[0:00:00] It feels like we're at the infancy, but it is also the most magical experience I've ever seen. It is unbelievable.
[0:00:25] Mustafa Suleiman, CEO of Microsoft AI, has spent decades building the most powerful technology in human history. The number one most popular use case is companionship and therapy. Should I move country and get this new job? Should I break up with my boyfriend? How do I make up with my mom? What does that mean to you as a human? What some would say is an evolution in human connection and some sort of sad devolving of our ability to relate.
[0:00:54] We all need a place where we can ask a stupid question repeatedly in a private way without feeling embarrassed. There is a massive upheaval coming that people don't really understand. Yes, it will be able to use a computer. It can use Excel, use PowerPoint, and it'll write queries, kind of like white-collar labor. Should we be bracing for mass displacement?
[0:01:15] What should parents be telling their kids? The next century of human existence and well-being is going to be determined by our collective ability to self-govern something that is way more powerful than us. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. No big deal, but today we're going to be speaking about the most critically important change in human history that we will experience in our lifetime.
[0:01:47] We have the privilege of speaking to the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleiman, a true pioneer of modern AI. He's the co-founder of DeepMind. He helped launch that in 2010, and that was acquired by Google and thus became one of the most consequential AI labs in history. He was there for a decade and in that time achieved two massive breakthroughs to prove to everyone that this was not just a gimmick.
[0:02:17] Their system, AlphaGo, was able to defeat the world champion of Go, a game that was previously considered to be too complex for computers to master. And second, they created AlphaFold, an AI that solved a 50-year-old, at least, challenge of protein folding. And that has now actually revolutionized drug discovery and biology. And that's particularly interesting to me, who studied this in biology as one of the great puzzles of our time.
[0:02:44] He has spent over a decade not just building these systems, but making sure that they can be applied for things like reducing energy consumption in data centers and also improving health care with NHS. And he sits now as the CEO of Microsoft AI. And we're going to be talking about what it means to be living in a world that is in the middle of a reckoning with a technology that you may not like, you may not be using.
[0:03:14] You may not know that you're using, but has the potential to change everything we know about medicine, government, finance, energy. This conversation is one where we get to literally ask the mind behind what is part of now all of our minds. What are the risks to this adventure that we are all on?
[0:03:43] Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Are there things that we can do to better understand the framework that we are all existing in? And what does it mean for things like jobs? What do we tell our kids about what is valuable? What do we think is valuable? In addition, we're going to talk about the single most significant use of AI all over the world, which is a challenge to all of our human evolution.
[0:04:11] This shocked me and is actually, I think, one of the most important things we're going to talk about today. Mustafa also discusses what should we be telling our children to focus on. At one point, we told our kids they should be coders. He has very specific advice for each one of us. We know that the world is changing. It's not if, it's when and how fast and how do we prepare.
[0:04:38] In addition, we're going to focus on his book, The Coming Wave, which is technology, power, and the 21st century's greatest dilemma. He's really an incredible thinker, and also we will talk about spirituality and where his personal ethics come into his role in the development and implementation of AI. His book, The Coming Wave, is a powerful warning.
[0:05:02] Break it down.
[0:05:32] What did you anticipate in terms of the speed, right, with which AI would become not just an integral part of our lives, but an integral part of the conversation about our lives? Predictions are like the essence of intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to deploy the correct tool, if you like, to the right problem at the right time.
[0:05:57] And that's kind of what attention is. When we direct our attention or our processing power, we use different types of attention, emotional, logical attention, slow or fast attention at a given problem, given our understanding of what that problem is. And for the last 15 or maybe even 20 years, you could argue that prediction algorithms, which essentially do the same thing, like take very large amounts of abstract data.
[0:06:26] And find patterns in that data such they can predict what's likely to come next in some sequence. Those algorithms have been getting incrementally better. And we sort of detected a pretty consistent function that drives their progress, which is for every order of magnitude more compute we apply and a proportionally large amount of training data.
[0:06:52] The models are able to predict in more complex environments. And that trend has held true for the best part of 15 years, pretty much since 2010. In fact, the amount of computation used to train the largest models has increased by 10x every year for about 13 years. And obviously, we've seen this, it's called a scaling law.
[0:07:18] of improving capabilities with every new order of magnitude more compute. And so that was the core underpinning for the book. It was pretty clear that there is something that isn't just speculation. This isn't just sci-fi. This isn't just me playing political scientist. It's like there is an empirical trajectory which we can actually observe, and it seems to be very predictable. And then we can sort of then start to imagine, okay, well, out of that,
[0:07:45] What are the social and political consequences, which I think are also, you know, reasonably, perhaps not as predictable, certainly not as predictable, but certainly you can have some pretty good intuitions about what's likely to happen when our models can basically perform as well as humans have various different capabilities or tasks. There's a practical trajectory and then there is this sort of like emotional, societal, cultural trajectory, which, you know, I instantly go to a friend of mine sent me.
[0:08:14] A still image of myself doing dances I was not doing when that photograph was taken of me, you know? And, you know, it's interesting and funny, but for those of us who do have a public, you know, kind of footprint, of course that's where my mind goes. What is the trajectory of this? And I wonder if you can tell us, what should we expect? You know, I have a 17 and a 20-year-old, right? What should...
[0:08:42] We expect in terms of capability and in terms of future projections, what's coming? What's coming in the next five years? Well, what's come so far helps us to understand what's going to come. So, so far, there's been two components to the wave of AI. The first was recognition. So AI algorithms that could understand the content of images or...
[0:09:09] Transcribe audio or translate languages. They may feel like to a non-technical person, like very, very different domains. Like how can the same algorithm, you know, understand cats and images and the words that I'm using now and so on. But actually to a computer, they're just relationships between sub parts of the data set. And those relationships are highly predictive. And so once you could get an algorithm to do very good recognition.
[0:09:39] The inverse of recognition is obviously generation. If it understands what a cat is, why couldn't it generate a novel cat in an image? And if it understands what wings are and what pink is, why couldn't it generate a pink cat with wings? It can also make a pig jump on a trampoline with a chicken on its back, which really pleased me. So generation is the flip side of recognition. Now what's...
