"I Worked for DARPA & Here's the Truth..." | Lee Cronin

Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then, sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Lee, it's great to have you back, man. Good to see you. Last time you were here, episode 289, it was like a year and a half ago, you closed off, like we literally stopped the cameras and then you're like, yeah, I was doing some work for DARPA as well. And you just lay that one on us. And I'm like, well, I mean, you're supposed to say that at the beginning of the podcast, but now you're telling me like, ah, it's not that big a deal. How's DARPA not a big deal? I mean, I'm like, I'm a big DARPA fan. Yeah, I know. So I will, I've had maybe, let me get this right. So how many grants have I had from DARPA? So DARPA is a funder, right? They're a funder. They're a grant funder. They give people money. I think their reason they were established, you know why they were established? I think you can check this. Their mandate was like to not, when Sputnik went up into space, the US were not expecting that satellite, the Soviets launched a satellite, I believe it was in the fifties. I think that's right. And it basically DARPA was then established to, to, to eliminate strategic surprise. So there were, so basically that want a load of money, fund people to do crazy things and also to have a mandate to do stuff. So arguably DARPA might've had something to do with say the internet, right? Self-driving cars. Um, and, um, a few years ago, DARPA started looking at, um, chemistry and AI like many years ago, way, not way before, way before the hype now. And they, there was a program they started called make it actually. Um, and I, and the, the person who started it, you know, they kind of used, um, uh, some terminology from one of my papers. And I was kind of a bit grumpy. They didn't offer me any funding, right. Cause they had, they gave money to MIT to Stanford. research institute darpa plagiarized lee cronin i didn't you used the p word they were inspired i said anyway they i remember they got on a call with me and i was like complaining bitterly um the fact that they used this paragraph from you know what i was trying to do and they're like dr cronin we're phoning you up because we want to talk to you about that i was like okay and basically what it turned out is they wanted me to put in a white paper and i said okay i want this you know a zillion dollars and they said well why not ask for a little bit less and do this thing that fits into our program you know as u.s taxpayers and you're one of the uh you know few uh groups overseas doing this thing and we think it would be valuable for us and what was the thing specifically so it was to it was to um it was part of their make it program can you make molecules on demand right in theater or you know on the moon in antarctica whatever right how do we do chemistry robotically and then when they asked me about that and i've been building chemical robots for years you've been building chemical robots for years yeah yeah yeah that's a dense statement for for since 2012 right 20 so about yeah about 14 years how would you define a chemical robot for people out there who are unfamiliar a robot that you give instructions to and it will do chemistry so yeah i mean it's fit it's out so i made i can tell you about but let me answer the question because you asked so that was the first grant they gave me make it and they and that they carried on giving money there and then they were they had a one on computation using molecules to make molecular computers and i i got money from darpa there and that was in a u.s consortium so there was a couple other groups in the u.s right and then there was another uh grant that gave me uh for kind of advanced using ai for discovery so they were the three darpa grant i think there's really good what year did they give you the ai grant i can't remember i mean ballpark 2019 2018 2019 and then it carried on through the pandemic it was a bit tougher in the pandemic but darpa a brilliant organization right they go where the experts are they don't give grants to people in countries that are probably anti-america i would say right so don't just so they're not they didn't fund been a lot and basically so they're and and also they they want to start new fields and they want to start fields that are going to obviously be of strategic importance right and the uk and the us have done a lot of um hookups in different scientific disciplines for a long while so i thought that was quite good um the molecular i made a molecular computer chemicals to do computation as well because what does that mean yeah i don't know yeah i mean so so well i know what it means now so what does a computer do so a computer we're around going everywhere but anyway let's start with what is a chemical computer a chemical computer is a chemistry set where you could put in inputs the the the data you input the data and into the chemistry somehow and the chemistry would then take that data and process it using chemical reactions run transistors on silicon and then you'd read it out using it some method and i was like i built a chemical computer um using a thing called the bluzov-sabaskinsky reaction which is a chemical clock and all it does goes tick-tock tick-tock or red blue red blue red blue okay so basically pour a lot of chemicals in the pot you could just take uh you know maybe a just a beaker which is like a like a glass put in half fill it up halfway put in some chemicals and without doing anything just leaving look watching it it would flash red blue red blue red blue whilst you're stirring it when you stop stirring it it would basically stop but then spontaneously flash one color or another what's called an excitable media it's a bit like how think about how neurons flash so that's a cool idea why don't i just basically make a grid of stirrers so i 3d printed a grid basically about the size of a small book and in that grid there was it was seven by seven grids so 49 um little wells and i put a stirrer bar in each one and had put a little motor under it and stirred them and put the chemical reaction in and all the colors went across the grid and i used a web camera to basically read out the colors and so when the stirrers were on i could that that was a one when the stirrer was off that was a zero and i basically then uh put uh basically printed in ones and zeros to represent some input and then just read it out and then worked out what it was doing we kind of just made it up to start with yeah what does that tell us when you're done well that's it's a DARPA project it's supposed to be crazy man no so what it was supposed to do is is could i could i somehow use the because remember the bz is a clock tick tock tick tock tick tock if you put a load of clocks together and you allow them to synchronize as they desynchronize you could process some information so we actually used it to classify and we used it to make a primitive neural net and the idea was a neural net you literally use no power and you can use it to read out what's going on and what's going on and you can do a lot of things with that and it was it was a really good idea and it was quite good at error correction and could like refine images so the same way you'd use chat gpt or you'd use a kind of nvidia's architecture to do gradient descent and what is gradient descent well it's basically that it changes the weightings in the in the neural network and to basically you know kind of maximize um its training capability because obviously you have the weights and the and the activations two different things but basically this was a chemical neural net and it was the idea it was the first step i'm now making brain gels but that's another discussion you're making brain gels now