Chat GPT

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In 2017, OpenAI discovered this incredibly surprising thing. They trained a neural net to predict the next character of product reviews on Amazon. But what was very surprising is that they found one neuron inside of this neural net that did the very best in the world job of predicting sentiment. In order to do something as seemingly simple as prediction the next character, the AI has to start inferring things about the human. What gender are they? What political leaning are they? Are they feeling positively sentimental or negatively sentimental or positively valenced? That idea is a fundamental one called self-supervised learning.

It may seem like the rise of artificial intelligence, and increasingly powerful large language models you may have heard of, is moving really fast… and it IS.

But what’s coming next is when we enter synthetic relationships with AI that could come to feel just as real and important as our human relationships... And perhaps even more so.

In this episode of Your Undivided Attention, Tristan and Aza reach beyond the moment to talk about this powerful new AI, and the new paradigm of humanity and computation we’re about to enter.

This is a structural revolution that affects way more than text, art, or even Google search. There are huge benefits to humanity, and we’ll discuss some of those. But we also see that as companies race to develop the best synthetic relationships, we are setting ourselves up for a new generation of harms made exponentially worse by AI’s power to predict, mimic and persuade.

It’s obvious we need ways to steward these tools ethically. So Tristan and Aza also share their ideas for creating a framework for AIs that will help humans become MORE humane, not less.

A classic and influential work that laid the theoretical foundations for information theory

New Chatbots Could Change the World. Can You Trust Them?

The New York Times addresses misinformation and how Siri, Google Search, online marketing and your child’s homework will never be the same

Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples by Lisa P. Argyle, Ethan C. Busby, Nancy Fulda, Joshua Gubler, Christopher Rytting, David Wingate

This paper proposes and explores the possibility that language models can be studied as effective proxies for specific human sub-populations in social science research

Earth Species Project

Earth Species Project, co-founded by Aza Raskin, is a non-profit dedicated to using artificial intelligence to decode non-human communication

Her (2013)

A science-fiction romantic drama film written, directed, and co-produced by Spike Jonze

What A Chatty Monkey May Tell Us About Learning To Talk

NPR explores the fascinating world of gelada monkeys and the way they communicate

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