-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
/
podcast-2.json
1 lines (1 loc) · 11.9 KB
/
podcast-2.json
1
{"podcast_details": {"podcast_title": "Azeem Azhar's Exponential View", "episode_title": "Azeem on AI: What Can the Copernican Revolution Teach Us about the Future of AI?", "episode_image": "https://hbr.org/resources/images/podcasts/1400-exponential-view-lg-3.png", "episode_transcript": " Puerto Rico. More than a tropical paradise, the island is a fast growing hub for innovators with tax incentives, world-class talent, and a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem. Visit investpr.org today. Game changers, welcome home. Hi there, I'm Azima Zah. For the past decade, I've studied exponential technologies that emergence, rapid uptake, and the opportunities they create. I wrote a book about this in 2021. It's called The Exponential Age. Even with my expertise, I sometimes find it challenging to keep up with the fast pace of change in the field of artificial intelligence. And that's why I'm excited to share a series of weekly insights with you, where we can delve into some of the most intriguing questions about AI. In today's reflection, I speak about AI's Copernican moment, the idea that the development of advanced AI models and their potential impact on society is a significant paradigm shift that will have far reaching consequences, similar to those brought about by Copernicus and Darwin in their respective fields. Let's go. Let's start with a confession. I've been finding it really hard to keep up with the constant flow of experimentation, innovation, research results that are springing up around these LLM technologies. There is so much that is going on right now. As I reflect around the pace with which this is going, I'm in bloody exponentials. I think I'm allowed to say that. And the challenge with keeping up with it and the breadth and the depth of the experimentation, I really do think that this is quite a remarkable, very powerful technology. And in a way, it's a sort of thing that we should, given our knowledge of history, really have a rethink. We need to enter a space of philosophical analysis, of imagination, of trying to step out of the system in which we are currently in to think about how we might order things given this set of changes. I have been thinking, for example, about the Copernican moment, that moment when we started to realize it took a couple of hundred years for this to become common knowledge. It's not yet common knowledge everywhere, that the earth was not the center of the universe, that the earth revolved around the sun, or the Gutenberg moment where we started to democratize access to and then creation of knowledge. And these moments were moments where fundamentally people living within that system were forced to change their system. Prior to Gutenberg in Western Europe, ultimately the priests were the elite who controlled knowledge, and they absolutely did control that knowledge, and they constrained what people could believe and how they could believe in very many ways. Of course, Copernicus came out and further challenged that domain. And so I think we can look at LLMs today and we can start to see where there's a sort of a friction. They're hitting copyright, they're hitting privacy, and start to ask, at what point are we the priests and at what point are we the scientists from the perspective of the existing world view. If you are the Catholic Church and you've controlled the dissemination of knowledge through handwritten, hand-copied Bibles and someone is coming out and allowing lots of different versions of that to be created, and ultimately for other people to start to produce lots and lots of material and drive up the levels of literacy, that's a risk, right? That's a risk to the existing stability, it's a risk to the existing structures. It's a risk that challenges that benchmark for truth and truth as a social construct. After Copernicus, it was no longer true as it had been before Copernicus that the sun revolved around the earth. Now, of course, listening to that, you're going to say the sun never revolved around the earth, the earth revolved around the sun, but that wasn't actually what people believed was true back in the 15th and early 16th century in periods before that. And I think it's important for us to ask those questions around this technology in particular, just as we play with it and we see what it is telling us about the world and about our own assumptions. So where are we with these technologies, these LLMs that will form the basis of more advanced systems? I think we have to admit that the cat is out of the bag, right? Now, while it's true that ever more powerful models are going to be harder and harder to build, GBT-5 will be harder to build, whatever Anthropic is building or Stability is building now will be hard to build. It will be gated on technical capabilities, the ability to find a few hundred and really remarkably talented people to work on each project and hundreds of millions of dollars to run for training and being able to even get the chips from Nvidia. That is hard stuff, but actually in over a 10 year, 15, 20 year period, it's going to happen, right? It may not happen in a year, but it'll certainly happen. We don't even have to think about the most sophisticated models because lower powered models of the GPT-3, 3.5 capability, things like Lama, which I've written about, are capable of quite a lot of the things that we see the most advanced LLMs doing and they're running on desktop computers and mobile phones and the cost of running those is simply going to decline because of on the one hand, the declining cost of computing and on the other hand, algorithmic optimizations and improvements, which will have sort of step change impacts on the sort of computational cost of training. On top of that, this is becoming the number one priority or certainly a top priority for most firms. I can't really disclose about who I've spoken to over the last two or three weeks, but I've talked to a lot of people in industry and a lot of people with a view, a site across many industries