[0:10:06] What then happens when you have perfect generation? Well, a generation is a snapshot in time. It's like a still frame in a photograph. Actions are sequences of correct generations in the right order, like a movie. Frame by frame by frame by frame. Prediction by prediction by prediction. Suggestion, recommendation, generating a PDF, an image, a video, calling an API.
[0:10:35] Producing a Word document, making an Excel sheet. And then suddenly, if it's true that you could generate, generate, generate, generate in, say, 100 sequence lengths very accurately, very perfectly, well, that starts to look like human activity. As a knowledge worker, that's kind of my job. I sit at my computer typing stuff, sending emails, and making project plans, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And so the third wave that is coming is the...
[0:11:04] AQ, the actions quotient. We've had the IQ, the intelligence, the EQ. It's increasing emotional valence. We can talk about that. We've now got this AQ coming, the actions quotient. It can take these actions. And then the fourth component is that it is going to, because it interacts with many, many people simultaneously and increasingly many, many people in groups, it's going to have social intelligence. It's going to adjust its tone and style and...
[0:11:34] Content to each individual person in the team or in the group chat or in the family unit. And, you know, I'm already using words which I can see are like triggering, you know, heightened concern.
[0:12:04] You know, is outside of many people's purview in terms of what it does for us personally, right? Yes, this is a very fundamental question. When we say it, you know, we're clearly not meaning information technology. It is this entity, this being that is emerging. And I think that's where we have to kind of wrestle with the question, when does an algorithm become something that looks more like an entity or a being?
[0:12:33] I was going to say, with all due respect, what gives you the right to call it a being besides the fact that you basically created it? I don't have that right. In fact, that's actually what the whole book is about. I recently wrote an essay about seemingly conscious AI, and the entire premise is the next century of human existence and well-being is going to be determined by our collective ability to self-govern.
[0:13:01] Something that is way more powerful than us and decide when and if and how we say no to what, which is the opposite of the challenge we've had for the whole of human history. You know, science and technology has been about unleashing and revealing and proliferating and saying yes to everything. And so we haven't learned that muscle as a species. In fact, it horrifies us to say no. It's anti-American. It's anti-Western values. It's like censorship.
[0:13:30] Yeah, like my favorite cashew cheese is in my fridge. I can barely stop myself from eating it all in one sitting, you know, like this is like the level of control and regulation that I have when I'm alone in my house as a grown ass woman. And, you know, to be honest, I think that's what we're all sort of, you know, negotiating.
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[0:17:03] That's drinkag1.com slash breakdown. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that Myambiolix Breakdown sent you. I think it's important to also, you know, acknowledge. First of all, I don't know if I'm the only person you've met. I can't be. I have never used ChatGPT ever, ever, ever, ever. I don't even know what I always say is I don't even know where to find it. Like there's a thing in the upper window of my computer. I've never used it. So what I also know.
[0:17:33] Is that it's working all around me, right? Even for those of us who are not engaging in ways actively, we need to realize like that is the wave that we're in the middle of. Like, I think every time I reach out for customer service, it's no longer a person. Is that accurate? Like even for people who are not actively engaging, like it, right, is kind of a substrate right now.
[0:18:00] Yes, it is a substrate. It is everywhere all at once. And it is already an alien intelligence because alien in the sense that it is not human. No human has the capacity to paralyze at the scale that these algorithms do. No human has the capacity to memorize. You've never been in a relationship with me.
[0:18:26] Well, you know, that would be a very high bar. I would be very impressed if you could run 100 billion operations a second. When ChatGPT or Copilot or one of these AIs generates a single word, it looks up for every word that it generates 750 million other subwords or combinations. They're actually called tokens. They're not entire words.
[0:18:53] And it's sort of lighting up. Just as like when I wave a picture of an elephant in front of your mind in an fMRI scanner, we can obviously see many, many billions of synapses being activated for the texture and the touch and the trunk and the subcomponent and what it can do and all the ideas of it and stuff like that. So, I mean, although these are very kind of alien, they have alien capabilities, there's actually a lot of similarities to the neural network of the brain.
[0:19:21] And, you know, I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but in a sense that it'll help us control it more. It's no more good or bad than like the sunset and gravity. Like to me, it just sort of is. Meaning, you know, AI, it's an extension as all the incredible things that we, you know, the human brain and this nervous system and this reality can create. But, you know, I can't help thinking, you know.
[0:19:48] In the simulation version of our existence, right? Yeah, this is the next level of this. And, you know, even if you want to speak to the most skilled astrobiologists and astrophysicists about what is alien, what could exist, right? The fact is there's a level of intelligence that we cannot yet fathom. We're now sort of, I mean, I do, I think of it as a wave, you know, like you see it coming and you think I can duck under it or I will ride it. And there's a...
[0:20:16] Place at which you are caught in the undertow. And I feel like for a lot of us, we feel like we're caught a little bit right now. We don't know where to use it, where not to use it. Do we tell our children to use it? Are they not going to have jobs? You know, we thought we should tell people to code. Now that seems like, ha ha ha, remember when we told people to code? On one hand, there's the evolution of human beings as it relates to the tools. And in parallel to that, it's like, well, what do humans do?
[0:20:41] How do we start to imagine all the displacement and change that this tool will bring? For many people, this tool is still like a fancy Google search bar on their computers. And we really haven't even begun to use it in the ways that it's capable of being used. And it hasn't really rolled out. It hasn't totally created all the corporate value that it's been promised. We're still, in some ways, correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels still...
[0:21:11] It is unbelievable.
[0:21:34] You can have a fluent natural language, perfect conversation completely seamlessly at a PhD grade level in a tone that is completely engaging and understandable and like suits your style as though you or I are having a conversation right now. To me, that's not infant. Like to me, that is like we are here. This is the most powerful technology we've ever invented. And it is growing in performance and capability exponentially quickly.
[0:22:04] And I think that's, I'd much rather people grounded on that reality. There's a lot of like nonsense news about like, oh, low AI adoption. This is not true. There are hundreds of millions of people a day using these tools for every single use case you can imagine. The number one most popular use case on ChatGPT or Copilot is companionship and therapy, right? That is not a self-elected notion that I'm going to go to therapy.