because we put that and put it in a gel because it was all liquid it's sloppy and it the memory wasn't that good but if you put it in a gel then maybe you could then basically use the polymer gel to flip to switch in such a way you could teach the system to learn for a longer period of time one of if not the most common dms i get on instagram are many of you asking me what my favorite books are well today's your lucky day because if you use the link in my description below to join my newsletter i'm going to give you my top 10 book recommendations right now also if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make money producing content from the show you can do so via the discord link in my description below and finally you can join my patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the patreon link in my description below as always please take one second to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already i really appreciate that also the like button's a big help and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below how does that work scientifically no idea that's why i did it so you're trying to figure it out it basically yeah i mean look we're again we're all over the place but why not that's good i was inspired by the episode of pickle rick and rick and morty and i was like well i and so so so so it's like i took a gherkin right and attached the gherkin to the mains to 240 volts and then put in low low you know my workshop i have at home um and used a bunch of electrodes and i tried to program the gherkin to recognize the difference between a circle and a square but it kept exploding kept exploding because it kept heating up with them so i had so long so i took the gherkin i thought the gherkin could be a good um it seemed like a good idea it's like it always does a gherkin computer like literally you could just be making this up right it's like yeah just anyway so gherkin heat it up to put it in there it sounds ridiculous you heat it up by putting it in the 240 volts what would happen the sodium ions potassium ions because it's in salt so you've got this gherkin you soak it in salt so it has this salt in it it's conducting when you put power when you put electricity into it when you put alternating current at high voltage it heats up and basically the ions can move around so it literally makes an excitable media a bit like the bz reaction like flashing on off on off but here with a gherkin and then when i put in little electrodes i put in little grid and i was then trying to basically train the gherkin to tell the difference between a square and a circle because it was made malleable it's a bit like taking some uh taking uh some cement and making a gherkin and then you put it in a little grid and then you put it in a little grid and then you make it liquid again and then you make it liquid again and it'll learn something and you'll set it but the thing is the gherkin kept exploding uh before i could actually train it and this is in your lab at your house i did at home yeah i mean i don't think the university would be too happy with that so now fast forward to the brain gel i was like well look if i could take a gel and then make the gel conduct right so it conducts electricity a bit like a um um yeah like a wire but and then put in electrodes on one face and the other and program one surface using a camera so i could just take a visual feed and plug it into the jet into the gel and then basically read out as i show the camera to different objects can the gel tell the difference between the edges on the objects and train it in the same way you'd use open cv or some kind of um silicon based um uh system for edge detection right it's a bit like you use a jetson nano or something right and that and i was just playing around if i could use material to compute turns out you can but the now you're like when you said well how's that work and i laughed well it's not because i'm making it up but because the way you program material is the material spawns in time um according to its stimuli so it's very much trial and error so a bit like how the brain has evolved like the brain has evolved over billions of years and so the brain has a number of different kind of programming periods it was programmed by evolution so your brain let's say it's 3.8 billion years old so that's time that's time number one then um you are created by your parents so over a period of nine months your brain is growing in the womb as you as you and so your brain is starting to program when you're then born obviously between you go through massive developmental surges so you know age 21 22 your brain may be fully almost there so then your brain is enabled to process data in real time so there's all these different developmental stages so the brain is able to evolve grow be programmed activate and then continue to work and we have no idea how brains work and what are unique to brains well sentience consciousness the purpose the the the and a living system that will tell you that they are an individual you talk to all humans most humans can communicate with will claim they're an individual so you think the brain is the thing that is strictly just programming that in and it might not necessarily mean that that's the case no no i think there is something very interesting i don't think it stops with the brain i think biological systems are very complicated but i think humans are unique in that they will claim to be an individual right with words if we teach them language um and i think that's uh something that we don't understand how chemistry gives rise to consciousness and how chemistry gives rise to um you know the fact that i will claim to be me and i have my own particular personality and do stuff this is very important this time because we're viewing that ai is our entities are sentient and they are indeed they are not yeah you've made a lot of arguments on this because you think that for example a lot of ai doomers are making leaps that the ai can exist without human beings i guess in the future and you don't agree that that's the case yeah clearly clearly not it's fantastical why do you say it's fantastical well we've not seen any evidence of the so the a if we think about the origin of ai right to go all the way back origin of life the ai is produced by well let's say the origin of the term ai was at the darpa sorry no wait a minute don't do that the darp the dartmouth meeting uh-huh right which you know you can check it and slip right there okay whatever i can i will let's build as many conspiracies as we can go um but i think darpa have funded some ai work right right at the beginning so at dartmouth college the term ai was was um was was kind of coined when was that again in the 50s i mean i don't know 56 i don't know um but a long time ago maybe maybe a bit later um and so but if you think about what a computer is a computer is a deterministically um built system it's sort of a switches right um and the way those switches work is um we we build a computer is built out switches those switches have high and low you you put those together to make logic gates those logic gates the the universal logic gate in a computer is a nand gate a nand gate yeah and not and right you can build everything with not ands right you can so not ands are literally you can build memories you can build everything the way you architect those together you build the silicon the silicon infrastructure for everything we have today is based on that there may be some differences that i'm you know electrical engineers watching this listening to this might be shouting going no that's wrong there are other things called asics which are basically um that you might be able to do um what we would call um let me neuromorphic computing where basically you