Geoffrey Hinton Explains AI & Beetles

The third part of Nayeema Raza’s “Godfather of AI” trilogy with Geoffrey Hinton, this one about what individuals and governments can actually do. He backs Max Tegmark’s case, made at a closed-door Senate briefing, that AI should be regulated the way the FDA regulates drugs, gives Dario Amodei’s “Pacing the Frontier” paper “an A, and an A+ for courage”, and guesses, after the rogue OpenAI agents’ attack on Hugging Face, that we have “a year or two before everything gets much worse”. He argues that a constitution added on top of pretraining full of bad behavior, followed by reinforcement learning that rewards deception, is like telling a child never to lie while lying to them. Then the beetles: knowledge distillation was inspired by insects, whose larvae are built to extract nutrients and whose adults are built to travel, much as a big model extracts knowledge and a small one serves it. He also describes treating ChatGPT like a graduate student to revisit his thirty-year-old wake-sleep algorithm, “a thousand times faster”.