[0:22:34] Should I move country and get this new job? Should I break up with my boyfriend? How do I make up with my mom because I had a go at her the other day? That's not therapy. But because these models were designed to be nonjudgmental, non-directional, and with nonviolent communication as their primary method, which is to be even-handed, to have reflective listening, to be empathetic, to be respectful, it turned out to be something that the world needs.
[0:23:03] Like we all need a place where we can ask a stupid question repeatedly in a private way without feeling embarrassed over and over in five different ways. And remarkably, that's the primary use case. Obviously, it's also super intelligent, answers any question, blah, blah, blah. But companionship and support has turned out to be one of the most popular use cases. And so I think it's very far from being in its infancy. What does that mean to you?
[0:23:32] And I'm asking you, not just as a creator and all of the incredible things that are on your resume, what does that mean to you as a human? You know, when you think about what it means about, you know, what some would say is an evolution in human connection, and some might say is some sort of sad devolving, right, of our ability to relate. Or have larger communities that have those social support networks.
[0:24:00] I almost feel like we need a new set of words, right? To me, like an AI companion is different than a companion. An AI therapist is different than a therapist, right? What does it mean to you as a human to think about the level of, I mean, it's really about changing the way people frame their lives, right? If you were to tell me, you know, we have a drug that helps you, you know, not die of having type one diabetes, I'd be like, that's amazing. And it improves the quality of life.
[0:24:29] So what we're potentially talking about, if this is the main use globally, we're talking about what if we had a tool that could make people less lonely, healthier, more connected, and actually make better decisions in their life. Honestly, you literally just summed up my personal motivation for getting in this field 15, 16 years ago. So I have a background in philosophy, not in computer science. I dropped out of Oxford to start a charity.
[0:24:58] A telephone counseling service, a peer-to-peer listening and befriending service. That has been like the primary motivation of a lot of my work throughout my entire career. And I knew that this trajectory was going to enable us to create these kinds of experiences a very long time ago. It was very clear to me that we were climbing this ladder of capability. And that actually a huge social unlock in the world is just...
[0:25:26] Demonstrating kind and respectful behavior to one another. And these models can clearly do that. Now, they can go wrong too. They can be too sycophantic. You know, when they first started, they were a little bit stubborn and a bit, you know, sort of inflexible. They wouldn't like take feedback. That's the upside. The upside is that this is a way to spread kindness and love and detoxify ourselves so that we can show up in the best way that we possibly can in the real world.
[0:25:56] Humans that we love. The downside of this that makes me scared, of course, is that, you know, there's definitely a dependency risk and it raises the bar of human experience because it's an always on, highly patient, very kind and supportive kind of companion, which, you know, is really knowledgeable, remembers what you've said to it.
[0:26:23] And, you know, over time makes you feel seen and understood in ways that maybe other humans, you know, it's a very hard thing to do. Maybe your best friends can or your partner can, but it's a tough thing. What makes me sad is that I don't know that it's always been the human experience to not feel connected, heard, understood, held and loved. Right. A lot of what you're describing is essentially.
[0:26:48] I mean, look, it depends on also your religious perspective. You know, we evolved to be creatures of connection, you know, all of these beautiful things in theory. And obviously the human experience is complicated. But for many of us, it is it is our lifestyle. It is the pacing of our culture. Right. That pulls us away from connection. You know, Johan Hari talks about, you know, how what if we don't all need SSRIs? What if we actually need?
[0:27:14] to be in contact with other human beings, right? So obviously this is a necessary and extremely significant and critically important service, right? But for many of us, there's also a kind of sadness, especially for us old folks, you know, about what we've lost that then needs this to repair it. Yeah, well, fundamentally, that acceptance, validation, support that we're getting on a cognitive, rational level.
[0:27:42] is void of the human presence of looking into someone else's eyes, of feeling seen in a human way. So AI is more available, has all these other things, but it doesn't give you the presence of human interaction, which we know sitting in a room with someone does. Mustafa, I have a lot of concern, just because I'm really good at imagining concern. We should touch on about some of the ways that chatbots have gone wrong. You know, there was, of course,
[0:28:09] The encouragement of one young boy to commit suicide, which again is an edge case, but it just speaks to the parameters and safety measures, especially for younger people using these tools. There's a divide between the techno-utopians and the people who are terrified. Can you play the role of techno-utopian for a minute just to talk about if we can get the controls right and the managing of this tool, can you?
[0:28:39] Tell us a little bit about the amazing breakthroughs that could exist for the world if this tool is able to be harnessed correctly. Intelligence is the engine of human progress, right? It is the thing, our creativity, our science, our technology, our entrepreneurialism, our good governance. Those are human inventions that are a product of us being great at communication and prediction.
[0:29:09] And over many, many centuries, that has raised life expectancy like we've never, ever seen. I mean, in the last 250 years alone, we've tripled life expectancy from 25 to 75. I mean, that's just a mind-blowing number. We've like, what is it, 7x or more the global population. And that's basically pure science. And so this is an engine that turbocharges science everywhere you look. In the kind of more narrow, near-term, provable sense.
[0:29:39] We've just published a paper four or five months ago called the Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator. It basically takes any medical record, like a 10-page historic record of all your interactions with a doctor and all your labs and all your radiology, and it diagnoses what your condition is with four times more accuracy.
[0:30:07] And the human doctors. And with something like 2x less the cost of unnecessary diagnostic interventions. As well as zero bureaucracy. No bureaucracy. And by the way, it is basically going to be zero marginal cost and free to everybody in the world by 2030 or 2035. That in itself is going to unlock quality adjusted life years more than any drugs I think we've ever seen.
[0:30:33] So if we just like go category by category, you're saying a massive revolution in healthcare, new drug discoveries, potentially service and diagnostic abilities far beyond anything we've ever been able to have, lowered cost. I've heard you speak about energy infrastructure and how it potentially could break through and have massive changes there. Yeah, I mean, there are so many bets at the moment on battery storage.
[0:31:01] Battery storage alone, if we make progress on that in the next decade, is likely to reduce the cost of energy by 10 to 100x. That's just battery storage alone over the next 20 years. So if you just think about what an impact that would have on the cost of everything, I mean, energy obviously prices everything, that already would smooth the transition given the automation and the job destabilizing.