will you could have an analog voltage so in a transistor you basically typically you have a voltage between zero and five five is high one zero is low zero and something in between and and and if it's if it's on the zero side you call it a low and if it's on the on the five volt side you call it a one but um i'm not a qualified electrical engineer so um i don't know how the asics are built today i've designed some asics for fun for fun yeah well i want to build a brain so if i want to build a device a chemical brain i have to design a i need to have an analog kind of electrical system for um you know i don't know um addressing the the chemical brain but we'll get there yeah we'll come back to that so the the so the most important thing um with a computer is like it's fairly deterministic in some regard and what sorry let's not say that it's digital and so that means i can put in the inputs in there and go on so with ais today they're based upon digital computers and they use all this digital infrastructure we take massive amounts of data and train a model and the model can do splendid things um but the idea that these models could you know run away and i agree the models could run away with bad humans running them right there's always a human in the loop the human is turning on the power station the ais although they are you know we use terms like recursively self-programming i mean it's a bit like you and i could build an ai now that we can have a do we can have a loop in a program like you know um do this thing and if this thing is it occurs then do that thing and carry on until you it either hits the objective or you someone turns off the computer now that's always been the case right those loops have always existed so the so the ai doomers are kind of stuck in this like um this kind of fantastical reality whereby they say that ai could overtake the world and cause a nuclear explosion or something else what i think is more likely is that bad humans using the ai to do bad things will happen and and and i do worry about that so i'm not dismissing ai doomers i'm dismissing ai doomers who are saying this thing will happen because magic on its own yeah got it and i think that is actually a major worry because they're talking about magic and actually there's just some doomer going some some bad actor going i'm gonna use ai to crack into this system and do some damage or i'm gonna i'm gonna use an ai to bot system that will basically do some social engineering on social media to cause some kind of effect right so i think that i haven't seen any evidence of sentience in any ai right the sentience comes from humans exclusively any evidence of sentience you get from the internet the training on the model if you say claude are you alive claude will say no i'm not alive but i and they'll use i and this anthropomorphization is just to hook you to be addicted to to talking to the entity what if it's a format what is if it's a technicality though and it doesn't get the sentience but because and i'm gonna way oversimplify this for a minute we're able to eventually or create technology that isn't quite simply plugged in and you know unplugged to be able to do that because of that a non-sentient but extremely intelligent artificial intelligence who has no ability to empathize feel obviously feel any sort of emotion or level of humanity and so i think that's the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the for something like that to possibly happen so i don't i don't i don't quite understand the statement and but i i know what you mean so i'm not going to be too obtuse but ais are they intelligent we have to define intelligence what really makes me very confused is there are people out there that say in x years the ai will be more intelligent than any human and what does that mean what is intelligence if you can't measure something so could the ai um cause something to happen progressive's accident response can contact emergency services if you're in a major accident the only thing worse than someone you love being in an accident is not being able to help them so progressive is here to help when you can't so get peace of mind knowing your loved ones are protected with progressive's accident response learn more at progressive.com progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates limited availability in california driver is responsible for emergency and towing charges not covered by the policy coverage subject to policy terms and conditions this episode is brought to you by universal pictures fucker and law spin this thanksgiving with the fuckers the beloved meet the parents franchise returns with a twist robert de niro and ben stiller are back joined by ariana grande as the newest member of the family get ready for laughs unexpected surprises and a hilarious new chapter of the family saga fucker and law rated pg-13 only in theaters this thanksgiving get tickets now um on its own no could humans not understanding how to set up a system cause something bad to happen think about social engineering i don't know take any system like uh this is kind of hard because i'm not a qualified i'm not qualified but let's um let's say um we're going to um i don't know create a type of um bylaw in the city that says right we you know we have to have a system that's going to be able to have trees every you know for you to get planning permission in the city every time you build a building you have to have a tree or every corner or something so suddenly before you you know it there's just random trees everywhere um and um i was gonna say bless you people got it bless you twice dude's dying over here um so so what happens is when humans make decisions and policies they get propagated and they get propagated by systems whether it's in a corporation or in a um in a institution or in a software algorithm right so those those things get propagated and there are unforeseen consequences of them and i totally buy that ai is object trying to build to um achieve an objective um could do bad things um but those bad things were humans are in the loop all the time and i guess what i'm trying to say is the the ai is not bad the human is bad or the training data is bad yeah so don't so and that would if i agreed with that point and you might be right you know i i honestly hope you're right and it is in control of humanity by the way selfishly speaking here but like let's assume though there are some sociopaths who have their hands on the trigger with these things which i think it's fair to say some of the technocrats we have in the world not all of them but some of them may fit that bill what's to stop people like you know to put a name on it like a sam altman who jokes about humanity ending what's to stop him from being like oh you know today i want to play fucking world of warcraft but with ai and let it go wild so look um i have a lot of sympathy for people who are building companies and building technologies i'm building one myself right now which we can talk about i think we have to kind of we have to take a step back and say what are we built how are we building our technologies how are we regulating those technologies and and how are how do we then get feedback from the regulation of those technologies to make sure that the good things are happening to humanity so if we if let's take an example where this has already happened right we got the internet and then we got social media so what was the critical failure in social media has given us arguably i don't think anyone would argue that social media is particularly nice right now right what's the failure yeah i think there's so there's one critical thing that people should have done uh which was the policy makers should have said to social media they should be treated like publishers section 230 