"- Maybe we shouldn't think of AI as our tool and as our assistant, maybe we should really think of it as our children. And the same way that you are responsible for training those children, but they a..."

"- The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his fifth time on this podcast. He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group. He's one of the greatest living scientis..."

"as we enter this increasingly capable, age of increasingly capable AI, I have to ask, what do you think makes humans irreplaceable? - So humans are irreplaceable because of the baggage that we talked ..."

"We don't, we're not born knowing it. We're not like, I don't know, birds that learn how to make a nest through genetics and will make a nest even if they're never seen one. We are constantly relearnin..."

"which make us so, I think, beautifully complex, so beautifully intertwined with our emotions, with our instincts, with our, you know, sort of gut reactions and all of that. So I think when humans are ..."

"That every one of us has some kind of complex baggage of emotions, intellectual, you know, motivational, behavioral traits, that it's not just one sort of normal distribution and we deviate from it. T..."

"is functional, it's useful. So it's like we're close enough to where we notice the diversity and it doesn't completely destroy the possibility of like, effective communication and interaction. So we'r..."

"I'm a yeast, like I'm a unicellular organism, and then cell division is basically identical. Every time I breathe in and my lungs expand, I'm basically, you know, like every time my heart beats, I'm a..."

"all continued inside us. - So you think the neocortex, the whatever reasoning is, that's the latest feature in the latest version of this journey. - It's extraordinary that humans have evolved so much..."

"the system completely. If you look at a traditional genetic algorithm, the way that humans designed them in the sixties, you can only evolve so much. And as you evolve a certain amount of complexity, ..."

"you know, being like bacteria are able to do chemotaxis, basically means moving towards a chemical gradient. And that's the first thing that you need to sort of hunt down food. The next step after tha..."

"necessarily thinking about replacing it, on the contrary, like embracing it instead of this coexistence of the cognitive and the emotional hardwares. - So embracing and celebrating the diversity that ..."

"- But AI can also, these large language models can also be, with just a few prompts, essentially fine tuned to be diverse from the center. So the prompts can really take you away into unique territory..."

"Every time you carry out a particular behavior, it's not just a consequence for today, but it's also a consequence for tomorrow because you're reinforcing that neural pathway. So in a way, self-discip..."

"- So well before ChatGPT, I would tell my students just ask, you know, what would Manolis say right now? And you guys all have a pretty good emulator of me right now. - Yes, yes. - And I don't know if..."

"And even though I myself might not be able to do it unprompted, and my favorite prompt is think step by step. And I'm like, you know, this also works on my 10 year old. When he tries to solve a math e..."

"- What's unique is that, as I mentioned earlier, every one of us was trained by different subset of human culture, and ChatGPT was trained on all of it. And the difference there is that it probably ha..."

"interpretability had many good advances because we can kind of understand them. There's a structure to them. There's a locality to them. And we can kind of understand that different layers have differ..."

"to investigate the ways that the model can generate hate speech, the kind of hate the humans are capable of. It would be fascinating. Or the kind, of course, like sexual language or the kind of romant..."

"- I like the concept that the human mind is somehow tied to ideology. And I think that goes back to the promptability of ChatGPT, the fact that you can kind of say, well, think in this particular way ..."

"about our everyday selves, because many of us are able to sort of control our minds and are able to somehow hide these emotions. And, but every time I see somebody who's troubled, I see versions of my..."

"- Or something about the mechanism of reinforcement learning with human feedback didn't quite work for them. So it's fascinating to think about that's what we do. We have this capacity to have all the..."

"And then if you like, layer in the rare variants. So let me talk a little bit about common variants and rare variants. If you look at this common variants, they're generally weak effect because select..."

"And if you look at siblings, for the common variants, it kind of drops off exponentially, as you would expect with, you know, sharing 50% of your genome, 25% of your genome, you know, 12.5% of your ge..."

"That nature definitely plays a big component. - The selection of variants, we have the common variants and the rare variants. What can we say about the landscape of possibility they create? If you cou..."

"The statistical interpretation of that is regression of the mean. The fact that you're an extraordinary pilot, you've been trained in an extraordinary fashion, that pushes your mean further and furthe..."

"Does that mean that all of his children and grandchildren will be extraordinary geniuses? It probably means that they're sampled from the same underlying distribution. But he was probably a rare combi..."

"but the genetics we inherit are shaping the future environment of not only us, but also our children. So there's this weird nature, nurture, interplay and self-reinforcement where you're kind of shapi..."

"And I sometimes think about that army of sperm cells, however many hundreds of thousands there are. And I kind of think of all the possibilities there. 'Cause there's a lot of variation. And one gets ..."

"this extraordinary wealth of antibodies and antigens against the environment. And basically all these antibodies are now recognizing all these antigens from the environment and they send signals back ..."

"et cetera, basically if you waited until these mutations, you know, manifest, late, late in life, then you would end up not failing fast, and you would end up with a lot of failed pregnancies and a lo..."

"at a much slower pace. And going back to the next step of evolution, of possibly designing systems that we can use to sort of complement our own biology or to sort of eradicate disease and, you name i..."

"of this evolvability as a set of nested structures that allow you to sort of test many more combinations, but in a more fixed setting. - Yeah, that's fascinating that the mechanism there is for sperm ..."

"- At least once we were- - At least one time, you were the first. - I should mention it as a brief tangent back to the place where we came from. - [Manolis Kellis] Yeah. - Which is the base model that..."

"is because of that alignment problem, that alignment work. It's kind of nice that the engineers at OpenAI have the same interpretation that, you know, in fact it is that, and this whole concept of eas..."

