Distilling the major events and challenges in the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning, from Thomas Krendl Gilbert and Nathan Lambert.
We're back! Tom and Nate catch up after the Thanksgiving holiday. Our main question was -- what were the biggest AI stories of the year? We touch on the core themes of the show: infrastructure, AI realities, and and antitrust. The power buildout to scale out AI is going to have very real long-term impacts.Some links this week:* Ben Thompson's, The End of the Beginning: https://stratechery.com/2020/the-end-of-the-beginning/* Miles Brundage's Substack: https://milesbrundage.substack.com/p/why-im-leaving-openai-and-what-im* Stochastic Parrots paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922Thanks for listening! Get The Retort (https://retortai.com/)…… on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheRetortAIPodcast… on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0FDjH8ujv7p8ELZGkBvrfv?si=fa17a4d408f245ee… on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-retort-ai-podcast/id1706223190… Follow Interconnects: https://www.interconnects.ai/… email us: [email protected]
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47:45
The Nobel Albatross
Tom and Nate catch up on the happenings in AI. Of course, we're focused on the biggest awards available to us as esteemed scientists (or something close enough) -- the Nobel Prizes! What does it mean in the trajectory of AI for Hinton and Hassabis to carry added scientific weight. Honestly, feels like a sinking ship. Some links:* Schmidhuber tweet: https://x.com/SchmidhuberAI/status/1844022724328394780* Hinton "I'm proud my student fired Sam": https://x.com/Grady_Booch/status/184414542282424329000:00 Introduction04:43 Criticism of AI-related Nobel Prize awards09:06 Geoffrey Hinton's comments on winning the Nobel Prize18:14 Debate on who should be credited for current AI advancements25:53 Changes in the nature of scientific research and recognition34:44 Changes in AI safety culture and company dynamics37:27 Discussion on AI scaling and its impact on the industry42:21 Reflection on the ongoing AI hype cycleRetort on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheRetortAIPodcastRetort on Twitter: https://x.com/retortaiRetort website: https://retortai.com/Retort email: mail at retortai dot com
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44:55
Claude Needs a Constitutional Convention
Tom and Nate catch up on recent events (before the OpenAI o1 release) and opportunities in transparency/policy. We recap the legendary scam of Matt from IT department, why disclosing the outcomes of process is not enough, and more. This is a great episode on understanding why the process technology was birthed from is just as important as the outcome!Some links:* Nathan's post on Model Specs for regulation https://www.interconnects.ai/p/a-post-training-approach-to-ai-regulation* Nathan's post on inference spend https://www.interconnects.ai/p/openai-strawberry-and-inference-scaling-lawsSend your questions to mail at retortai dot com
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42:27
Avoiding the AI burnout
Tom and Nate catch up on core themes of AI after a somewhat unintended summer break. We discuss the moral groundings and philosophy of what we're building, our travels, The Anxious Generation, AGI obsessions, an update on AI Ethics vs. AI Safety, and plenty more in between.As always, contact us at [email protected] links we mention in the episode:* The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail https://motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf* The Anxious Generation https://www.amazon.com/Anxious-Generation-Rewiring-Childhood-Epidemic/dp/0593655036* Shadow Lake Lodge https://shadowlakelodge.com/* Recent Dwarkesh Podcast https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/joe-carlsmith
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36:37
What we are getting wrong about AI regulation
Tom and Nate catch up on the rapidly evolving (and political) space of AI regulation. We cover CA SB 1047, recent policing of data scraping, presidential appointees, antitrust intention vs. implementation, FLOP thresholds, and everything else touching the future of large ML models.Nate's internet cut out, so this episode ends a little abruptly. Reach out with any questions to mail at retortai.comSome links:- night falls on the cumberlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Comes_to_the_Cumberlands- hillbilly elegy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Elegy- wired piece on data https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-training-data-apple-nvidia-anthropic/- nate's recent piece on AI regulation https://www.interconnects.ai/p/sb-1047-and-open-weights00:00 Intro 01:19 Training Data and the Media 03:43 Norms, Power, and the Limits of Regulation08:52 OpenAI's Business Model12:33 Antitrust: The Essential Tool for Governing AI17:11 Users as Afterthoughts20:07 Depoliticizing AI 26:14 "Breaking Bad" & the AI Parallel28:11 The "Little Tech" Agenda31:03 Reframing the Narrative of Big Tech 32:20 "The Lean Startup" & AI's Uncertainty
Distilling the major events and challenges in the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning, from Thomas Krendl Gilbert and Nathan Lambert.
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