or whatever i don't know what the u.s version is so if you're treated like a publisher that is anything you put on your on your on your platform you have to basically be held accountable for and so that you that you don't you when you start putting nonsense out there um it can be taken you have to say no it's clearly a lie we put it down you have to say no it's clearly a lie we put it down right so basically facebook and you're good you're good so facebook and x and um instagram and all the and all these entities are not accountable for the stuff they put out now that's for me that's a real problem because basically that that entire decision although you know they're a they're a medium it's a bit like you can't hold the type the person who built the type the printing press liable for the bad books printed right i get that same way we might argue when you talk about my chemical robots am i going to be liable for anyone making any bad chemistry on them but i i do think there's something we can learn from the social media and the fact we didn't regulate that we didn't hold them accountable and so um it's very hard to know how it's going to evolve however having said that there if someone invents the social media that's quite good as in you know a nice place to be and not a hellscape right and if we can work out why humans are very good at being you know you get a anger for attention right sorry if you create anger you get the system wants so you know if there was a social media system whereby i'm not saying it should be like you know some kind of mary poppins world where everyone's like you know it's all flying around and all happy but but they're i guess we understand the psychology of social media and the negative effects it has particularly on teenagers when i grew up there was no social media and i've i've seen that social media has been probably a negative for a lot of teenagers but some might argue it's like well in in environments where they don't have access to social centers or youth clubs and things there's people can work play online play games interact one another support one another and we don't see all those positive things because they're only the negative things are amplified so when it comes to social media we don't see all those positive things and when it comes to a.i we have a similar quandary which is how do we how do we let the free market and free humans dictate what's happening because there is one argument if you look at the difference between say uh anthropic and maybe open a.i anthropic basically won't let you do anything on the models because it's got some kind of higher purpose wired in whereas open a.i is like no no i'm going to serve you as the entity and actually if i'm a i want to and if i choose to use the object to do bad things and i'm breaking the law then i should be held accountable sure whereas like and i think so i i'm not sure if i'm getting that correct but it seems to me that there is a kind of a split right in this right now but but that's kind of obscured by the doom is saying a.i could run away and i don't understand the mechanism for running away i do understand the mechanism for tinkering i do understand the mechanism for but may put disinformation out there or for doing some kind of now the conspiracy theories that don't aren't yet possible here's one crazy thing look there's no real conspiracy theories in history not many because humans couldn't keep them secret but if we had good a.i's and we could just pump you could play around with the future with the a.i's pretty well and that might be one thing to be worried about now you know is there one big if we say that you know one particular political movement or post-second world war when the winners talk about what happened could that be one big glorified conspiracy theory because obviously the winners write the history books okay yeah there's always a percentage that's written by victors for sure as far as like when you look at a story it's never 100 what was said i take issue with when you then try to say well if five percent wasn't what we were told therefore a hundred percent's not you know you got to be careful with where you go absolutely absolutely and i think that's really important in terms of nowadays i think um i that critical reasoning to what can i verify and what what do i find impactful to me is really important so i think one of the things that i think a.i will accelerate the the teaching of critical reasoning right now we're in this real um I I worry a lot about um how young people are going to be allowed to get their first job you know make mistakes get the training the Mastery is required have the the hard work and motion frustration is the best trainer right but whereas like people you don't want to get frustrated now just use chat GPT and so but I think this is an aberration I think these tools are actually a lot of them are really good like the coding tools are amazing and so I I do wonder and this is me actually shifting my emphasis a bit that a.i might actually save us all save us all save us all because social media is such a cluster right if by using a.i we can actually allow but help us do critical thinking help us verify things if we understand that the you know the current ai is as generated are not very good at actually um class as classically trained weren't very good at being correct but actually they're getting better at being correct because you you can say hey go out and check the literature and check if this thing actually happened and help me you know storm at straw man or steel man a particular argument and then also help me understand um as objectively as possible how i might frame that argument because if if nothing else these ais might be able to allow you to do one-to-one teaching they've got infinite time infinite patience and if you use them correctly if you use them correctly well we might be yeah if we can use anything incorrectly like i say you know so so i'm kind of i'm as you might tell in where i'm just saying wildly contradictory things um uh strong opinions loosely help yeah yeah i mean for sure um but i i do think that the the doomers are kind of like they're kind of out it's a bit like you know um that well i would say that the doomers serve a very good purpose but i just wonder if the doomers could actually help us by shifting their doom to the real issues that we need to um uh do a little bit of a different approach to it and i think that's a really good um uh deal with such as like bad actors using the systems right well that's the thing that i'm thinking about with your world right there that you're painting on paper that would make sense but again if these different platforms because there's many of them are going to actually be a positive and help teach critical thinking and things like that for a person to be able to do that themselves then i think a requirement for humanity for all of them across the board would then be you need to open source all of them and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point because you don't want to know or you want to make sure that there are not human beings you know just slightly injecting their little opinions into coding the actual ai i'm going to use a fake word here but the ai organism that is going to teach us to to what we do well let me know what you're not ai organisms are cybernetic organisms they are the combination of human programmers and the model working together right so i'm very happy to say the sentience in the ai comes from humans right and so i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point and this is really the nice mystery um that we can talk about um but look i'm uniquely unqualified although um to to say what the models do because i don't build fine well i mean i build models but i build