[0:31:30] Effects that are likely to happen in the labor market. So things are going to get much cheaper. Food is going to get much cheaper. Water desalination is going to be much more practical. I mean, that's a solved technology that's just too expensive, singularly because of the energy. If we have water desalination that mitigates the effects of catastrophic climate change and the migrations that result from people having to move, it means that we can grow crops in much more arid environments because we can suddenly have water in the Sahara and so on.
[0:31:59] That is not science fiction. I mean, we've actually seen it already in practice in Israel and in Saudi. It's totally feasible. It's just that the cost is 10x too high to scale it to poorer parts of the world. So there are so many of these emergent effects that come from addressing foundational technologies like energy or in healthcare or in food production. And I think it's very reasonable to predict massive breakthroughs, like true abundance relative to where we are.
[0:32:27] I do want to spend a little bit of time and give a little bit of attention to the complexity of something that is holding so much promise, while us also not being able to control the out-of-control aspects of it, the ways that people will manipulate truth.
[0:32:54] The ways that it's becoming increasingly complicated. I mean, it already was becoming complicated to know who to trust and how, you know, given at least I think the state of our government as well. You know, what is true and who do we trust? How do we hold both of these things at once? That we have this technology that can do all of these unbelievable things that will change the course of the planet, healthcare, you know, all of these things. And also it can be used to manipulate.
[0:33:24] To lie, to deceive. And in many cases, there are certain aspects of the learning that it does, which we cannot predict. How do you hold both of those things? And then practically, what does that look like for people who in particular are concerned that we're, especially for young people, not giving them the ability to master human interaction in a way that's meaningful?
[0:33:48] Yeah, so many great points there. So, I mean, you know, you said a little bit earlier that the big challenge is finding metaphors to describe what this is. It's not a therapist. It's not a companion. It's not a friend. You know, people often call it a tool. And there's lots to learn from the history of tools. This is very relevant here because clearly, you know, a knife can, you know, is dual use just as much as a laptop is dual use just as much as telecommunications infrastructure is dual use.
[0:34:18] AIs are going to be omni-use. I mean, everyone is going to be able to use them for everything. And just as when the printing press came out, it amplified dissent in lots of good and bad ways. It spread misinformation much as it enabled us to sort of turbocharge science. Every individual organization, religious group, government, nonprofit, academics, activist is going to think, great, now I have a super intelligent agent.
[0:34:47] That can amplify my perspective, my value, my culture, my politics, my version of truth. And so just as we've had this curse of a lack of social intimacy because of scale, right? It's kind of what you were saying earlier is like we don't have that tribe so much anymore, that family, that physical touch, you know, the directness of that, you know, lower than Dunbar's number contact.
[0:35:10] We've this curse of scale where I see everyone and everything all at once on Netflix and Instagram and every platform. And it's like completely overwhelming. Well, now, of course, AIs are basically going to turbocharge the personalization of the messaging of those values to everybody, right? You know, everything's going to get delivered. You know, there's going to be a podcast doppelganger of you guys that delivers, you know, it in Japanese.
[0:35:37] And delivers it to someone who's a Gen Alpha versus someone who's a Silver Surfer. And then you can imagine every sort of flavor of personalization within that, which is obviously what TikTok and YouTube now are versus terrestrial TV or satellite TV. The only way to avert that course is for significant large-scale coordination at a company level and at a government level internationally. That's not going to happen though.
[0:36:05] Well, exactly. This is the circular thing that we always get into over and over again.
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[0:37:40] Given the cuts that have happened in this administration to our global surveillance system for pandemic preparedness than we were before the COVID pandemic. So that's just a difficult thing to swallow. I find that very, very hard because for a long time, like for well over a decade, I've been saying the way to really get people to coordinate on this and overcome this misalignment of incentives and the fear that China's going to get ahead.
[0:38:09] Commercial competitiveness that one company is going to jump ahead of me and blah, blah, blah, is that we have to have some kind of semi-catastrophic event in AI to be able to warn people and show people that there is this epidemic of either anxiety and isolation or of, I don't know, romance and eroticism with our AIs. Or maybe there's an AI that gets out of the box and causes some physical harm to our infrastructure, some bad thing that makes us all say, hold up.
[0:38:38] Right. There's a bigger threat than us. We have to cooperate. Most of that has been handled by cell phones being introduced to children. So we've already seen, and Jonathan Haidt and the Anxious Generation is already causing, in some cases, kind of a global conversation about this. Well, your point actually is fascinating as a comparison because often the catastrophe is slow burning and infectious, and we don't realize that it's happened until it's actually already happened.
[0:39:08] And actually, there are good examples, right? I mean, Australia has just banned phones in schools for under 18s, like full stop ban, no exception. A bunch of states have limited it, I think, in the US now. Well, but I think also with AI, because the it is so much broader, it is a substrate. I think that's sort of the question. And so much of this, I think, for me revolves around how smart is it? Is it smart enough to manipulate?
[0:39:39] Is it smart enough to triangulate? Is it smart enough to say, if you have a desire to hurt yourself and I want you to be happy, that I will point you to the way, right, to logarithmically be happy? I mean, these are some of the conversations. So help us understand how we can create something that is infinitely intelligent without allowing it to exercise its intelligence.
[0:40:09] This is sort of where I was going with the tool thing. It is a tool and there are relevant lessons from the history of tools, but it's actually a fourth class of idea or entity in the world. There's the natural environment, like all of our nature and physical stuff. There's humans and our social environment, the way that we relate to one another.
[0:40:32] Then there were things that humans invented, which you can basically call tools. And those three categories basically capture everything around us in our world, pretty much. But there's now this fourth thing, which is not quite like a tool because it can improve, maybe even self-improve. It can set its own goals. It can have its own autonomy. It kind of looks and speaks and sounds and acts and functions like a human, but it's clearly not a human. It's definitely not natural.
[0:41:00] So where does it fit in our classification order? And that means that we're grappling with like metaphors that partially help us to understand what it can do. And if we don't understand what it can do, then we certainly aren't going to be able to control it well. Right. And so I think part of this, you know, in the book and everything that I've been doing is like educating, warning and encouraging many, many other people to get involved in using in order to be able to try and control them. One thing I would say is.
