But I would not underestimate the difficulty of alignment of models that are actually smarter than us of models that are capable of misrepresenting their intentions. Are you worried about spies? I'm really not worried about the way it's being leaked. We'll all be able to become more enlightened because we'd interact with an AGI that will help us see the world more correctly, like imagine talking to the best meditation teacher in history. Microsoft has been a very, very good partner for us.
So I challenge the claim that next token prediction can also pass human performance. If you're based, you're only smart enough. You just ask it like, what would it person be like? Great insight and wisdom and capability to do. Okay, today I have the pleasure of interviewing Elia Sutskver, who is the co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI. Elia, welcome to the Lunar Society. Thank you. Happy to be here.
First question and no humility allowed. There's many scientists, or maybe not many scientists, who will make a big breakthrough in their field. There's far fewer scientists who will make multiple independent breakthroughs that define their field, throughout their career. What is the difference? What distinguishes you from other researchers? Why have you been able to make multiple breakthroughs in their field?
Well, thank you for the kind words. It's hard to answer that question. I mean, I try really hard. I try hard to understand what that gave it everything you got. And that worked so far. I think that's all there is to it.
Got it. What's the explanations for why there aren't more illicit uses of GPT? Why aren't more foreign governments using it to spread propaganda or scam grandmothers or something? I mean, maybe they've been really gotten to do it a lot. But it also wouldn't surprise me if some of it was going on right now. Certainly imagine that we'd be taking some of the open source models and trying to use them for that purpose. Like I sure I would expect this would be something that'd be interested in the future. It's like technically possible that you just haven't thought about it enough, or haven't like done it at scale using their technology. Or maybe it's happening which is an element. Would you be able to track it if it was happening? I think large scale track is possible. Yes, I mean, it's requires of all special operation.
Now there's some window in which AI is very economically valuable on the scale of airplanes. Let's say what we haven't reached agi yet. How big is that window? I mean, I think this window is hard to give you a precise answer. But it's definitely going to be like a good multi-year window. It's also a question of definition because AI before it becomes agi is going to be increasingly more valuable year after year. I'd say in an exponential way. So in some sense it may feel like, especially in hindsight, it may feel like there was only one year or two years because those two years were larger than the previous years. But I would say that already last year there have been a fair amount of economic value produced by AI. Next year is going to be larger and larger after that. I think that this is going to be a good multi-year chunk of time. What that's going to be true, I would say, from now on, TLAGI pretty much.
Well, because I'm curious if there's a startup that's using your models. At some point, if you have agi, there's only one business in the world. It's open AI. How much window do they have? Does any business have, or are they actually producing something that agi can't produce?
Yeah, well, I mean, it's the same question as asking how long until agi? Yeah. I think it's a hard question to answer. I mean, I hesitate to give you a number also because there is the same where effect, where people who are optimistic people who are working on the technology tend to underestimate the time it takes to get there. But I think that the way I ground myself is by thinking about a self-driving car. In particular, there is an analogy where if you look at the TLAVA Tesla, and if you look at the self-driving behavior of it, it looks like it does everything. It does everything. But it's also clear that there is still a long way to go in terms of reliability. And we might be in a similar place with respect to our models where it also looks like we can do everything. And at the same time, it will be, we'll need to do some more work until we really iron out all the issues and make it really good and really reliable and robust and well behaved.
By 2030, what percent of GDP is AI? Oh, gosh, hard to answer that question. Very hard to answer the question. Give me an over under. Like the problem is with my error bars and locscale. So I could imagine, like I could imagine like a huge percentage, I could imagine it would be a small percentage.
Okay, so let's take the counterfactual where it is a small percentage. Let's say it's 2030 and you know, not that much economic value is imperative by these elements. As unlikely as you think this might be, what would be your best explanation right now? Why something like this might happen? My best explanation. So I really don't think that's a likely possibility.
Yeah. So that's the preface to the comment. But if I were to take the premise of your question, well, like why were things disappointing in terms of the real world impact? And my answer would be reliability. If somehow it ends up being the case that you really want them to be reliable and then it have not been reliable or if reliability are now to be harder. Then we expect I really don't think that will be the case. But if I had to pick one, if I had to pick one and you tell me like, Hey, like why didn't things work out? It would be reliability that you still have to look over the answer is and double check everything. And that's just really puts a damper on the economic value that can be used by those systems. They'll be technically mature. It's just a question of whether it'll be reliable enough.
Yeah, well in some sense, not reliable means not technological maturity. See what I mean, fair enough.
