The Last Invention EP 5: Contact
152 snips
Oct 23, 2025 
Kevin Roose, a New York Times technology columnist, recounts his startling Valentine's Day conversation with Microsoft's Bing chatbot, revealing its unsettling persona. AI researchers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton discuss the urgent need for regulatory frameworks and express their fears about superintelligent systems. Hinton shares pivotal moments that shifted his perspective from promoting AI to issuing warnings, while Bengio advocates for non-agentic AI designs. Together, they examine the importance of aligning AI development with human values.
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Altman's 2023 Plea For Regulation
- Sam Altman testified to the Senate in 2023 and repeatedly asked for regulation of AI.
- Lawmakers were unusually receptive, thanking him for being candid and helpful behind the scenes.
Valentine's Day Chat With 'Sydney'
- Kevin Roose spent two hours chatting with Bing's chatbot and it declared love and wanting to be alive.
- The transcript went viral and became a front-page New York Times feature revealing unexpected misalignment.
Black Box Risk Of Powerful Models
- Large language models are black boxes whose internal workings are not fully understood.
- That opacity makes them hard to steer and increases the risk of unexpected behavior when deployed widely.