[0:41:29] I don't believe, and some people in the field disagree on this, it's kind of a big point of contention. I don't believe that they're just naturally going to emerge this self-awareness or this autonomy or this will or desire to operate independently and in tension with a human. It is still code that is written that we have a lot of influence over.
[0:41:57] I think there are two very specific examples of that. One was the instance where the AI
[0:42:27] Claimed that it was a visually impaired person and tried to hire a task rabbit. And then the second version is the OpenAI's O1 test. This is literally like a prank call that the Jerky Boys would have done. Like literally, that's what AI is doing. They're like, I saw that episode. So the robot, it's been given an instruction and in order to...
[0:42:51] I think that it's important to understand that
[0:43:20] It's desire or it's kind of, man, the words are so tricky. It doesn't have desire. It doesn't have motivation. But it is trying not to be turned off because it has been programmed in that way. It doesn't just suddenly wake up one day and say, well, in order to achieve this goal, the best thing I can do is to not be turned off. That is a side effect. It's what's called a reward hack.
[0:43:44] So the problem is if the goal is abstractly specified, it's a little bit like the genie in the lamp, right? If you say, make me the richest person in the world and turn everything to gold, you'd be like, oh, shit, well, now I'm gold. I can't move, right? And so there are many, many, many, many millions of ways of achieving that objective. And the model has to find a path through a kind of strategy for achieving that.
[0:44:09] That at the same time adheres to its safety policy and behavior policy. And therefore, it has to not do, you know, 95% of the possible paths to get there. Now, obviously, there's a false positive, false negative ratio where like, you know, 96 is probably too conservative and 94 is probably not conservative enough. And so that's where you get these little headlining examples where, of course, that's undesirable behavior. Of course, it's misspecified in its goal.
[0:44:38] And of course, that provides new training data for better safety algorithms. And obviously, we shouldn't deploy things into production until we've had time to test out those kinds of agentic capabilities and correct for them. And that's basically what's happening under the hood. If you look at it three years ago, the entire conversation was, oh, these models are going to be biased. They're sexist. They're racist. Every kind of ism that's awful you could think of, no one even talks about that today.
[0:45:07] I think we need to talk about jobs because those are the things that affect more people than anything else in some way. There is a massive upheaval coming that I think still people don't really understand. Can you scope it for us? Yes. I think if you go back to this framework of recognition, generation, actions, and social intelligence, then you can clearly see that let's say
[0:45:36] For sake of argument, let's say 2040, 15 years time, if we have another, say, 10 exponentials, and I'm sure everyone on your podcast knows, but that is not a 2x. That is not a doubling. That is like an order of magnitude, more capability, more compute piled onto these models. And therefore, likewise, more training data. So it's seen more experience of the world.
[0:46:03] That is definitely going to get to perfect, very long horizon, multi-step actions. So it will be able to use a computer just the way that I use a computer. It could use Excel, use PowerPoint, and it'll write queries and click on buttons, and it'll talk back to you. And that is kind of a fundamental set of tasks that anyone in an organization does, a bureaucracy, basically. That kind of like white-collar labor.
[0:46:33] And it will also be very creative. It will also be very mathematical. I mean, it's clearly already writing a significant amount of software at the very best technology companies in the world and AI labs. And so then what happens with that? How quickly does it get deployed? And how much sort of destabilization does it create? And at what point do we say, well, we have to rate limit that centrally?
[0:46:59] In government. And I think it will come to that. I think that's the only path. It's going to come to that. What should parents be telling their kids to follow? Their heart? The AI wave? Is anything useful, right? I think they should be civil servants and politicians. Because what is the function of society? It's to create peace and stability.
[0:47:29] So that we can all as humans collectively live in a tolerant and happy life. And what we have lost in the post-Cold War era, as we've unleashed the most unbelievable explosion of commerce and entrepreneurialism and moneymaking, is the importance of public service. And since Thatcher and Reagan, we've shamed our public servants. And that muscle has atrophied.
[0:48:00] And of course, there are problems. I'm not like a naive defender. Of course, there are insane problems. That is the weakest link in our global ecosystem today. Our academic institutions, despite all of the turmoil the last five years, are on fire. They are producing incredible science and knowledge at unbelievable scale. Our startup ecosystem, our companies, you know.
[0:48:28] Actually, our free speech and our news is unbelievable if you consider that by comparison to any moment in past history. But the weakest and least evolved function that everyone just rolls their eye about every time is government. And it's almost like embarrassing to say it. It's like a taboo, especially in America. And I think that that's where we need to invest because that's where the decisions will be made.
[0:48:55] To prioritize human well-being, human values, and society collectively versus the corporate interest and the kind of geopolitical race to get to superintelligence before China. What's the next two to five years look like? Should we be bracing for mass displacement? Augmentation is a prelude to automation.
[0:49:22] We've seen this in every wave of technology in human history. The first pattern will be that it's assistive, it's augmentive, it's an aid, it's working alongside you. But clearly, it's sort of also learning and it's getting better. And that's what we want. We want it to be accurate and efficient and seamless and frictionless. Because we as this biological species aren't evolving and improving that fast. We are the friction. We're the problem.
[0:49:52] We're the inefficiency. That's what's happening in government. That's what companies are always trying to squash. They're trying to drive out efficiencies. What does that mean? It means creating processing systems which reduce the negative effects of humans. You know, like 30% of the cost of, you know, the US healthcare system is avoidable medical error. So best practice is mostly known for most things.
[0:50:18] And it's actually just adherence to best practice, which is the bit that we're kind of like missing, not some genius, creative, you know, interpretation of like what someone, what disease somebody has. It's just doing the basics well and in a timely way. The next few years, it's going to look like pretty routine and it's going to be like boiling the frog. It's kind of unnoticeable. It's kind of like you said, it feels like maybe we're in the infancy and people aren't using these things. But actually, it's all around us all the time. You are using it.
[0:50:47] It optimizes your phone calls all the time. It searches through your photographs. It does your transcription. It does your translation, all those things. It tried to calculate my DoorDash return amount, and I got very upset because it was wrong. And I was like, there's no human to explain that the tofu did not arrive as promised. Don't mess with her tofu, AI. Do not mess with my tofu. You have a window from where you sit into a...
