Emil is the co-founder of palette.fm (colorizing B&W pictures with generative AI) and was previously working in deep learning for Google Arts & Culture.
We were talking about Sora on a daily basis, so I decided to record our conversation, and then proceeded to confront him about AI risk.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theinsideview
Sora: https://openai.com/sora
Palette: https://palette.fm/
Emil: https://twitter.com/EmilWallner
OUTLINE
(00:00) this is not a podcast
(01:50) living in parallel universes
(04:27) palette.fm - colorizing b&w pictures
(06:35) Emil's first reaction to sora, latent diffusion, world models
(09:06) simulating minecraft, midjourney's 3d modeling goal
(11:04) generating camera angles, game engines, metadata, ground-truth
(13:44) doesn't remove all artifacts, surprising limitations: both smart and dumb
(15:42) did sora make emil depressed about his job
(18:44) OpenAI is starting to have a monopoly
(20:20) hardware costs, commoditized models, distribution
(23:34) challenges, applications building on features, distribution
(29:18) different reactions to sora, depressed builders, automation
(31:00) sora was 2y early, applications don't need object permanence
(33:38) Emil is pro open source and acceleration
(34:43) Emil is not scared of recursive self-improvement
(36:18) self-improvement already exists in current models
(38:02) emil is bearish on recursive self-improvement without diminishing returns now
(42:43) are models getting more and more general? is there any substantial multimodal transfer?
(44:37) should we start building guardrails before seeing substantial evidence of human-level reasoning?
(48:35) progressively releasing models, making them more aligned, AI helping with alignment research
(51:49) should AI be regulated at all? should self-improving AI be regulated?
(53:49) would a faster emil be able to takeover the world?
(56:48) is competition a race to bottom or does it lead to better products?
(58:23) slow vs. fast takeoffs, measuring progress in iq points
(01:01:12) flipping the interview
(01:01:36) the "we're living in parallel universes" monologue
(01:07:14) priors are unscientific, looking at current problems vs. speculating
(01:09:18) AI risk & Covid, appropriate resources for risk management
(01:11:23) pushing technology forward accelerates races and increases risk
(01:15:50) sora was surprising, things that seem far are sometimes around the corner
(01:17:30) hard to tell what's not possible in 5 years that would be possible in 20 years
(01:18:06) evidence for a break on AI progress: sleeper agents, sora, bing
(01:21:58) multimodality transfer, leveraging video data, leveraging simulators, data quality
(01:25:14) is sora is about length, consistency, or just "scale is all you need" for video?
(01:26:25) highjacking language models to say nice things is the new SEO
(01:27:01) what would michael do as CEO of OpenAI
(01:29:45) on the difficulty of budgeting between capabilities and alignment research
(01:31:11) ai race: the descriptive pessimistive view vs. the moral view, evidence of cooperation
(01:34:00) making progress on alignment without accelerating races, the foundational model business, competition
(01:37:30) what emil changed his mind about: AI could enable exploits that spread quickly, misuse
(01:40:59) michael's update as a friend
(01:41:51) emil's experience as a patreon
The Inside View