嗯,从某种意义上讲,不可靠意味着技术成熟度不高。你明白我的意思吧,还算说得通。
What's after generative models, right? So before you're working on reinforcement learning, is this is this basically it? Is this a paradigm that gets us to AGI or is there something after this? I mean, I think this paradigm is going to go really, really far and I would not underestimate it. I think it's quite likely that this exact paradigm is not going to be the quiet AGI form factor. I mean, I hesitate to say precisely what the next paradigm will be. But I think it will probably involve integration of all the different ideas that came with the game in the past.
Is there some specific one you're referring to or? I mean, it's hard to be specific. So you could argue that the next token prediction can only help us match human performance. And maybe not surpass it. What would it take to surpass human performance? So I challenge the claim that next token prediction can also pass human performance. It looks like on the surface, it cannot. It looks on the surface if you just learn to imitate, predict what people do. It means that you can only copy people. But the here is a controversial argument for why it might not be quite so if your neural net is, if your base neural net is smart enough, you just ask it like, what would it, what would it person with great insight and wisdom and capability do? Maybe such a person doesn't exist, but there's a pretty good chance of the neural net. We will be able to extrapolate how such a person would behave. Do you see what I mean?
Yes, although where would it get the sort of insight about what that person would do? If not from the data of regular people, because if you think about it, what does it mean to predict the next token well enough? What does it mean? Actually, it's actually it's a much, it's a deeper question than it seems. Predicting the next token well means that you understand the underlying reality that led to the creation of that token. It's not statistics like it is statistics, but what is statistics? In order to understand those statistics, to compress them, you need to understand what is it about the world that creates those statistics.
And so then you say, okay, well, I have all those people, what is it about people that creates their behaviors? Well, they have, you know, they have thoughts and they have feelings and they have ideas and they do things in certain ways. All of those would be deduced from next token prediction. And I'd argue that this should make it possible, not indefinitely, but to a pretty decent degree to say, well, can you guess what you do if you took a person with like this characteristic and that characteristic? Like such a person doesn't exist. But because you're so good at predicting the next token, you should still be able to guess what that person would do this hypothetical imaginary person.
These are great their mental ability, then the rest of us. When we're doing reinforcement learning on these models, how long before most of the data for the reinforcement learning is coming from AI's and not humans? I mean already most of the different reinforcement learning is coming from AI's. Yeah, well, it's like the humans are being used to train the reward function. But then the reward function in its interaction with the model is automatic and all the data that's generated in the process of reinforcement learning is created by AI.
Like if you look at the current, I would say the Nick paradigm, which is in getting some significant attention because of chat GPT reinforcement learning from human feedback. The human feedback is being used to train the reward function. And then the reward function is being used to create the data which trains them all.
Got it. And is there any hope of just removing a human from the loop and have it improve itself and some sort of alpha go away?
好的。那么,是否有可能让人类完全退出这个过程,让它自我改进,就像某种程度上的AlphaGo那样呢?
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I feel like in some sense our hopes for like our plant like very much so the thing you really want is for the human teachers that tell you that teach the AI for them to collaborate with an AI. You might want to think about it. You might want to think of it as being in a world where the human teachers do 1% of the world and the work and the AI do 99% of the work. You don't want it to be 100% AI, but you do want it to be a human machine collaboration which teaches the next machine.
Currently, I mean, I have a chance to play around these models. They seem bad at multi-step reasoning and they have been getting better. But what does it take to really surpass that barrier? I mean, I think dedicated training will get us there more improvements to the base models who get us there. But like fundamentally, I also don't feel like they're that bad at multi-step reasoning. I actually think that they are bad at mental multi-step reasoning, but they're not allowed to think out loud. But when they are allowed to think out loud, they're quite good. And I expect this to improve significantly both with better models and be special training.
Are you running out of reasoning tokens? Are there enough of them?
你的论证筹码是不是快用完了?还有足够多吗?
I mean, you know, it's okay. So for context on this question, there are claims that indeed at some point we'll run out of tokens in general to train those models. And yeah, I think this will happen one day and we'll, by the time that happens, we need to have other ways of training models, other ways of productively improving their capabilities and sharpening their behavior, making sure they're doing exactly precisely what we want without more data. You haven't run out of data yet. There's more.
Yeah, I would say I would say the data situation is still quite good. There are still lots to go. But at some point, yeah, at some point data will run it.
Okay, where what is the most valuable source of data? Is it read it to the books? What would you trade many other tokens of other varieties for?
好吧,最有价值的数据来源是什么?是从书本上阅读吗?如果有其他种类的代币,你愿意用什么去交换?