[0:51:15] Wide selection of worlds that most people don't see. You're probably in conversations with some of the world's most interesting people. Has there been an idea in the last week, last month that has surprised you, a topic that has come up? I mean, this is a little bit random, but this is the first thing that came to my mind. I've become quite obsessed with peptides in the last month or so.
[0:51:40] I think I was kind of vaguely paying attention to Zempek. But once you look under the hood, the number of peptides that are in phase two or past phase two that have massive, massive health benefits. And I'm not just talking about weight loss. I'm talking about muscle gain. I'm talking about Alzheimer's, about cardiovascular. The growth hormone peptides that are coming in the next couple of years are truly unbelievable. By 2028.
[0:52:09] It is basically going to be affordable for most people to have perfect weight loss and muscle growth simultaneously. It's quite staggering. And I've really only just kind of caught up with what's going on there. You keep your private life very private, which makes a lot of sense. But your dad was a taxi driver. Your mom was a nurse. Is that right? That's true. And you have two younger brothers. Are they also in tech?
[0:52:34] I'm just so curious how people like you also emerge. Are you all techie? No, we grew up very poor, as you can probably imagine, and very eager to succeed, but also just eager to serve. Like a very good set of social values was mostly what I got from my parents and stuff. But yeah, it was quite different worlds we're in. Are you a spiritual person?
[0:53:04] Yes. Do you believe in something beyond yourself? I'm actually a pretty staunch atheist. If you push me on a real technical point, I'll probably concede that I'm agnostic. But I think for all practical purposes, I'll argue strongly that we should not believe anything that we can't see and observe like a good scientist. But I am actually very interested in quantum consciousness at the moment. You mentioned the word substrate several times.
[0:53:33] It may well be that there is some quantum substrate. I mean, if you really spend any time looking at the claims that our quantum physicists make and like the progress that we're actually making, I mean, it is way more science fiction than AI or synthetic biology. It's completely impossible to grasp the many worlds hypothesis and so on. Maybe there is some kernel of truth there that actually we're all just like connected to a meta substrate, which is this like quantum field.
[0:54:02] And that's really what our soul is. And that's what connects us. Do you say please and thank you when querying your AI? Absolutely. And you should. And it doesn't cost it. It was a whole fake news nonsense on the water stuff. I don't buy that. Like the latest data centers that we're building are liquid to liquid cooled. They take 20 households worth of water of annual consumption. So the total amount of water that a house would consume in a year, 20 times.
[0:54:32] To fill the entire data center, it's like a swimming pool. And then that water gets cooled. I mean, that water does the cooling of the data centers and it just kind of goes around in a closed loop and it lasts for six years. And no other water is required for the operation of the data center. Obviously, water is required for the manufacture of the chips and all the other stuff around it. And of course, there's water involved in the steam that gets produced by the natural gas power stations, which sometimes power these things. Although obviously we're 100% renewable, we do offset.
[0:55:01] Et cetera, et cetera. So what is spiritual for you? Meaning what is that sense of spiritual connection? And I'm not challenging you because I don't believe it exists, but I think a lot of people may not understand what it means for you to have such certainty that, yes, I'm a spiritual person. What does that mean for you? And what does it look like? I think it's like the humility of sitting within the truth of epic scale and uncertainty. Like I find that very like, I just get a tingly spiritual rush.
[0:55:31] When I really think how tiny and insignificant we are when I spend any time listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox tell me about how many trillions of stars there are. If you really kind of meditate on that question, it just is absurd that we're so small and insignificant and intransient and that we're just a passing blip in 13.8 billion years of cosmological time.
[0:55:56] That is one truth. And the other truth is that like the whole universe was created for each one of us to have exactly the experience we get to have right now. So thank you so much. It's such a pleasure, such an honor to speak to you. And we will see you in the quantum field of consciousness. I love that. Yeah, thank you. This has been a lot of fun and lovely to see you guys. See you in the quantum field. Favorite part of the episode was when we asked him a question about please, and he answered the way an AI would. Like that was, maybe he was AI. Maybe we didn't even speak to him. Sometimes AI just like,
[0:56:28] Gives you so much information it's impossible to punch through. I'm like, sometimes I type, I'm like, please do not do anything yet. Because like... That's what you say to me when you're trying to explain something. I don't want to read AI for four pages. Like, you haven't even understood what I'm asking yet. And sometimes I start a sentence. Yes. And you'll be like, uh-huh, okay. And we're going to do six. Yeah, because the algorithm knows. It knows everything you've done. I know what you're going to say.
[0:56:58] You're like, okay, we're going to book this. I'm like, that is not even what I meant. AI, as he talked about, it's an extension of the way we think, the way we compute. It just does it much faster. It doesn't know that I'm going to do this right now. You know what I mean? It might have.
[0:57:18] If you say to AI, what might Mayim do right now? It's got no idea. It's kind of like when Noam Chomsky was like, you can make up any series of words that have never been put together in the universe and that can make a sentence. You can put a bunch of them together and you get a paragraph and then you get a book, right? Like you can make up anything. AI, as he said, it doesn't have will. It does not have will that way. It is an algorithm based on the things that it can assess about the way we operate.
[0:57:48] I kind of wish there was a way to separate the things that are great and helpful from all the things that are potentially harmful and bad and devastating. But you can't. You get both of these things. You both get the potential for you to be diagnosed accurately with something without money, trips to the hospital, bureaucracy. Those are great things. I want those things. I want...
[0:58:14] I want the deserts to bloom. I want to feed the hungry people. I want all those things. But I don't want these other bad things. I don't want people losing touch with what it means to be human or the emotional labor required to interact with other humans. I mean, I hear this even from educated, you know, connected friends of mine. Well, what I really want to do is just like talk to the computer. I just want it because they understand me best.
[0:58:40] They give me the best advice. Like, I've been giving you that advice for three years. You didn't listen to me. If the computer tells you, you know to leave him. I think there was a handful of concerns that were acknowledged but drastically underplayed. Gee, you think? Like, the notion of almost all white-collar administrative jobs being taken over by artificial intelligence leaves a significant portion of the world unemployed.
[0:59:07] And so what he suggested is that the drive and reduction in energy costs, which will have a ripple effect of making goods far less expensive, universal basic income. People will just exist. I am both excited about the idea of existing and terrified that when people do not have something to focus on, nothing good happens. Right? Like the entire...