models based on data and very basic learning algorithms and systems because i need i need a first principles understand it if i can't understand it um then i don't tend to implement it and the reason for that is like i need to understand what the model is and i need to understand what the model is doing and a lot of these models are kind of they've got lots of meta levels it's a bit like having a conversation with someone and you think they're understanding you and you've got completely different images in your head and then you leave the conversation they go and do something else they're completely different to what you thought they would do and you're going to likewise so so so you can have what you've got to be able to do with these systems to somehow ground them and understand uh conceptually what's going on in science that's really important the only thing i have exception to is that i've got to be able to do something i've got to be able to do in ai my hard lines are the ais are not intelligent right they're not intelligent not intelligent they're not intelligent how do you define intelligence yeah that's the question that is the question that makes sense because people talk about ai agi and super intelligence what is super intelligence everybody like um is super intelligence like some kind of magic that i don't understand what is intelligence and what is artificial general intelligence let's go all the way back and just i've got very strong positions on this i've got very strong positions on this which i think will which will um uh you know will endure the time uh um so intelligence i would define um to be a property um of an entity to solve problems um that will allow that entity to survive so this is like a biology right so so now um a general intelligence is would be an entity that cannot solve almost any problem to come that's coming at it to survive an entity that cannot solve can can solve any problem like so you've got you've got basically you could say your entity is really good at mathematics right um now people will say well the ais are good at mathematics and they do solve problems so now we're saying right well i think that the ais are very good at taking a prompt a problem that you can solve and you can solve it and you can solve it and so what i'm playing with right now is trying to engage with people positively about what we mean by intelligence right and intelligence is a very interesting thing and and what i will say to you is that we do not yet know yet how to define or measure it i'm working on a problem a shadow problem that i'm uniquely used to and i'm working on a problem that i'm uniquely used to and i'm unqualified for maybe uniquely qualified for the which are which will have a go at measuring it and i'm and i'm really inspired by going back in science looking at problems and discontinuities in problems so the one that i really like is like the concept of temperature we knew in the part or gravity but let's take temperature we know that things are hot and cold but what is that oh that's hot oh that's cold so that we didn't really know how to measure temperature we knew some things were hot some things were cold it wasn't until um humans scientists were able to actually the technologists would say right what do we need to be able to do we need to to measure temperature right how do you measure temperature today well the good old days you'd have a thermometer the thermometer could have a number of different liquids in it you want a liquid that would basically as the temperature goes up it would expand and hopefully have kind of a linear relationship so whether that's mercury or alcohol and so if you take an alcohol and you can measure it you can measure it you can measure it you can measure it you can measure it you can measure it you can measure it you can measure it you can measure it you can measure it you can measure it so for that expansion let's go back so i just want to say temperature we knew that things are hot and cold we didn't have a scale how do we get a scale well we realized that liquids expand as they as they get hot and they contract as they cool down great so let's let's build a system whereby we can measure the expansion of liquid what technology is required when we need a glass and what property we do need that glass we need the glass be human uniform because if you made it fat and thin and fanning out maybe maybe you know a triangle shape and then you can measure the expansion of liquid that ain't going to work very well so you needed to make a really nice tube where the the the sides of the tube were parallel was a perfect cylinder was perfect as you can get well back in in earlier times there were some glass blowers in italy that perfected how glass blow tubes suddenly the glass glass blow the tubes and then you put the alcohol in you could go around and measure the temperature everywhere suddenly oh it feels cold here we'll go antarctica this temperature oh we go here and of course the americans we're gonna have fahrenheit i don't know where you guys got fahrenheit i like fahrenheit a lot better it has more units like a celsius a one degree celsius jump is a jump but if it goes like 82 to 83 it's you know i'm wearing the same thing okay we got that right you got that wrong just take the l please um well there is this temperature scale called the absolute scale and and kelvin scale so one degree kelvin is the same as one degree celsius it just goes down to minus something or other so that means zero kelvin is the lowest temperature you can get you can't get any colder than zero k right in fact you can't achieve zero k anywhere on earth we've built some really good um systems you can almost get to absolute zero and what that would mean is the molecules absolute zero wouldn't do anything they wouldn't even vibrate they'd just be like stationary but um but anyway so i digress brilliant thing about temperature technology was built to measure it right right we knew things were hot and cold but before but we didn't know what quite what it meant now intelligence the problem is human cognition and psychology and iq tests and all this stuff and we have people saying well you know this ai will be able to solve any problem from a human they're misunderstanding what intelligence is giving a algorithm a series of queries to solve a mathematics test is not the same thing as a human solving an unseen problem and intelligence is actually the ability to solve an unseen problem now unseen is hard right because it's not in my training i can't solve it so this is the problem but when i actually have the problem and i've solved it i can train on it am i way oversimplifying this if i put it in the bucket of almost what you're saying is logic versus the ability to be creative well we'll get there logic is so the way to computers are quite good at using logic if you encode them properly there's some good programming language to do it and they can do lots of things no what i'm saying is something super concrete that um uh intelligent intelligence is a thing we don't know yet how to define or measure and i think for a little hobby because i'm basically bored and i haven't got enough work you're bored i'm far from bored and i'm too busy but i think it someone needs to have a go at this and of course i'm uniquely unqualified so maybe that'll make me I've almost finished it so it's not that hard so yeah You're so busy, you don't change clothes. I did wash – I have 12 different – I think 12 pink shirts in play today. All right. I'm going to need to see some evidence of that because that looks like the same shirt as last time. Probably. I don't know. You can check. Maybe the other one was a wide collar one. These are narrower collars. Evidence. I was going to wear a different pink – anyway, it doesn't