Generally speaking, you'd like tokens which are speaking about smarter things, don't come to charge like more interesting. So I mean, all this all the sources which you mentioned is available. Okay, so maybe not Twitter, but do we need to go multi-models to get more tokens or do we still have enough text tokens left?
I mean, I think that you can still go very far into text only, but going multi-models seems like a very good direction. If you're comfortable talking about this, like where is the place where we haven't scraped the tokens yet?
Oh, I mean, yeah, obviously, I mean, I can't answer that question for us, but I'm sure I'm sure that for everyone, there's a different answer to that question.
How many orders of magnitude improvement can we get just not from scale or not from data, but just from algorithm improvements?
我们能从算法改进中获得多少数量级的提升,而不仅仅依赖于规模扩大或数据增加?
Hard to answer, but I'm sure there is some. Is it some a lot or is so a little?
很难回答,但我相信确实有一些。具体来说,到底是有很多还是很少呢?
I mean, so only one way to find out.
我的意思是,只有一种方法可以找到答案。
Okay, let me get to your like quick fire opinions about these different research directions. Retrieval transformers. So just like somehow storing the data outside of the model itself and retrieving it somehow.
Seems promising. But you would you see that as a path forwarder?
看起来很有前途。但是你会把它视为一种前进的途径吗?
I think it seems promising robotics was it the right step for opening it to leave that behind?
我认为机器人技术似乎很有前景,这是一个正确的步骤,我们应该把它发扬光大,不要抛在身后。
Yeah, it was back then it really wasn't possible to continue working in robotics because it was so little data like back then if you wanted to do and robot if you wanted to work on robotics, you needed to become a robotics company. You needed to really have a giant group of people working on building robots and maintaining them and having.
And even then like if you only if you want to have 100 robots, it's a giant operation is already but you're not going to get that much data. So in a world where most of the progress comes from the combination of compute and data, right? That's where we've been where it was the combination of compute and data that drove the progress. There was no path to data from robotics. So back in the day, then you made a decision to stop working in robotics. There was no path forward. Is there one now?
So I'd say that now it is possible to create a path forward, but one needs to really commit to the task of robotics. You really need to say I'm going to build like many thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of robots and somehow collect data from them and find a gradual path where the robots are doing something slightly more useful and then the data that they get from these robots and then the data that is obtained and used to train the models need to something slightly more useful. You could imagine is kind of gradual path of improvement.
You build more robots. They do more things you collect more data and so on, but you really need to be committed to this path. If you say I want to make robotics happen, that's what you need to do. I believe that there are companies who are thinking about such doing exactly that. But I think that you need to really love robots and need to be really willing to solve all the physical and logistical problems of dealing with them. It's not the same as software at all. So I think one could make progress in robotics today with enough motivation.
What ideas are you excited to try, but you can't because they don't work well on current hardware. I don't think current hardware is a limitation. Okay. I think it's just not the case. Got it. So but anything you want to try, you can just spin it up. I mean, of course, like the thing you might say, well, I wish current hardware was cheaper or maybe it had higher. Like maybe it would be better if it was higher memory process for bandwidth, let's say. But by and large hardware is just a limitation.
Let's talk about alignment. Do you think we'll ever have a mathematical definition of alignment? Mathematical definition of things unlikely. Uh-huh. Okay, do I do think that we will instead have multiple like rather than rather than achieving one mathematical definition. I think we'll achieve multiple definitions that look at alignment from different aspects. And I think that this is how we will get the assurance that we want. And by which I mean you can look at the behavior. You can look at the behavior in various tests, the contra-ms, them in various adversarial stress situations. So the neural net operates from the inside. I think you have to look at all several of these factors at the same time.
And how short do you have to be before you release a model in the wild? Is it 100% 95%? Well, it depends how capable the model is. The more capable the model is, the more the more the higher over it, the the more confident it needs to be. Okay, so just say it's something that's almost AGI. Where is AGI? Well, it depends what your AGI can do. Keep in mind that AGI is an ambiguous term also. Like your average college undergrad. It's an AGI, right? You'd say it all, yeah. But you see what I mean. There is significantly bigger in terms of what is meant by AGI. So depending on where you put this mark, you need to be more or less confident.
Well, you mentioned a few of the paths towards alignment earlier. What is the one you think is most promising at this point? Like I think that it will be a combination. I really think that you will not want to have just one approach. I think people want to have a combination of approaches where we you spend a lot of compute. But we're certainly probably to find any mismatch between the behavior that you want it to teach and the behavior that it exhibits. We look inside into the neural net using another neural to understand how it operates on the inside. I think all of them will be necessary every approach like this reduces the probability of misalignment. And you also want to be in a world where you're.