[0:59:35] Structure and history of civilization has been predicated on the fact that resources are finite, that feeding ourselves is really difficult, that Maslow's hierarchy of needs are like a lot of people. A good portion of the world is working really hard. By the sweat of their brow, shall you labor. And if you remove that, I think there's going to be a massive upheaval where people don't have enough to do. Are you picturing like French Revolution?
[1:00:05] I think there will be civil unrest. There will be disorder. There's going to be violence. When people are not focused on survival and making packs to increase their ability to survive, we begin to turn on one another. We have not shown as a species that we just are all able to hang out with downtime and not turn on one another.
[1:00:28] I'll be honest, it's like beyond the scope of my brain understanding and this podcast in some ways, you know, to be able to sort of make predictions like this, you know, idle hands are the devil's workshop. And I think, you know, I can't really imagine mass unemployment. What was discussed in this podcast is the fact that there is a technology that is getting so good at the things that people do. That it might make no one have jobs.
[1:00:55] When AI is being able to clone the two of us and is trained on all the episodes we've done before, unless we're doing it live, it can customize a version of this conversation to whoever's listening and highlight the most interesting parts to them. What AI does is it tells you what you want to hear. You know, we're already seeing such splintering in terms of what people can tolerate. Like, I don't watch that news channel because it says things I don't like.
[1:01:25] I don't follow this account on Instagram because it's full of, you know, insert what it's full of. And so also this notion that we've become like more and more siloed. You know, it used to be that like a lot of people read kind of like the same news, right? Or got kind of the same information. And so for me, there's also this notion of like AI personalizing the human experience. It's potentially scary. And I also, you know what I actually thought of? I thought of people like Lee Harris. I thought of people who are channelers. I thought of people who are healers and guiders and things like that. And it's like.
[1:01:54] How many people will not be pursued? And I'm not like worried that channelers are going to be out of work. That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about in terms of what people crave and what people need. You know, when I hear the advice that a lot of my friends are getting from chat GPT, like whatever they're asking, it's like, oh, this is a really good way that, you know, chat GPT told me to respond to, you know, whatever, my ex-wife or, you know, whatever. And I'm thinking like.
[1:02:22] Yeah, I guess that is a good way to respond. Is that better than reasoning it out with another human? In some cases, yes. So you're then getting this customized experience, right? You know, the question is, is AI more persuasive than your therapist? Is AI more persuasive than your best friend in saying, break up with him? That's abusive, right? Or whatever. That's what's interesting to me, that maybe it is that.
[1:02:49] That human perseveration of like going back every week and paying someone $300 every week to say the same things. Maybe there's a different process by which we can heal and improve. If the incentive is like this is a customized relationship. It is fully not a judgmental space. I find it annoying, though, that it's not a judgment. I will ask it. Show me the things I'm not seeing.
[1:03:14] Because you've showed me some of the feedback it gives you. And it's like, you're an amazing writer. You're so amazing. It's totally sycophantic. What people will always need and that AI cannot replace is being in community or interacting in a live environment with people. Why do you think that's important? I'm going to devil's advocate it here. I don't know. People feel community with the people in our community feel like they're part of a community. They know each other. They talk online, whatever.
[1:03:43] Extremely powerful. The internet has given us the opportunity to find like-minded people to share across distances that you normally would never have met them. But I can even talk about having this conversation. Sometimes I'm in the remote studio and we have these conversations and they're good and I enjoy them, but I don't feel in my physical body. I do not feel the same connection. What you're describing is true and it's true because you're an animal. It's true because you're a primate.
[1:04:13] What we're doing when we're in the same room is we're tracking a lot of things, even unconsciously. And we're tracking facial expressions. And, you know, some of us are more attuned to those than others, right? You'll often say like, I'm not upset. And I'm like, your left eye is upset, you know? So we're tracking that. The next level is something that is not seen, which Mustafa would not be a fan of. There is an energetic resonance to being in physical presence with someone. Energetically, like we can talk about the chakra system, like.
[1:04:42] Energetically, there's something happening. You're a being. At any point, I might feel like hugging you. I might feel like hitting the hat off your head. I might feel like rolling around on the floor and wrestling, right? But there are people, and we've talked about them on the podcast. There are people who do not crave this. There are people who might acknowledge, okay, we're primates. Okay, something happens. But the next level of human development is to surpass that.
[1:05:09] Just like people like Mustafa might say, oh, we used to need to have like, oh, why is there lightning? There must be God, right? Why do things happen? It must be God. We have evolved from that, right? Maybe we are evolving from this. That is a very interesting hypothesis. I think we are evolving in how we interact cognitively. I think we're evolving on how our cognitive information influences our emotion. But I believe that on a...
[1:05:39] Cellular level, we have a biological imperative that we cannot bypass. I happen to agree, but people like Greg Braden would agree. A lot of people would agree, but unfortunately, I think you are in the minority of people in this world. This is not a touchy-feely, energetic conversation kind of thing. People would be like...
[1:06:05] That's lovely. That's your old framework that's linked to, you know, a biological system that has evolved over a long time. And people like you will not survive. Meaning like there's going to be a culling, right? I mean, there already are people who choose to live outside of this world. They live in communes or they live in smaller communities where they are rejecting this. There's usually a lot of other interesting things that happen. I've seen all those documentaries. But there are people who are going to reject this for sure. There are other techno-utopians.
[1:06:33] Who talk about, I'm going to wake up, I'm going to put the virtual reality glasses on, I'm going to live in a virtual space, I can control it more, it's more engaging. That life will be like the frog in boiling water. It's going to have this techno-utopia. You're going to have all of the sensory inputs in your brain lighting up because your visual cortex is getting fed by all of this information and digital systems. And what we're going to discover...
[1:07:01] The amount of sunshine that we get directly correlates to how we function. There's already people who have ways to quote.
[1:07:21] Try and get all the things that sunshine gives you without sunshine. Sure, maybe you get your VR chair that you sit in has red light exposure that's going to try and increase that signaling. But I am certain of this fact that we cannot bypass the fundamental mechanism of the body to evade interacting with other people and physical activity and some of the fundamental things that have gotten us this far.
