciousness. Was already there in One Point Oh. Is it possible? I think we should be humble and not be so quick to make everything binary and say either it's there or it's not. Clearly, there's a there's a great spectrum and there is even controversy by whether some unicellular organisms like amoebas can maybe learn a little bit. You know after all so apologies if I offended any bacteria here it wasn't my intent it was more that I wanted to talk up how cool it is to actually have a brain. Yeah, where you can learn dramatically within your lifetime. Typical human and and the higher up you get from One Point Oh to Two Point Oh to Three Point Oh the more you become the captain of your own destiny, the master of your own destiny and the less you become a slave to whatever evolution gave you right. By upgrading your software, we can be so different from previous generations and even from our parents, much more so than even a bacterium. You know no offense to them. And if you can also swap out your hardware, take any physical form you want. Of course, really the sky is the limit. Yeah, so the it accelerates the rate at which you can perform the computation that computation that determines your destiny. Yeah and I think it it's worth commenting a bit about you means in this context also if you swap things out a lot right. This is controversial, but my current understanding is that that you know. Life is best thought of not as a bag of meat or even a bag of elementary particles, but rather as in as. A system which can process information and retain its own complexity, even though nature is always trying to mess it up. So it's all about information processing and. That makes it a lot like something like a wave in the ocean, which is not its its water molecules right. The water molecules bob up and down, but the wave moves forward. It's an information pattern in the same way you lex. You are not the same atoms as during the first time you talked. Yeah, did with me you swapped out most of them, but still you. And the the information pattern is still there, and if you if you could swap out your arms and like whatever. You can still have this kind of continuity. It becomes much more sophisticated sort of wave forward in time where the information lives on. I lost both my parents since since our last podcast and and it actually gives me a lot of solace that. This way of thinking about them, they haven't entirely died because a lot of mommy and daddy's. Sorry, I'm getting emotional here, but a lot of their values and ideas and even jokes and so on, they haven't gone away. Right, some of them live on. I can carry on some of them and they also live on a lot of other and a lot of other people. So in this sense, even with Life Two Point Oh, we can to some extent. Already transcend our physical bodies and our death, and particularly if you can share your own information your own ideas with many others like you do in your podcast. Then you know that's the closest immortality we can get with our bio bodies. You carry a little bit of them in you in some sense. Yeah. Do you miss them? You miss your mom and dad. Of course, of course. What did you learn about life from them? If you can take a bit of a tangent. So many things. For starters, my my fascination for math and the physical mysteries of our universe. I got a lot of that from my dad, but I think my my obsession for really big questions and consciousness and so on that actually came mostly from my mom. And what I got from both of them, which is very core part of really who I am, I think is is this. Feeling comfortable with not buying into what everybody else is saying. Doing what I think is right. They both very much just you know did their own thing and sometimes they got flack for it and they did it anyway. That's why you've always been an inspiration to me that you're at the top of your field and you still you're still willing to to tackle the big questions in your own way. You're one of one of the people that represents. MIT best to me you've always been an inspiration that so it's good to hear that you got that from your mom dad. Yeah you're too kind but but yeah I mean. The real the good reason to do science is because you're really curious you want to figure out the truth. If you think this is how it is and everyone else says no no that's bullshit and it's that way you know you. You stick with what you think is true and and even if everybody else keeps thinking it's bullshit there's a certain. I always root for the underdog when I watch movies and my my dad once I one time for example when I wrote one of my craziest papers ever our math talking about our universe ultimately being mathematical which we're not going to get into today I got this email from a quite famous professor saying this is not only bullshit but it's going to ruin your career you should stop doing this kind of stuff. I sent it to my dad. Do you know what he said? He replied with a quote from Dante. Segui tu corso e la sedir lagente, follow your own path, let the people talk. Go dad. Yeah, this is the kind of thing. Yeah, he's dead, but that that attitude is not. How did losing them as a man as a human being change you? How did expand your thinking about the world? How did expand your thinking about you know this thing we're talking about which is humans creating another living. Sentient perhaps being. I think it mainly did two things. One of them just going through all their stuff after they had passed away and so on, just drove home to me how important it is to ask ourselves. Why are we doing these things we do because it's inevitable that you look at some things they spent an enormous time on and you ask in hindsight would they really have spent so much time on this or would they have done something that was more meaningful. Um, so I've been looking more in my life now and asking you know why am I doing what I'm doing and I I feel. It should either be something I really enjoy doing or it should be something that I find really really meaningful because it helps. Humanity and if it's in none of those two categories maybe I should spend less time on it you know. The other thing is dealing with death up in personal like this it actually made me less afraid. Of of even less afraid of other people telling me that I'm an idiot you know which happens regularly