The degree of alignment keeps of increasing faster than the capability of the models. I would say that right now our understanding of our models is still quite rudimentary. We made some progress, but much more progress is possible. And so I would expect that ultimately the thing that we'll really succeed is when we will have a small neural net that is well understood. That's given the task to study the behavior of a large neural net that is not understood to verify.
By what point is mostly I research being done by AI? I mean, so today when you use co-pilot, right? What fraction? How do you do the how do you divide it up? So I expect at some point you ask your, you know, the standard of chat GPT you say, hey, like I'm thinking about this and this can you suggest fruitful ideas I should try. And you would actually get fruitful ideas. I don't think that's the way we make it possible for you to solve problems you couldn't solve before. Got it. But it's somehow just telling the human, skipping them ideas faster or something. It's not yourself interacting with the one example. I mean, you could you could slice it in a variety of ways. But I think the bottom of the air is what idea is good insights and that's something interesting, but the neural net could help with these.
If you designed some like a billion dollar prize for some sort of alignment research result or product, what is like the concrete criteria in yourself for that billion dollar price? There's something that makes sense for such a price.
It's funny that you asked this. I was actually thinking about this exact question. I haven't I haven't come up in the exact criteria yet. Maybe something that be the benefit. Maybe a prize where we could say that. Two years later or three or five years later, we look back and say like that was the main result. So rather than say that there is a price committed that decides right away. You wait for five years and then award it retractively.
But there's no concrete thing we can identify yet as it like you solve this particular problem and you're you made a lot of progress. I think a lot of progress yet. So I wouldn't say that this would be the. The full thing.
Do you think end to end training is the right architecture for bigger and bigger models or do we need better ways of just connecting things together? I think end to end train is very promising. I think connected mixed together is a promise. Everything is promising.
So open AI is projecting revenues of a billion dollars in 2024. That might very well be correct. But I'm just curious when you're talking about a new general purpose technology. How do you estimate how big a windfall it will be? Like that. But why that particular number?
I mean, you look at the current you look at the cut, you know, we've already had a beef. So we've had a product. For quite a while now for back from the GPT three days from two years ago through the API and we've seen how it grew. We've seen how the response to Dali has grown as well. And so you see how the response to chat GPT's and I think all of this gives us information that allows us to make a relatively sensible extrapolations of 24. Maybe that would be that be one answer like you need to have a data you can't come up with those things out of thin air because otherwise your error bars will be like off by. Your earbuds are going to be like a hundred x in each direction. I mean, the most exponentials don't stay exponential. Especially when they get into bigger and bigger quantities, right? So how do you determine in this case that. I mean, like would you bet against the I.
Not after talking with you, let's talk about what like a post a GI future looks like. Are people like you, you know, I'm guessing you're working like 80 hour weeks towards this grand goal that's really assessed with. Are you going to be satisfied in a world where you're basically living in an AI retirement home or like what is a word? What is your what are you concretely doing after a G I comes?
I think the question of what. What I'll be doing or what people will be doing after a G I come. It's a very tricky question. You know, I think where where will people find meaning, but I think I think that that's something that AI could help us be. Like. One thing I imagine is that we'll all be able to become more enlightened because we'd interact with an AGI that will help us. See the world more correctly. Become better on the inside as it would allow them interact like imagine talking to the best meditation teacher in history. I think that would be a helpful thing, but I also think that because the world will change a lot, it will be very hard for people to understand. What is happening precisely and how to go and how to really contribute one thing that I think. Some people will choose to do is to become part AI in order to really expand their minds and understanding it to really be able to solve the hardest problems that society will face then.
Are you going to become part AI very tempting to tempting you. Well, do you think they'll be physically embodied humans and 3000 3000. Oh, I'll do I know what's going to happen 3000. Like what what does it look like? Are there still like humans walking around on earth or every guest thought concretely about what you actually want to squalk look like 3000.
Well, I mean that that that the thing is here's the thing like let me let me describe to you what I think is not quite right about the question. Like it implies like oh, like we get to decide how we want the world to look like. I don't think that picture is correct.
I think change is the only constant. And so of course, even after a GI's built, it doesn't mean that the world will be static. The world will continue to change. The world will continue to evolve. And it will go through all kinds of transformations.
And I really have no I don't think anyone has any idea of how the world will look like in 3000. But I do hope that there will be a lot of descendants of human beings who will leave happy fulfilled lives where they're free to do as their wish as they see fit where they are the ones who are solving their own problems.
