Masters of Scale
00:23:14 · Demis Hassabis, Reid Hoffman
I just think it's dangerous to think one has. That's the first thing. There's a technical problem, especially if you combine it with something like an RSI. [00:23:22] S3: Yes, exactly. There's reason why we're going in this direction. [00:23:25] S2: RSI with self volition is you know, sort of doubly dangerous. So that's one thing. Second thing is a societal... More of a societal issue, which is that I don't think we are ready yet as a society. We haven't had the debate with a wider society, philosophers, theologians, artists, humanities, not just technologists, to, you know... And from many different cultures, like, do we want to cross that second Rubicon? Are we ready to have the discussion about do these systems have moral standing? Do we need to worry about what are we doing with them in this box? You know, are they slaves of some sort? You know, all these questions come up that are complex questions, and I don't think we're equipped to even begin to start dealing with those questions. So my view is we should cross the first Rubicon on its own, which is build these intelligent tools, and then actually use these intelligent tools to do more neuroscience to go back... I'd go back and do more neuroscience to actually understand what the neural correlates of consciousness really are. Finally Yes. Understand that. Yes. And then, you know, that will probably take five, ten years, and then cross the second Rubicon. Well, to have a discussion about should we cross the second Rubicon, and then if so, how? Yes. Right? Of the conscious entity type.
00:23:25 · Demis Hassabis, Reid Hoffman
[00:23:25] S2: RSI with self volition is you know, sort of doubly dangerous. So that's one thing. Second thing is a societal... More of a societal issue, which is that I don't think we are ready yet as a society. We haven't had the debate with a wider society, philosophers, theologians, artists, humanities, not just technologists, to, you know... And from many different cultures, like, do we want to cross that second Rubicon? Are we ready to have the discussion about do these systems have moral standing? Do we need to worry about what are we doing with them in this box? You know, are they slaves of some sort? You know, all these questions come up that are complex questions, and I don't think we're equipped to even begin to start dealing with those questions. So my view is we should cross the first Rubicon on its own, which is build these intelligent tools, and then actually use these intelligent tools to do more neuroscience to go back... I'd go back and do more neuroscience to actually understand what the neural correlates of consciousness really are. Finally Yes. Understand that. Yes. And then, you know, that will probably take five, ten years, and then cross the second Rubicon. Well, to have a discussion about should we cross the second Rubicon, and then if so, how? Yes. Right? Of the conscious entity type. [00:24:38] S4: And how would you... Because you engaged in hours of these discussions. How would
00:24:38 · Reid Hoffman, Reid Hoffman
[00:24:38] S4: And how would you... Because you engaged in hours of these discussions. How would [00:24:42] S3: you answer the folks who say, look, it's the only way we get the intelligent correlate to be powerful enough is it has, as it were, the ephemeral accidental. Yes. It actually has this cognitive state and so Right.
00:24:53 · Demis Hassabis
[00:24:53] S2: So we should talk about this a lot. We discussed this, you know, even ten plus years ago, I discussed it in my PhD back twenty plus years ago of... Look, I felt and I still feel intelligence and consciousness are double dissociable, which means that you can have an intelligence system that's very smart on IQ and so on, kind of like the systems we have today, which I don't... I personally don't feel are at all conscious yet, right from my own... You know, everyone probably has their own view, but I don't feel yet. And then you can have conscious entities that are not that smart. For example, my pet dog, it's lovely, but he's... And and he's pretty conscious, think. He dreams and everything, but he's not that smart. Right? Yeah. And that's provable. So so I think you can have double dissociation here. You know, many of the higher animals, dolphins, monkeys and so on, elephants, I think most of us would view that they have some, you know, they're conscious beings, but... And they exhibit all of that that sort of behaviour. And, of course, they're also made of carbons and and the same neurons and types of things we're made of. So I feel like it's pretty obvious they have some of those qualities, but they're not necessarily that smart. So it feels like you can dissociate these things. And I think to the extent that you can, I feel like we should?
00:26:01 · Reid Hoffman
[00:26:01] S3: You know, we're coming up close to the end of our session and the end of, you know, the summit, sad. But what should we think about in terms of the whole notion of AI sovereignty? Right? Because obviously one of the things that is kind of going around in a lot of countries right now is, oh, is this really important? And, you know, one of our earliest conversations was with you trying to solve this problem. So I wanted to share some thinking and obviously it's updated for whatever that was thirteen, fourteen years ago, but...
00:26:31 · Demis Hassabis
[00:26:31] S2: Yeah. Well, look, I think first of all, first thing to say is, it looks to me like there's going to be, you know, half a dozen, six to eight, if you include Chinese companies, company, you know, offerings at the frontier or near the frontier. Right? And it feels like there's gonna be leapfrogging and maybe something's, like, three to six months ahead, but it's gonna be relatively close. So there's a lot of options if... Depends if you're talking about an enterprise or a country. Right? So I think as an enterprise, you have a lot of options to arbitrage between these different things. Some of them are better at certain things, you know, multimodal understanding versus coding, or it's very hard to be better on all on all vectors of importance at once. So I think that's gonna happen. And then open source, which also has its risks because how do you... As we've discussed for many, many years, how do you restrict bad actor using that whilst enabling, of course, as many good actors, scientists, and others to use these fantastic tools. So that's an unresolved problem. But open sources, you know, maybe only lagging six months to a year behind. Obviously, we need kind of Western open source solutions. But I think at this point, if we're talking about countries as well, all companies that need their data to be private or they wanna fine tune further on their own, you know, sensitive data, again, be that enterprise data or or sovereign data, I think that's that's gonna be one solution. There's also looking at what are the downstream things that can be done with these tools, you know, big companies and big sectors that can benefit from these tools like health care that you can just use this, you know, almost like commodities and then build the value on top of it rather than, you know, I wouldn't recommend every country, for example, trying to build a a frontier model. That just doesn't make sense to me.