and just. Live my life, do my thing you know. Um and it made it a little bit easier for me to focus on what I what I feel is really important. What about fear of your own death? Has it made it more real that this is that this is something that happens? Yeah, it's made it extremely real and you know I'm next next in line in our family now right me and my brother younger brother but. They both handled it with such dignity. That was a true inspiration. Also, they never complained about things and you know when you're old and your body starts falling apart, it's more and more to complain about. They looked at what could they still do that was meaningful. And they focused on that rather than wasting time. Talking about or even thinking much about things they were disappointed in. I think anyone can make themselves depressed if they start their morning by making a list of grievances. Whereas if you start your day with a little meditation on just the things you're grateful for, you you basically choose to be a happy person. Because you only have a finite number of days. Should spend them make it count. Being grateful. Yeah. Well, you do happen to be working on a thing which seems to have potentially some of the greatest impact on human civilization of anything humans have ever created, which is artificial intelligence. This is on the both. Detailed technical level and in a high philosophical level you work on. So. You've mentioned to me that there's an open letter that you're working on. It's actually going live in a few hours. So I've been having late nights and early mornings. It's been very exciting actually. In short, I have you seen Don't Look Up. The film. Yes, yes. I don't want to be the movie spoiler for anyone watching this who hasn't seen it, but if you're watching this you haven't seen it, watch it. Because we are actually acting out it's it's life imitating art. Humanity is doing exactly that right now except. It's an asteroid that we are building ourselves. Almost nobody is talking about it. People are squabbling across the planet about all sorts of things which seem very minor compared to the asteroid that's about to hit us right. Most politicians don't even have their radars this on the radar they think maybe in 100 years or whatever. Right now we're at a fork in the road. This is the most important fork humanity has reached in its over 100 thousand years on this planet. We're building. Effectively a new species that's smarter than us. It doesn't look so much like a species yet because it's mostly not embodied in robots but. That's the technicality which will soon be changed and and this arrival of of. Artificial general intelligence that can do all our jobs as well as us and. Probably shortly thereafter, super intelligence which greatly exceeds our cognitive abilities. It's going to either be the the best thing ever to happen to humanity or the worst. I'm really quite confident that there is. Not that much middle ground there, but it would be fundamentally transformative. To human civilization, of course, utterly and totally you know. Again we we branded ourselves as Homo sapiens because it seemed like the basic thing where the king of the castle on this planet were the smart ones we can control everything else. This can very easily change. We're we're certainly not going to be the smartest. On the planet for very long if AI unless AI progress just halts and we can talk more about why I I think that's true because it's it's controversial. And and then we can also talk about reasons you might think it's going to be the best thing ever and the reason you think it's going to be the end of humanity. Which is of course super controversial, but what I think we can anyone who's working on advanced AI. Can agree on is it's it's much like the film Don't Look Up and that it's just really comical how little serious public debate there is about it. Given how huge it is. So what we're talking about is a development of currently things like GPT four. And the signs it's showing of rapid improvement that may in the near term lead to development of super intelligent AGI AI general AI systems and what kind of impact that has on society. Exactly when that thing is achieves general human level intelligence and then beyond that. General superhuman level intelligence. There's a lot of questions to explore here. So one you mentioned halt. Is that the content of the letter is to suggest that maybe we should pause the development of these systems. Exactly so this is very controversial. From when when we talked the first time we talked about how I was involved in starting the future life institute and we worked very hard on 2014 2015 was the mainstream AI safety. The idea that there even could be risks and that you could do things about them. Before then, a lot of people thought it was just really kooky to even talk about it and a lot of AI researchers felt. Worried that this was too flaky and could be bad for funding and that the people who talked about it were just not didn't understand AI. I'm very very happy with how that's gone and that now you know it's completely mainstream. You go any AI conference and people talk about AI safety and it's a nerdy technical field full of equations and simula and blah blah. As it should be, but there is this other thing which has been quite taboo up until now. Calling for slowdown. So what. We've constantly been saying, including myself, I've been biting my tongue a lot. You know is that you know we we don't need to slow down AI development. We just need to win this race, the wisdom race between the growing power of the AI. And the growing wisdom with which we manage it, and rather than trying to slow down AI, let's just try to accelerate the wisdom. Do all this technical work to figure out how you can actually ensure that your powerful AI is going to do what you wanted to do and have society adapt also. With incentives and regulations so that these things get put to good use. Sadly, that didn't pan out. The progress on technical AI on capabilities has gone. A lot faster than than many people thought. Back when we started this in 2014, turned out to be easier to build really advanced AI than we thought. And on the other side, it's gone much slower than we hoped with getting. Policymakers and others to actually put incentives in place