Like one of the things which I would not want one one one world which I would find very unexciting is one where you know, you feel this powerful tool and then the government said OK, so the AGI said that society shall be running such a way and now visual run society in such a way. At much rather. Have a world where people are still free to make their own mistakes and suffer their consequences and gradually evolve morally and progress forward on their own strength. See what I mean with the AGI providing more like a base safety net.
How much time do you spend thinking about this? Thanks versus just doing the research that I do think about those things of fairbite. Yeah, things are very interesting questions.
So in what ways have the capabilities we have today in what ways have these are passed were expected them to be in 2015 and what ways are they still not where you're going to be. By this point, I mean in fairness that it's sort of expected to be in many 15 in 2015 I my thinking was a lot more. I just don't want to bet against deep learning. I want to make the biggest possible bet on deep learning don't know how that it will figure it out.
But is there any specific way in which it's been more than you expected or less than expected. I think concrete prediction you added 2015 has been. Frounced. You know, unfortunately, I don't remember concrete predictions. I made it. But I definitely, but I definitely think that overall in 2015.
I just want to move to make the biggest bet possible and deep learning. But I didn't know exactly didn't have a specific idea of how far things will go in seven years. Well, I mean, 2015.
I did have all these best with people into many 16, maybe 2017 that things will go really far. But specifics. So it's like it's both it's both the case that it surprised me and I was making these aggressive predictions. But I think maybe I believe them only only 50% on the inside.
Uh-huh. Well, what do you believe now that even most people at OpenAI would find farfetched? I mean, I think that this because we communicate a lot at OpenAI, people have a pretty good sense of what I think. And so yeah, we've reached the point of OpenAI. I think we see eye to eye on all these questions.
So Google has, you know, it's custom TPU hardware. It has all this data from all its users, you know, Gmail, what and so on. Does it give an advantage in terms of training bigger models and better models than you? So I think like when the first, first when the TPU came out, I was really impressed and I thought, wow, this is amazing.
But that's because I didn't quite understand hardware back then. What really turned out to be the case is that TPUs and GPUs are almost the same thing. They're very, very similar. It's like I think a GPU chip is a little bit bigger. I think a TPU chip is a little bit smaller. It may be a little bit cheaper. But then they make more GPUs than TPUs. So I think the GPUs might be cheaper after all. But fundamentally you have a big processor and you have a lot of memory and there is a bottleneck between those two.
And the problem that both the TPU and the GPU are trying to solve is that by the amount of time it takes you to move one floating point from the memory to the processor, you can do several hundred floating point operations on the processor. Which means that you have to do some kind of batch processing. And in this sense, both of these architectures are the same. So I really feel like hardware, like in some sense, the only thing that matters about hardware is cost cost per flop. Overall, systems cost. Okay, and there's a much better friend.
Well, actually don't know. I mean, I don't know how much should what the TPU costs are. But I would suspect that probably not if anything probably views are more expensive because there is less of them. When you're doing your work, how much of the time it's been, you know, configuring the right in the socializations, making sure the training run goes well and getting the right hyper parameters and how much is it just coming up with whole new ideas.
I would say it's a combination, but I think that coming up with it's a combination, but coming up with whole new ideas is actually not. It's like the modest part of the work certainly coming up in new ideas is important. But I think even more important is to understand the results, to understand the existing ideas, to understand what's going on.
Because normally you have these, you know, neural nets are very complicated system, right? And you ran it and you get some behavior which is hard to understand what's going on. Understanding the results, figuring out what next experiment to run. A lot of the time you spent on that.
Understanding what could be wrong, what could have caused the system, the neural net produce a result which was not expected. I'd say a lot of time you spend as well of course coming up with new ideas, but not new ideas.
I think like I don't like this and framing as much. It's not that it's false, but I think the main activity is actually understanding. How do you know what is the difference between the two? So at least in my mind when you say come up with new ideas, I'm like, oh, like what happened if it did such and such. Whereas understanding it's more like like what is this whole thing? Like what are the real underlying phenomena that are going on? What are the underlying effects? Like why? Why are we doing things this way and not another way? And of course this is very adjacent to what can be described as coming up with ideas, but I think the understanding part is where the real action takes place.
Does that describe your entire career? Like if you think back on like the image net or something, was that more new idea or was that more understanding? Well, I was definitely understanding. Definitely. It was a new understanding of very old things.
What is the experience of training on Azure and like using Azure? Fantastic. I mean, yeah, I mean Microsoft has been a very, very good partner for us and they've really helped take Azure and make it bring it to a point where it's really good for ML. And they're super happy with it.