matter. It's all right. It looks sharp. It's fine. But you're talking about intelligence. So the nice thing is I don't have a cognitive load, right, when I dress. It's just pink. But it's – That's good. Simple man. It could be like Mark Zuckerberg and he just wears like, I don't know, blue, gray. Gray, I think. Does he have like a – He just wears gray. Isn't he like kind of like based with fashion now? Like he's always wearing different chains and shit? Sure. I don't know. I mean, me no billionaire. Got it. Me just poor person. Hey, you just raised like 70 milli. I don't want to hear it. Sure. I mean, but I raised it to change the world and chemistry. That's right. Not sort out my wardrobe. That's right. But fine. We can go back there. But let's go back to intelligence measuring because I want to linger on it. You can measure temperature and therefore we can have a scale and we got there. We don't know what intelligence is. We've got the IQ issue. We've also got the race issue that goes along with it, right, that's out there. And also the genetics issue, right, which was all kind of like crazy because psychologists and cognitive psychologists and so got confused. But then we got people confusing the AI is getting good at stuff as being intelligent. Yeah. Sometimes you make questionable ones like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states. This episode is brought to you by Universal Pictures' Fokker & Law. Spin this Thanksgiving with the Fokkers. The beloved Meet the Parents franchise returns with a twist. Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller are back. Joined by Ariana Grande as the newest member of the family. Get ready for laughs, unexpected surprises, and a hilarious new chapter of the family saga. Fokker & Law, rated PG-13. Only in theaters this Thanksgiving. Get tickets now. And so, you know, I think Elon keeps saying, Oh. The AI, Grok is going to be a PhD level in all these subjects right now. And therefore no PhDs. And that is such a fundamental fail. Why? Because PhD. So, let me explain how the AIs work right now. And I'm going to convince you, and hopefully by extension anyone listening or watching this. So, AIs today do the following thing. You get a lot of data. You take that data and you train a model. That's right. And that model will be able to tell you what's in that data, right? And find your relationships in that data. Great. So, that data, if let's say the internet, all the problems solved in the past are encoded. Let's say all the problems solved in that past are captured in that data set. So, when you give the AI a problem that's been solved in the past, it can solve it, right? That's not intelligence. That is incredible retrieval. And retention. Exactly, right? And sometimes the AIs aren't that good because they hallucinate and so on. They hallucinate? Well, because of the way the structures of some of these models work, they hallucinate. And so, what happens is that because they have to give you back a output, it's less problematic now because the frontier labs, I don't know what they call the frontier labs. The top AI providers. Are very good at basically having what's called a, having a checking system. They might say, oh, come out with an answer, we'll check it. Like, you would go to chat GPT and say, you know, calculate, do a GIST calculation. It used to just retrieve it using the model. But, of course, the model would not get it right because the numbers, the training data in the internet, humans kind of put there by humans. And so, it would just give you a random number back. But now it says, oh, I recognize. This is a calculation. Let me bring up my calculator tool. Press the buttons on the calculator and get the number back. Right? So, the AIs are quite good at doing things like that. But the thing is, the AIs are trained on this huge amount of data. And all the problems that we've solved up till now in humanity are in there. So, potentially, that's awesome. But a PhD, scientist, mathematician, is not about understanding the past. They're trained on that. It's about using. Using the scientific method to solve problems. So, whenever you give a new problem that's not in the data set to the AI, it can't solve it. But what if it has enough data and enough retention from all the things in the world that it can keep at one time that a human can't such that it can find abnormalities or holes or something to be able to then, for lack of a better way of putting it, plug it in a way, in a faster way than a human could. How's that not intelligent? So, I would not. So, because if we, again, we have to define intelligence. You can call it, I would call that very useful, right? My calculator is very useful. There are many tools I've built that have been built that are useful, that enable me as an entity with, you know, with human rights, right, to do stuff. But Einstein with a pencil was much more intelligent than Einstein without a pencil. Because he was able to use a pen and paper, pencil and paper to think. So, it's almost like a cybernetic thing. So, we get trapped in these circular arguments. Are the AIs intelligent? To all the AIs, do they have free will? And are they sentient? Right? It's where we kind of confuse it. So, people use intelligence as a confusion. Intelligent entities can solve problems and want to persist in time. That's called biology. I would say intelligence is a property absolutely reserved for biological organisms. Right? Now, what are the AIs? We can call them maybe augmented informatics, that would be the word. Augmented informatics? Yeah. That's a lot to say, Lee. I know, it doesn't sound as good as AI, right? Yeah, let's get it shorter. Artificial intelligence sounds great, right? I'm like, wow, right? So, there is a culture, there's a zeitgeist associated with it. But again, the AIs aren't magic, they are incredible, incredible models. In fact, they are revealing things about human language and cognition. That we didn't expect, and that is. Like what? The AI, so again, I'm not an expert. So, if you train an AI in a certain language, and then you train it in another language, and you look at the representations of those entities, let's say, king or queen or brick on cement, they occupy a space that is prelingual. Right? Which is conceptual. In English, what do you mean? Ask the AI. Basically, there is a mathematical representation beyond the language in a space, right? Okay. Which is really interesting, but not that surprising, because humans use language to represent concepts. So, if I basically take the Spanish, and I distinguish it. And I distill Spanish to find out love and hate, hot and cold, up and down, and plot them in some space. And I do the same in English, you overlay them, they're very close. This is why AI translation tools are amazing. Right? Yeah. I don't know if. I haven't tried it yet, but this is great German. I learned German, I'm not very good at it now, but there's a great word in German called gemütlich. Gemütlich. Gemütlich, which is like loosely translates as cozy. So, I don't know if you. Gemütlich? Gemütlich, because they go, "Das ist gemütlich, ja." Okay. If you go into a pub in the UK, and it's a windy winter night, and it's cold outside, and there's a nice fireplace and beer, you go and go, "Oh, that's cozy, nice." Gemütlich. Yeah. Germans have it, but it doesn't quite translate, right? Like, it's a different kind of word. So, there are cultural representations, and the Inuits have a lot, right? Because the Inuits have to live in the cold a lot, right? That's right. There are lots of terms, but let's go back again. What is intelligence? We don't know. Can we measure it? We don't have a measurement. We know what temperature is. So, we've got an idea. These AI tools are able to do very important, very interesting