and firms within those. And the thing that I'm hearing is that this is becoming a super priority. There's a lot of clamoring for firms to start to use these technologies for competitive advantage. There is a sort of a technical research and a commercial momentum. I think one of the things that we then need to do is start to really understand what the upsides of all of this might be and how we paint that upside. And once we understand what that upside is, that we start to fundamentally think about what kind of institutional frames we want to develop around these technologies. Ultimately, institutional frames, whether they are regulations or laws, are trade-offs, right? They are trade-offs between freedom and benefits that might be delivered and delivered unevenly and costs that are attached to them. So, for example, over the past couple of weeks, we've started to read more about how these LLMs have made use of copyright material or maybe using private material and breaching various privacy regulations or breaching laws around slander or misinformation or libel. I think that the thing that we need to do when we start to look at that, of course, is take that material seriously, but also start to ask questions about whether we need to change institutional frames and the laws around that in order to deal with the realities of this technology. If you think about copyright, it's only a few hundred years old and it's an economic settlement in the face of new opportunities. Virtually no one was making any money as an author before the printing press and the printing press appeared in a blink of an eye. One quite interesting example to look at is the use of DDT, the insecticide, the pesticide. So DDT was developed 60, 70 years ago, was really effective pesticide, turned out to have all sorts of problematic environmental effects and effects on human health, so it was largely banned about 50 years ago. However, many countries, in particular India, continued to use DDT. So the question is given all of its downsides, why did the Indian government continue to use DDT and allow its use? There were reasons, right? It was really effective for malarial control. It was incredibly cost effective. There weren't other good alternatives. So fundamentally there was a trade off which said the harms are done by DDT in this case were worth bearing with given the benefits it provided certainly within India. And I think it's really important for us to recognise that particular tension and what that exploration should look like. This is a hugely powerful technology. The things that have been happening in days, not even in weeks, are really amazing. They're somewhat jaw dropping to me. And as I reflect on how hard it is to keep up with what's going on, both on the sort of myriad of new applications and experiments that are taking place on the one hand and the really legitimate concerns that we might have in terms of ethics, inclusion, just outcomes from this technology, but also the way in which it is pushing very hard on our understanding of things like copyright and privacy. I think that we have to hold all of those things in our heads. We don't want to have an unthinking embrace, but we want to start to look at this with a deep analysis, some imagination, some sense of humanity about it. I do also think that we shouldn't fall short of going back to Copernicus for sake of argument, who inverted worldviews and forced us to think really differently, Darwin similarly, and ask the question of the extent to which the system in which we are operating may start to change because of the nature of these sorts of discoveries. Well, thanks for tuning in. If you want to truly grasp the ins and outs of AI, visit www.experimentalview.co where I share expert insights with hundreds of thousands of leaders each week."}, "podcast_summary": "The reflection discusses the concept of AI's Copernican moment, drawing parallels to historical shifts in knowledge and worldview brought about by figures like Copernicus and Gutenberg. The author reflects on the rapid pace of advancement in AI and the need for deep analysis and imagination to understand and navigate its potential impact on society. They acknowledge that while the development of more advanced AI models may be challenging, it is inevitable over time. Lower-powered models are already capable of performing advanced tasks and their accessibility and usage are increasing. The author also highlights the growing priority of AI adoption among businesses and the need to understand the potential benefits and develop appropriate institutional frameworks and regulations. Examples are given of copyright and privacy challenges posed by current AI capabilities, and the need to reassess and adapt existing laws to accommodate the realities of AI. The author emphasizes the power and transformative nature of AI, urging a thoughtful approach that takes into account ethics, inclusion, and ensuring just outcomes. They encourage a deep analysis of AI's potential impact, while also acknowledging its potential to challenge and reshape existing systems and worldviews.", "podcast_guest": {"name": "Azima Zah", "summary": "No information available about the host"}, "podcast_highlights": "Key Insights:\n\n- The development of advanced AI models and their potential impact on society is a significant paradigm shift that will have far-reaching consequences.\n- Similar to moments in history like Copernicus and Gutenberg, AI technologies are forcing us to rethink existing systems and challenge established structures.\n- More powerful AI models will become harder to build, but lower-powered models already have the capability to achieve advanced tasks and their accessibility will increase over time.\n- AI technologies are becoming a top priority for many industries and firms, leading to a growing momentum for their use in gaining competitive advantage.\n- As AI technologies advance, there is a need to understand the potential upsides and develop appropriate institutional frames, such as regulations and laws, to address concerns related to copyright, privacy, slander, misinformation, and libel."}