to to make steer this in the in the good direction. We can maybe we should unpack it and talk a little bit about each. So why did it go faster than we than a lot of people thought them. In hindsight, it's exactly like building flying machines. People spent a lot of time wondering about how how the birds fly, you know, and that turned out to be really hard. Have you seen the TED talk with a flying bird? Like a flying robotic bird. Yeah, it flies around the audience, but it took 100 years longer to figure out how to do that than for the Wright brothers to build the first airplane because it turned out there was a much easier way to fly. And evolution picked the more complicated one because it had its hands tied. It could only build a machine that could assemble itself, which the Wright brothers didn't care about. It can only build a machine. It'll use only the most common atoms in the periodic table. Wright brothers didn't care about that. They could use steel. Iron atoms and it had to be able to repair itself and it also had to be incredibly fuel efficient. You know. A lot of birds use less than half the fuel of a remote controlled plane flying the same distance. For humans, throw a little more, put a little more fuel in a roof. There you go, 100 years earlier. That's exactly what's happening now with with these large language models. The brain is incredibly complicated. Many people made the mistake you're thinking we have to figure out how the brain does human level AI first before we could build in a machine. That was completely wrong. You can take an incredibly simple computational system called a transformer network and just train it to do something incredibly dumb. Just read a gigantic amount of text and try to predict the next word, and it turns out if you just throw a ton of compute at that and a ton of data, it gets to be. Frightingly good like GPT four which I've been playing with so much since it came out right. And there's still some debate about whether that can get you all the way to full human level or not, but yeah we can come back to the details of that and how you might get the human level AI even if. Large language models don't. Can you briefly, if it's just a small tangent, comment on your feelings about GPT four. Suggest that you are impressed by this rate of progress, but where where is it? Can GPT four reason? What are like the intuitions? What are human interpretable words you can assign to the capabilities of GPT four that makes you so damn impressed with it? I am both very excited about it and terrified. Interesting mixture of emotions. All the best things in life include those two somehow. Yeah, I can absolutely reason. Anyone who hasn't played with it, I highly recommend doing that before dising it. It can do quite quite remarkable reasoning. I've had to do a lot of things which I realized I couldn't do that myself that well even and and obviously does it dramatically faster than we do too when you watch it type. And it's doing that while servicing a massive number of other humans at the same time. At the same time, it cannot reason as well as a human can on some tasks just because it's obviously limitation from its architecture. You know we have in our heads what in geek speak is called a recurrent neural network. There are loops, information can go from this neuron to this neuron to this neuron and then back to this one. You can like ruminate on something for a while, you can self reflect a lot. These large language models that are they cannot like GPT four. It's it's a so called transformer where it's just like a one way street of information basically in geek speak it's called a feed forward neural network. And it's only so deep, so it can only do logic that's that many steps and that deep and it's not. And you can show you can create problems which will fail to solve you know for that reason. But the fact that it can do so amazing things with this incredibly simple architecture already is quite stunning and and and what we see in my lab at MIT when we look inside. Large language models to try to figure out how they're doing it, which that's the key core focus of of our research. It's called mechanistic interpretability in geek speak. You know you have this machine that does something smart. You try to reverse engineer see how does it do it. You think of it also as artificial neuroscience. That's exactly what neuroscientists do with actual brains, but here you have the advantage that you can. You don't have to worry about measurement errors. You can see what every neuron is doing all the time. And and a recurrent thing we see again and again. There has been a number of beautiful papers quite recently by by a lot of researchers some of them here even in this area is where when they figure out how something is done. You can say oh man that's such a dumb way of doing it and you immediately see how it can be improved like for example. There was a beautiful paper recently where they figured out how a large language model stores certain facts like Eiffel Tower is in Paris. And they figured out exactly how it's stored and were able the proof that they understood it was they could edit it they changed some of the synapses in it. And then they asked it where is the Eiffel Tower and it said it's in Rome. And then they asked you how do you get there? Oh how do you get there from Germany? Oh you take this train and the Roma Termini train station and this and that. And what might you see if you're in front of it? Oh you might see the Colosseum. So they had edited. So they literally moved it to Rome. But it the way it's storing this information it's incredibly dumb for for for any any fellow nerds listening to this. There was a big matrix and. And roughly speaking, there are certain row and column vectors which encode these things and they correspond very handwavyly to principal components and. It would be much more efficient for sparse matrix to store in the database you know and and everything so far we've figured out how these things do are ways where you can see they can easily be improved and. The fact that this particular architecture has some roadblocks built into it is in no way going to prevent. Crafty researchers from quickly finding workarounds and making. Other kinds of architectures sort of go all the way so. So it's in in short