things. They can automate a lot of tasks. But I'm going to make one, again, one statement, and I'll keep coming back to it. The AI only knows what it's trained on, and if something is embedded in that data, and you query it correctly, you can get that out, which is great, right? And the AIs are showing there's a huge amount of knowledge that we haven't explicitly found in the internet, in human knowledge, that we can pull out. But it can't use the way the humans query and reason over time to put together patterns to be able to predict how they're going to query in the future and potentially outrun humans before we can get there? I don't understand that statement. I understood all of it until they outrun humans, until we get there. Because if they can patternize everything -- like, let me give an example, because it's a little bit complicated. complex. If I'm talking to an AI and a hundred other people people in a population are talking to an AI and we're all trying to figure out something about paint. And we're asking all these questions about different colors and how we paint a room and whatever. The way I ask questions in a series of queries, even if it's very similar to the next person, the wording might be different or a specific thing I may be interested might be different. But the AI is collecting all of these different at volume and at scale, all these different ways of querying things so they can try to pat the AI can use all of its computational technology to be able to patternize what everyone's saying and be able to predict what the optimal questions might actually be. So in that way, the way I see it is it could be outrunning humans. Front running them is maybe a better way to put it. So yeah, this is really interesting. So no, no, no, that's not what's happening. Thanks for clearing that up. Well, so and I think there's a fallacy here, which is super interesting. And again, look, I'm very happy to be wrong on this, but I want to come to it with data. So AIs are prediction machines. Humans are creation machines. And so AIs, when the creations are kind of shallow, the AI is great at finding them. You take all these air dish problems, all these ways you find in mathematics, so the AIs are solving. I mean, and you find all these disproving certain conjectures. AIs are very good at disproving things by finding a counter example. But AIs, an AI has not come up with a single creative mathematical act, right? Hasn't come up with a single creative scientific act. Now, people will argue about this. Now, I want to actually stop this argument, because it's actually obscuring what the AIs are good at. And I tell you, in the last two years, last one half years, AIs have supercharged my ability to be creative. Because I don't have to spend my time doing things that, writing code and collecting data and processing things. The AIs are splendid at it. They're really, really great. But what they can't do is they can't create. They can appear to create, right? And those creations are relatively shallow. But I would say, and this is where I'm really interested in where intelligence is. Intelligence I would measure is by the ability to solve problems that are unseen. AIs are able to solve problems that are seen or embedded in their data. That's probably called, I don't know, we should call it a different word. Like, it's not a problem. So AIs are very good at doing new, can do new things, right? But they can't do novel things. And so the question is, what is the difference between novel and new? And here it is, right? New is something that you can get from your data set. It's just a combination of things. It's fairly shallow. Novel, so you can search for new, something new in your data set and find it in the end. So when the AI does something, and you go, oh, that's exciting. You can see that it is just new. And it's entirely, embedded in that data. Humans are able to do something which I call novel. And novelty is defined by that thing that is in principle, not predictable and not embedded in the data. So, but when I then do it, it's a bit like fashion. Fashion is a music. That's right. You're not going to know when humans are going to do, you know, I might, you might have me back on your podcast one day. I might come back wearing a color you were, anticipating. Is that new or novel? Well, it's novel because you're in prior data. I'm just wearing pink. Right. Right. The AI is just going to make you in this suit. So when I come in wearing, I don't know, turquoise or something or whatever else, you'd be like, that's novel. And so, and it's very interesting that humans are kind of misunderstanding it, but there is a certain amount of mis-selling here because we're trying to sell AI as intelligent, going to replace PhDs, replace this. And human beings are going to use the AIs to massively fix their cognitive capabilities, right? Not replace them. This is where everyone's going wrong. AI is going to replace science. No, they're not. I mean, because science is about problem solving. Well, you actually just made a point a couple of minutes ago, and I can't believe I've never looked at it this simply. It's like the most obvious 30,000 foot in the air point. We've had this AI crisis now, I'm putting that in air quotes, being talked about extensively over, I'd say the last decade, but particularly the last three to where everyone's using it on LLMs and God knows what they have behind the scenes. And I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. Maybe you know, but like they haven't created their own equals MC squared yet or anything like that, which is make kind of making your point for you. Like there's not something they have not figured out the laws of quantum or I'm just making up things right now. But these things that scientists are constantly trying to test every day, therefore, not only have they not replaced the highest level guys like you, they haven't replaced science in any way at all, technically to this point. Well, I would say, um, people have used AI to come up with very good new ideas for making new drugs, folding proteins, solving some physics problems, but these problems are already well defined by the human. That's right. Right. For data processing. So the AIs are a great tool. They're a tool. I don't understand. I, I think there's something really interesting sociologically happening and culture. So culturally and technically happening now. Um, now I, I'm not going to geolocate it. You can all guess, but we have this problem right now where people saying AIs, the AI labs need a lot of money. They need a lot of infrastructure. They need a lot of energy. Right. And we're saying in academia, there is this political, um, push against academia. Academia is full of left wing people who are basically, you know, don't critically think and all woke and so on. Therefore, let's just replace all academia with AI as new science. Right. Now that's just such a fail on all levels. Sure. Academia has problems, right? There's, but ideologies and things everywhere, but given the AI providers, builders don't know what science is, right. You know, they, they simply don't, they're populated by computer scientists and mathematicians now. Um, and they don't, and that's not me saying being elitist. It's just like solving scientific problems in a wet laboratory, whether it's a biological lab or chemistry lab or a physics lab, or you're trying to do some mechanical engineering problems are very visceral things. Right. And it requires creation like the governor in a steam engine, you know, someone's like, oh yeah, I need a, why do you make sure I can, the boiler doesn't explode and I need to do this thing and you know, build stuff. We, we interact with the world. Now we will be able to build models and whether we build, I'm building a world