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Sooo, Big Yud appeared on Lex Fridman for 3 hours, a few scattered thoughts:
Jesus Christ his mannerisms are weird. His face scrunches up and he shows all his teeth whenever he seems to be thinking especially hard about anything, I didn't remember him being this way in the public talks he gave a decade ago, so this must either only be happening in conversations, or something changed. He wasn't like this on the bankless podcast he did a while ago. It also became clear to me that Eliezer cannot become the public face of AI safety, his entire image, from the fedora, to the cheap shirt, facial expressions and flabby small arms oozes "I'm a crank" energy, even if I mostly agree with his arguments.
Eliezer also appears to very sincerely believe that we're all completely screwed beyond any chance of repair and all of humanity will die within 5 or 10 years. GPT4 was a much bigger jump in performance from GPT3 than he expected, and in fact he thought that the GPT series would saturate to a level lower than GPT4's current performance, so he doesn't trust his own model of how Deep Learning capabilities will evolve. He sees GPT4 as the beginning of the final stretch: AGI and SAI are in sight and will be achieved soon... followed by everyone dying. (in an incredible twist of fate, him being right would make Kurzweil's 2029 prediction for AGI almost bang on)
He gets emotional about what to tell the children, about physicists wasting their lives working on string theory, and I can see real desperation in his voice when he talks about what he thinks is really needed to get out of this (global cooperation about banning all GPU farms and large LLM training runs indefinitely, on the level of even stricter nuclear treaties). Whatever you might say about him, he's either fully sincere about everything or has acting ability that stretches the imagination.
Lex is also a fucking moron throughout the whole conversation, he can barely even interact with Yud's thought experiments of imagining yourself being someone trapped in a box, trying to exert control over the world outside yourself, and he brings up essentially worthless viewpoints throughout the whole discussion. You can see Eliezer trying to diplomatically offer suggested discussion routes, but Lex just doesn't know enough about the topic to provide any intelligent pushback or guide the audience through the actual AI safety arguments.
Eliezer also makes an interesting observation/prediction about when we'll finally decide that AIs are real people worthy of moral considerations: that point is when we'll be able to pair midjourney-like photorealistic video generation of attractive young women with chatGPT-like outputs and voice synthesis. At that point he predicts that millions of men will insist that their waifus are actual real people. I'm inclined to believe him, and I think we're only about a year or at most two away from this actually being a reality. So: AGI in 12 months. Hang on to your chairs people, the rocket engines of humanity are starting up, and the destination is unknown.
Did you know Lex is affiliated with MIT and is himself an AI researcher and programmer? Shocking isn't it? There's such a huge disconnect between the questions I want asked (as a techbro myself) and what he ends up asking.
At any given time I have like 5 questions I want him to ask a guest and very often he asks none of those and instead says "what if the thing that's missing... is LOVE?!?"
To give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he could ask those questions but avoids them to try to keep it humanities focused. No less painful to listen to.
For someone "obviously high IQ", he seems unable to understand a very simple thought experiment. He wasn't even aware it was a thought experiment, as he asked shortly afterwards if Yud has any thought experiment to help understand the intelligence gap.
I don't particularly like Yud as a person, but ironically I think that conversation itself was a good illustration of an intelligence gap.
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There was a comment in the old place that had an interesting observation about Lex
In short, he realized that there's a niche in 'hyperpopular podcast space' that Rogan doesn't quite fill, and he bent himself into the exact shape required to fill it.
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I refuse to believe that Lex is smarter than Joe Rogan. Joe has a capacity to quickly "get" things and concepts that Lex just doesn't have.
It's believed Lex plays an idiot in order to be more relatable.
I'm leaning towards it, tbh. He isn't very smart - it could very well be that he's about as smart as I am, merely tries much harder, but at times he says outrageously stupid, inane 110 IQ shit quite often. He'đ been discussed here before.
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I would expect Joe to be somewhere around 2 standard deviations above the norm in intelligence, aka somewhere around the average physics PhD level. He's just interested in a particular set of things. Lex is probably similar, with a different set of interests.
Everyone shitting on Lex need to realise that he's a podcast host, not a supergenius TM braggart showing off their mensa card. It's his role to play a part in the discussion to make his audience want to keep listening. That audience isn't just clever techies, and I expect he is rewarded quite well by the glorious algorithm by behaving in this way.
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Didn’t he just like, give the MIT equivalent of a TEDx talk? He’s only “affiliated” with them in the most tenuous sense.
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IIRC, when people dug into this, the affiliation was real but not close to what people would think if AI researcher Lex Friedman was to email them from his MIT address or tell them he taught a class there.
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Oh that's way too charitable towards him, I think he really wanted to go as technically deep as he was able, given that this is about AI and he views AI as part of his region of expertise. At least the crypto-dudes on the bankless podcast asked Eliezer their own naive but sincere questions, they knew they were out of their depth and didn't try to somehow pretend at expertise. But Lex insistently tries to steer the conversation towards "deep topics", and for him this means bringing up Love, Consciousness, The Human Condition, etc.
I think he's trying to imitate Old Esteemed Physicists, who after a lifetime of deep technical contributions spend a few minutes or a small book talking about Beauty and Love, but with Lex it just perpetually feels unearned.
Yeah, perhaps it's too charitable. I'm remembering him absolutely flubbing the Earth in a jar thought experiment and wanted to shake him. I would've said "right, step one, scour their internet and learn as much as we possibly can about them without any chance of arousing suspicion. step two, figure out if there's any risk they'd destroy us and under what conditions. step three, if we're at an unacceptable risk, figure out how to take over their civilization and either hold them hostage or destroy them first. boom done. okay, are we on the same page Yud? great, now here's why I think this thought experiment sucks..."
Also that discussion on steelmanning. How did that go so off the rails.
I can't believe I still have another hour to go.
He didn't even acquit himself smoothly, either.
It actually read to me like he was aware that if he made any honest statements in response it would potentially lead to some blowback ("popular podcaster casually discussing how he'd genocide a whole planet") or controversy and his safety systems deployed to completely derail that line of questioning.
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