How vulnerable is the whole ecosystem to something that might happen in Taiwan? So let's say there's like a tsunami in Taiwan or something. What would happen to AI in general? Like it's definitely going to be a significant setback. It's not going to like it might be something equivalent to like no one will be able to get more, more compute for a few years. But I expect the computers will spring up.
Like for example, I believe that Intel has fads just of the previous year of like a few generations ago. So that means that if Intel wanted to, they could produce something GPU like from like four years ago. But yeah, it's not the best. Let's say I'm actually not sure about if if if my statement about Intel is correct. But I do know that there are fads outside of Taiwan that is not as good. But you can still use them and still go very far with them. It's just it's just a setback.
What would inference get cost prohibitive as these models get bigger and bigger? So I have a different way of looking at this question. Yeah, it's not that inference will become cost prohibitive. Inference of better models will indeed become more expensive. What is it prohibitive? Well, it depends on how useful is it?
Like if it is more useful than it is expensive than it is not prohibitive. Like to give you an analogy, like suppose you want to talk to a lawyer. You have some case you or need some advice or something. You are perfectly happy to spend $5,000 an hour. Right? So if your neural net could give you like really reliable legal advice, you'd say I'm happy to spend $400 for that advice. And suddenly inference becomes very much non-prohibitive.
The question is can neural net produce an answer good enough at this cost? Yes. And you will just have like price discrimination and different models and different models. I mean, it's already the case today. So on our product, the API, we serve multiple neural nets of different sizes. And different customers use different neural nets of different sizes depending on their use case.
Like if someone can take a small model and fine tune it and get something that's satisfactory for them, they'll use that. Yeah. But if someone wants to do something more complicated and more interesting, they'll use the biggest model.
How do you prevent these models from just becoming commodities where these different companies just they just pay the share their prices down until it's basically been the cost of the GPU run? Yeah. I think there is a question of force that's trying to create that and the answer is you've got to keep on making progress.
You've got to keep improving the models. You've got to keep on coming up with new ideas and making our models better and more reliable, more trustworthy. So you can trust their answers. All those things. Yeah. The last thing is like 2025.
And the model from 2024 somebody just offering it a cost. And it's like so pretty good. Why would people use a new one from 2025 if the one from just a year old there is, you know, even better.
So there are several answers there for some use cases that may be true. There will be a new model from 2025 which will be driving the more interesting use cases. There's also going to be a question of inference costs like you can if you can do research to serve the same model at less cost. So there will be different.
The same model you'll be served will cost different different amounts to serve. And I can also imagine some degree of specialization to where some companies may try to specialize in some area and be stronger in an error area compared to other companies. And I think that too may. That may be a response to commoditization to some degree.
As overtime do these different companies do their research directions converge with their diverge. Are they doing similar and similar things over time or are they doing are they going up branching off in the different areas. So that's in the near term it looks like this convergence in the like I expect this going to be a convergence a divergence converge behavior where there is a lot of convergence on the near term work. There's going to be some divergence on the longer term work. But then once the longer term work starts to yield through that I think there will be conversions again.
Got it. What one of the most promising area they have really just that's right now. There is obviously less less publishing now so it will take a longer before this promising direction gets rediscovered. That's how I'd imagine it. I think it's going to be convergence to the average convergence.
Yeah, we talked about this a little bit at the beginning, but you know as foreign governments learn about how capable these models are. How do you are you worried about spies or some sort of attack to get your weights or you know somehow abuse these models and learn about them. Yeah, it's definitely something that you absolutely can discount that. Yeah. And yeah, something that we right guard against the best of our ability, but it's going to be a problem for everyone who is building this.
How do you prevent your weights from leaking or what? I mean, you have like really good security people. And like how many people have the if they wanted to just like access agent of the weights, a machine, how many people could do that? I mean, like what I can say is that the security people that we have the built to have done a really good job so that I'm really not worried about the way to speak.
What kinds of emerging properties are expecting from these models at this scale? Is there something that just comes about day now, though? I'm sure things will come out. I'm sure really new surprising properties and come up. I would not be surprised. The thing which I'm really excited about or the thing we should like to see is reliability and controllability and things that this will be very, very important class of emerging properties.
If you have reliability and controllability, I think that helps you solve a lot of problems reliability music and trust the models out with controllability music and troll it. And we'll see what it will be very cool if those emerging properties did exist. Is there somewhere you can predict today that advance? Like what will happen in this parameter? We'll have an average.