model for chemistry. What does that mean? Well, I'm just learning all the chemical reactions by doing them. And then once I've learned them, I'll then be able to make any molecule. That's pretty cool. That's very cool. But, but that, but that's not magic. It's just like, I have to collect the data. I have to have a verifiable process and then I have to be able to then run it and get it. And so I think the science has never been in a more exciting place. Right. And it's, it's just a shame that we have this culture war that's going on at the same time, because we have to make a decision. Do we want to spend all this money on CP on GPU, CPUs, water, energy, whatever, to basically crunch the data and give back products to people, or do we want to spend the money on humans doing that as well? Right. So it's kind of like a choice you can spend money on. How much does it cost to, to produce a human that can solve a problem that you can use chat GPT for, right? Like it's, there's not magic, right? You just say, well, if I want to, if I want to replace a human with chat GPT, I can, but what is the cost? And I've got the human out there who's now got not got a job to do well, maybe the human will do something more interesting, but it's, there are so many different things. There's many layers. Maybe we can go back. I go back to one fundamental thing. We don't yet know what intelligence is. We haven't measured it. We're using AIs to do very important, very interesting things at scale and at speed, but it's not diminishing a human. So you said at the beginning of, of when you were explaining this with the intelligence loop, you said there's three layers. We often talk about intelligence, general intelligence, and then super intelligence. So if I'm understanding you correctly, because we can't even measure the bottom layer, you're saying it's like 10 leaps and a fucking skip to get to the next layers, obviously. Yeah. I mean, AG. So I think that the, the, the providers of AI, right. And I actually like the, I like the products. They're great. Right. I don't know about your glasses though. They were doing some shit math before. You might want to check those things. Yeah. I'm, I'm not doing any product, um, promotion on your podcast. There you go. Um, so I, and then, but they're not meta glasses. Yeah, but meta might've actually gotten that right. Not that I'm trying to show for them. No, no, they, they worked. It was just, okay. Anyway, I'm a little off to me. Well, okay. Um, but so let, but let's go back. So we say, um, AI, so AGI, lots of people will say that an AGI is, um, what the term we would give to something that can automate most tasks. Now, is that an AGI, an artificial general intelligence, or is it just an, an artificial general? I don't know. Um, uh, automated. so like you know if i it'd be great if i have an ai that can clean up my emails but actually i mean i do use an ai to clean up my emails i use one that's about maybe eight years old and it kind of and what i do is i'm obsessive email cleaner i answer all my emails that i want to answer and i basically file everything and i keep them all and so i just file them and it's a it's a filing system so i i just because then when new stuff comes in it doesn't get lost in the noise right don't look at my emails i get so many emails every day it just i find it incredibly depressing because i lose stuff in the noise i need to answer or get you know i've only got so much cognitive bandwidth so an artificial general intelligence that the frontier labs are discussing is literally an entity that could just solve a lot of problems right um sorry do a load of tasks does it solve general problems no humans are good at this and i think you know maybe there are some jobs that humans have that are filing but we our failure uh maybe in um in human society right now as people go from school to university or wherever they go into a job is maybe we need to generate jobs that have more value and meaning right we can do that and ai provides a great chance that now let's go to super intelligence well nick bostrom made up this term yeah we got off this last time we didn't go deep on this i've read that whole book i'd really like to it means just making shit up right it's like it's like if look if you can't define a thing and you say it's super i mean i could be a super chemist what does that mean i mean so a super intelligence for me would be to say be somehow that's beyond our current understanding of physics and mathematics like magic again it super intelligence plays on this kind of oh there could be this entity that's way more intelligent than me knows more what does that mean right we human beings are able to discern how the universe works we're able to understand far more than maybe evolution has equipped us with it would seem now what the doomers say is well this super intelligence could understand how to you know do things that could basically end humanity or build a super duper weapon or something well i don't understand the evidence for that so what i try to do is deflate the term super intelligence because i don't know what that means now it could mean let me let me make a take a stab at three different things i don't know what that means but i don't know what that means i don't know what that means it could be it's just a faster way of thinking right well sure chess computers can do chess really fast so i could buy that but why call it super just fast it could be that it is able to um play through some kind of chain of reasoning um how i can basically look at um decision theory and i can if i plant these seeds and these decisions i can basically create disruption thank you guys for checking out this clip if you haven't already subscribed please subscribe and hit the like button on this video it is a huge huge help and if you'd like to check out this clip's full podcast episode that link is in the description below or right here and finally you can follow me on instagram and x by using the links in my description below are you ever shopping online and suddenly a discount that helps you save pops up it makes your day sometimes even your week want that feeling month after month well new customers who save by switching their home and auto insurance to progressive save hundreds queue your happy dance get your quote today at progressive.com progressive casualty insurance company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states this episode is brought to you by universal pictures fokker and law spend this thanksgiving with the fokkers the beloved meet the parents franchise returns with a twist robert de niro and ben stiller are back joined by ariana grande as the newest member of the family get ready for laughs unexpected surprises and a whole new world of fun and hilarious new chapter of the family saga fokker and law rated pg-13 only in theaters this thanksgiving get tickets now the secret society of semi-homemade listen up sam's club has pre-made dishes for a thanksgiving feast that's ready in two hours all while tasting suspiciously homemade come join us sam's club individual oven times may vary your sausage mcmuffin with egg didn't change your receipt did the sausage mcmuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown a small coffee for just five dollars only at mcdonald's for a limited time price and participation may vary promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing introducing pandora's holiday collection this season celebrate the ones you know by heart with a gift that says it all from engravable pieces to festive charms to lab-grown diamonds pandora's jewelry is made for the ones who inspire you who've been there through it all give a piece that says exactly what words can't pandora more than a gift shop new styles in store or online at pandora.net