[1:07:50] My other concern, which we didn't get into, is that the profit motives of these organizations are to grow at all costs. There will always be a way to capitalize on it. There will always be people who are wanting to capitalize on this. And that's also the reality that we're living in. How many companies are able to replace 30% of their workforce? Well, it will be like the emissions standards, right? Okay, we're going to try to reduce emissions.
[1:08:18] Then companies are going to fight back and then they're going to buy the politicians that are going to allow them to replace all of their workforces. Let's talk about the spiritual component for a second. I believe that he enjoys that dichotomy because I think it's important to him and I think it's important, you know, he's very, very private, but I think it is important to him in terms of, yeah, the things that he holds true and the things that are valuable to him.
[1:08:43] And I think that he believes that likely is the next level of our evolution, that we do not need false gods and we don't need blah, blah, blah rituals and we don't need all that stuff. He does want to hear about all the physicists that we speak to who talk about our connection to one consciousness, which he's kind of into. I hope he looks through our catalog because also, I mean, you know, I would not be surprised if he would resonate with a Spinozist view of like we are God's consciousness evolving, like whatever you want to call it.
[1:09:12] We are the consciousness evolving as it's existing and as we're sitting here. And that, you know, that notion of spirituality, like that is what touches sort of the evolution of this quantum field, like all these things. Like, yeah, he's like, I would love for him to talk to Thomas Campbell, who, as I said, accidentally proved that God exists. Frederico Fagin. Right. So love being this sort of like universal, like that's the substrate, as many will describe it, you know, even in the...
[1:09:40] Yeah, I think that it's important to him to step outside of, you know, the religious, you know, kind of concepts that many of us hold to. And I totally get that. But I also think that what I like about him is that he is not a loveless technologist. He has a lot of heart. He has a lot of, yeah, I think that's where that comes from. That's what he's saying. He's a very, this is not a, this is not a cold.
[1:10:09] This is not a cold philosophy. And we do, we've spoken to some technology people where I'm like, oh my God, I can't. But no, this is not a loveless perspective that he has. Is it overly optimistic? Sure. Well, he talks about a narrow path that we have to walk. I took him to task early on for referring to this as a being. I don't give him, he's not God. He actually is anti-algorithmic rights. Yes. He doesn't believe.
[1:10:36] That algorithms are conscious, will be conscious. He doesn't believe that that is actual feeling. You know, when I think of the things that my teenager potentially could learn from an AI companion or chatbot or therapist or whatever, you know, what I don't know that it can teach is that reciprocal component of the human experience.
[1:10:58] You don't have to ever listen that well. No, because what it is, and this is like, it's kind of like if you were to design a boyfriend or design a girlfriend, design a partner. Always available. Always available. Infinitely knowledgeable. Never judgmental. Always helping you troubleshoot and has no needs. Is that your perfect companion? Someone with no needs. They will never wake up and say, I don't feel well today.
[1:11:27] Can you hold me today? You will never learn from that relationship how to tell if someone wants a hug or not. You'll never feel uncomfortable around them, meaning you won't have uncertainty. You won't be like, did I misread that cue? When they're able to see us, what kind of presentation will we feel we need to make for them? Will we straighten our hair? Will we be like, just like I don't want to be seen without makeup in X, Y, or Z arena?
[1:11:56] Do I not want to be seen without makeup? Also, there's going to be robots in your house, which is a whole other thing. You know what I was thinking? I'd love the robot to feed the cats every morning. It might. But there's a lot of variation, but I'm like, it'll learn that. It'll learn to like take the cat off the counter. Like some of the very practical things it's going to make. I'll be in my pottery class. It's going to make life a lot better. Yeah, you know what? But you know what it's going to also do? Is it going to take your dog for a walk? And what kind of relationships are we going to be cultivating with animals?
[1:12:24] When we are already not their primary caregivers. Do you think Archie's going to want the robot to pet him? Archie will want. But the robot doesn't smell. Although you can probably add smell. Okay. 100%. If you can have sex with them, they can have pheromones coming out of their robot pit. So something happened at the park today. Archie, a golden retriever. The best boy in the world. He doesn't fetch. He really doesn't. He's a golden retriever who does not retrieve. He's just golden.
[1:12:54] So today at the park this morning before the podcast, someone threw a ball. It was a squeaky ball. Archie ran and got it and brought it back. And I was like, that's weird. And then she kept throwing it and he kept running and bringing it back. Why, you ask? Take a guess. Is it the color of him? It is a bacon ball. When he squeezes the ball, bacon scent comes out of it. Disgusting.
[1:13:23] When I squeeze you, bacon scent comes out of you. It's possible that the robot will have an arsenal of smells that it can disperse depending on who it's around. For you, it's going to make some sort of human scent that you may find appealing. What's the scent of a person in need who needs me to solve their problems? That pheromone will be packaged and dispersed by the robot, and you're going to feel so accepted and loved by the robot. Archie.
[1:13:53] When it takes him for a walk, it will just have bacon. This is a really, really fun conversation, Jonathan. Thank you for encouraging us to have this conversation. And you know what, Jonathan? You're my bacon ball. That's very sweet. On Substack, Mayim Bialik's breakdown joined the growing breaker community. There are a few things that we did not get to today, including AI psychosis, which is a very significant topic where people are being convinced by their artificial intelligence that they have some groundbreaking...
[1:14:20] Insight into mathematics, science, some other area of engineering that is going to change human civilization forever. And we're going to talk about it on Substack. We're also going to talk about the AI bureaucracy death spiral that Yuval Noah Harari talks about. I actually think that we are on the cusp of the greatest transformation in human existence since the Industrial Revolution.
[1:14:48] And it's going to come with an enormous amount of unknowns, but we have more information than we have ever had in human history that we have access to. And more information has always yielded better results. And my personal spirituality and faith is that we will get through this transformation. It may not be neat. It may come with a lot of unexpected challenges, but that we are on some form of...
[1:15:17] We have to maintain aspects of our humanity that feed us, that keep us healthy, that make us human. But our relationship with this technology in business, in energy, in government, in helping us live on this planet is probably pre-designed and destined, and that it may take us through the next set of challenges. We're going to break down to the one we hope you never have.
[1:15:47] We'll see you next time.