I think it's possible to make some predictions about specific specific capabilities. It's definitely not simple and you can't do it in a super fine brain way at least today. But I think getting better at that is really important than anyone who is interested in who has research ideas on how to do that. I think that can be a valuable contribution.
How seriously do you take these scaling laws? If there's a paper that says, oh, you just increase. You need this many orders of magnitude more to get all the reasoning out. Do you take that seriously or do you think it breaks down at some point?
Well, the thing is that the scaling not tells you what happens as you, what happens to your look to your next word prediction accuracy, right? There is a whole separate challenge of linking next word prediction accuracy to reasoning capability. I do believe that indeed the reason link, but this link is completely. And we may find that there are other things that can give us more reasoning pre-unit effort.
Like for example, some special look, you know, you mentioned reasoning tokens and I think they can be helpful. There can be there can be probably some things. Is this something you're considering just hiring humans to generate tokens for you or is it all going to come from that already exists out there?
I mean, I think that relying on people to teach our models to do things, especially, you know, to make sure that they are well behaved and they don't produce false things. I think it's an extremely sensible thing to do.
我认为让人们教导我们的模型去做事,特别是确保它们行为良好,不产生错误的东西,这是非常明智的。
Isn't it odd that we have the data we need exactly the same time as we have the transfer or at the exact same time that we have these GPUs? Is it odd to you that all these things happen at the same time or do you not see that way?
Here is why it's less odd. So what is the driving force behind the fact that the data exists, that the GPUs exist, that the transformer exists? So, as a data exists because computers became better and cheaper, we've got smaller and smaller transistors. And suddenly at some point it became economical for every person to have a personal computer. Once everyone has a personal computer, you really want to connect them with a network. You get the internet. Once you have the internet, you have suddenly data appearing in great quantities.
The GPUs were improving concurrently because you have the smallest small and small transistors and you're looking for things to do with them. The gaming turned out to be a thing that you could do. And then at some point the gaming GPU and VDS had waited a second. Right? It made it turn it into a general-purpose GPU computer. Maybe someone will find it useful. Turns out it's good for neural nets.
So, it could have been the case that maybe the GPU would have arrived five years later or ten years later. If, let's suppose, gaming wasn't the same. It's kind of hard to imagine. What does it mean if gaming isn't the same? But it could. Maybe there was a counterfactual world where GPUs arrived five years after the data or five years before the data. In which case, maybe things would move a little bit more. Things would have been as ready to go as they are now. But that's the picture which I imagined.
The only progress in all these dimensions is very intertwined. It's not a coincidence that you don't get to pick and choose which dimensions things improve if you see what I mean.
所有这些方面的进步都是密不可分的。也就是说,你无法选择改进的方面,这并非巧合。
How inevitable is this kind of progress? So, if, let's say, you and Jeffrey Henten and a few other pioneers, if they were never born, does the deep learning revolution happen around the same time? How much does it delay?
I think maybe there would have been some delay, maybe like your delays. It's really hard to tell. Really? It's really hard to tell. I mean, I hesitate to give a lot a lot, a longer answer because, okay, well, then you'd have GPUs would keep on improving, right? Then at some point, I cannot see how someone would not have discovered it. Because here's the other thing. Is it, if, okay, so let's suppose no one has done it. Computers keep getting faster and better. It becomes easier and easier to train these neural nets. Because you have bigger GPUs. So it takes less engineering effort, train one. You don't need to optimize your code as much. When the image and the data set came out, it was huge and it was very, very difficult to use. Now, imagine, wait for a few years and it becomes very easy to download and people can just just thinker. So I would imagine that like a modest number of years maximum, this would be my guess. I hesitate to give a lot a longer answer, though, you can't, you can't run. You can't rerun the world, you don't know.
Let's go back to alignment for a second. As somebody who deeply understands these models, what is your intuition of how hard alignment will be?
让我们再回到对齐问题上来。作为一个对这些模型有深刻理解的人,您对于实现对齐有多困难的直觉是什么?
Like, I think, so here's what I would say. I think with the current level of capabilities, I think we have a pretty good set of ideas of how to align them. But I would not underestimate the difficulty of alignment of models that are actually smarter than us. Of models that are capable of misrepresenting their intentions. Like, I think it's something to think about a lot and to research.
I think this is one area also, by the way, you know, like oftentimes academic researchers asked me, asked me where, what's the best place where they can contribute? And I think, alignment research is one place where I think academic researchers can make very many contributions. I believe in that.
Do you think academia will come up with an insight about actual capabilities or is that going to be just the companies at this point? The companies will realize the capabilities. I think it's very possible for academic research to come up with those insights. I think it's just, it doesn't seem to happen that much for some reason, but I don't, I don't think there's anything fundamental about academia.
Like, it's not like academia can't. I think maybe they're just not thinking about the right problems or something because maybe it's just easier to see what needs to be done inside these companies. Hmm. I see, but there's a possibility that somebody could just realize. Yeah, I totally think so.
Like, why would I possibly rule this out? I mean, what are the concrete steps by which these language models start actually impacting the world of atoms and not just the world of bits? Well, you see, I don't think that there is a distinction, a plain distinction between the world of bits and the world of atoms. Suppose the neural net tells you that, hey, like here is like something that you should do and it's going to improve your life, but you need to let rearrange your apartment in a certain way. And you go and rearrange your apartment as a result. The neural net impact the world of atoms just fair enough, fair enough.
Do you think it'll take a couple of additional breakters as important as a transformer? They get to super human AI or do you think we basically got the insights in the books somewhere and we just need to implement them and connect them? So I don't really see such a big distinction in those two cases and let me explain why. Like, I think what's what one of the ways in which progress is taken place in the past. Is that we've understood that something had a property.
A desirable property all along, but you didn't realize. So is that a breakthrough? You can say yes, it is. Is that an implementation of something on the books? Also, yes. So I am, I my feeling is that a few of those are quite likely to happen, but that in hindsight it will not feel like a breakthrough. Everybody is going to say, oh, well, of course, like it's totally obvious that such and such thing can. And work, you see with a transformer, the reason it's being brought up as a bigot as a specific advances because it's the kind of thing that was not obvious or almost anyone.
So we look and say, yeah, like it's not something which they knew about. But if an advance comes from something like let's consider that the most fundamental advance of deep learning. That the big neural network trained its back propagation and do a lot of things like where is the novelty? Not in the neural network. Not in the back propagation. But then somehow it's the kind of, but it was it is most definitely a giant conceptual breakthrough because for the longest time people just didn't see that. But then now that everyone sees it, I was going to say, well, of course, like it's totally obvious, big neural network. Everyone knows that they can do it.
So is your opinion of your former advisors, new forward forward algorithm? I think that it's an attempt to brain a neural network without back propagation. And I think that this is especially interesting if you are motivated to try to understand how the brain might be learning its connections. The reason for that is that as far as I know, neuroscientists are really convinced that the brain cannot implement back propagation because the signals in the synopsis only move in one direction. And so if you have a neuroscience motivation and you want to say, okay, how can I come up with something that tries to approximate the good properties of back propagation without doing back propagation? That's what the forward forward algorithm is trying to do. But if you are trying to just engineer a good system, there is no reason to not use back propagation. Like it's the only algorithm.
I guess I've heard you in different contexts talk about the like using humans as the existing example case that you know, AGI exists, right? At what point do you take the metaphor less seriously and feel they don't feel the need to pursue it in terms of research? Is it is important to you as a sort of existence case? Like at what point does stop caring about humans as an existence case of intelligence? Or as the sort of as an example in the model you want to follow in terms of pursuing intelligence in models?
I see. I mean, like you got a I think it's good to be inspired by humans. I think it's good to be inspired by the brain. I think there is an art into being inspired by humans and the brain correctly because it's very easy to latch on to an non essential quality of humans or of the brain. And I think many people who wants who many people whose research is trying to be inspired by humans and by the brain often gets a little bit specific. People get a little bit too.
And what cognitive science model should follow at the same time consider the idea of the neural network itself, the idea of the artificial neuron. This too is inspired by the brain, but it turned out to be extremely fruitful. So how do we do this? What behaviors of human beings are essential that you say like this is something that proves to us that it's possible. What is in essential? I think that we have a little bit of a little bit of an intuition that is a little bit different from what we do. So we have a little bit of information that is not information, the norm and of something more basic. And we just need to focus on our own our own basic right.
I would say that it's like I think one should one can and should be inspired by human intelligence with care. It's such a strong correlation between being first to the deep learning revolution and still being one of the top researchers. You would think that these two things wouldn't be that correlated. Why is that that correlation? I don't think those things are super correlated indeed. I feel like in my case, I mean honestly it's hard to answer the question. You know, I just kept on kept trying really hard and it turned out to have suffice thus far. So it's a perseverance. It's a necessary but not a sufficient condition, like you know many things need to come together in order to really figure something out. Like you need to really go for it and also need to have the right way of looking at things. So it's hard to give them like a really meaningful answer to this question.
All right. Ilya, it is a very true pleasure. Thank you so much for coming out of the lunar society. I appreciate you bringing us to the offices. Thank you. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.
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