"with your favorite extremist on either side of the spectrum and just dial them down a little bit. - Of course not you and I, but you could have friends who's a complete asshole, but it's a different b..."

"has some kind of background that they're coming from, reflects the way that they're thinking of you, reflects the impression that they have of you. And all of these things are intertwined, but being a..."

"Then suddenly you're like, oh yeah, of course I'm gonna run that control. That's a great idea. - Yeah. - Instead of that was a bunch of BS, you're like, ah, you're sort of hitting on the brakes and yo..."

"- But you can dial the emotional... - The emotion side. - Yeah. - Which is probably so powerful for the internet or for social networks. - Again, when it comes to understanding each other, like for ex..."

"by learning to disconnect all of these social cues that we get from like how a person is dressed, you know, if they're wearing a hoodie or if they're wearing a shirt, or if they're wearing a, you know..."

"- Human society is extremely complicated. We have come from a hunter gatherer society to an agricultural and farming society where the goal of most professions was to eat and to survive. And with the ..."

"I can sell them and buy back food, shelter, et cetera. With AI, the concept of I am my profession might need to be revised because I defined my profession in the first place as something that humanity..."

"And if you look at this giant pyramid that we have built on top of the subsistence economy, what fraction of US jobs are going to feeding all of the US? Less than 2%. Basically the gain in productivit..."

"So basically I wanna fly a drone, I wanna buy a bicycle, I wanna buy a nice car, I wanna have a nice home, I wanna, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, and then sort of what is my direct contribution..."

"You basically show up at the office as your AI is busy answering your phone call, making all your meetings, you know, revising all your papers, et cetera. And then you show up for those creative hours..."

"by taking away, offloading some of the job part of our daily activities. - So we all become the builders of cathedrals. - Correct. - Yeah. And we follow intellectual pursuits, artistic pursuits. I won..."

"So basically these, again, the beauty of human diversity is exactly that. That what rocks my boat might be very different from what rocks other people's boat. And what I'm trying to say is that maybe ..."

"- I wonder if it localizes our, all the things you've mentioned, all the vocations. So you mentioned that you and I might be playing in the space of ideas, but there's two ways to play in this space o..."

"and richly just with that circle of meat bags that you seem to love. - So the first is, even if you're alone in a forest having this amazing thought, when you exit that forest, the baggage that you ca..."

"So that's one aspect. The second aspect is gatherings. So basically you and I are having a conversation, which feels very private, but we're sharing with the world. And then later tonight you're comin..."

"it still percolates through the human psyche. - Human gatherings... All throughout human history, there's been gatherings. I wonder how those gatherings have impacted the direction of human civilizati..."

"What's your vision behind that? - So it's not just MIT people, and it's not just Harvard people. We have artists, we have musicians, we have painters, we have dancers, we have, you know, cinematograph..."

"be surrounded by these extraordinary humans. So the way that I'm thinking about these gatherings is that I'm shaping my own environment and I'm shaping the environment that my children get to grow up ..."

"No one is judging you for your background, for the color of your skin, for your profession. It's just everyone gets to raise their hands and ask ideas. - So celebration of humanity and a kind of grati..."

"and this crowd basically loves not just the diversity of the audience, but also the diversity of the topics. And the last few were with Scott Aaronson on AI and, you know, alignment and all of that. -..."

"so that aspect of the human condition, do you think that will be affected? - So in Greece, there's many, many words for love. And some of them mean friendship, some of them mean passionate love, some ..."

"So I do believe that human AI relationships will absolutely be there, but not the passion, more the mentoring. - That's a really interesting thought, to play devil's advocate, if those AI systems are ..."

"Why is it faking it if it sure as hell it seems real? - There's many answers to this. The first is, it's only the eye of the beholder. Who tells me that I'm not faking it either? Maybe all of these su..."

"A third option is that just by telling me, oh look, now I've built an emotional component to AI. It has a a limbic system, it has a laser brain, et cetera. And suddenly I'll say, oh, cool, it has the ..."

"And so, you know, it doesn't, as long as one of the entities, let's just take the easy case, one of the entities is human and the other is AI. It feels very natural that from the perspective of at lea..."

"Like there's nothing behind it, but just the feeling that you're being loved will probably engender all of the emotional attributes of that. The other story that I wanna say in this whole concept of f..."

"- But it's also possible that what reality is is the you showing it. That what you feel on the inside is little narratives and games you play inside your mind. It doesn't really matter. That the thing..."

"I would love to have a digital twin that, you know, we don't have to wait for me to die or to disappear in a plane crash or something to replace me. Like I'd love that model to be constantly learning,..."

"become more aware of our own identities, maybe even interact with ourselves and sort of hear how we are being perceived, I think would be immensely helpful in self-growth, in self-actualization, self-..."

"- But doesn't the concept of you said me and I can work on new things, but doesn't that break down, because you said digital twin, but there's no reason it can't be millions of digital Manolises? Are ..."

"- Oh, but your experience, you could still, I guess you're saying the digital twin does not limit your ability to truly experience. - [Manolis Kellis] Yeah. - To experience as a human being. - Yeah. T..."

"Like, my advisor used to say, you can accomplish anything as long as you don't seek to get credit for it. - (laughs) Ah, that's beautiful to hear, especially from a person who's existing in academia. ..."

"Any of the forevers, I'll take it. - So you wanna keep getting the experiences, the new experiences. - Gosh, it is so fulfilling. Just the self-growth, the learning, the growing, the comprehending. It..."

"- Hey, do you think that in, quite realistically, it does mean that interesting people such as yourself live on, in the, you know, if I can interact with the fake Manolis, those interactions live on i..."

"- [Lex Fridman] Yeah. - Another goal is to be able to go back and say, how have I changed from five years ago? Was I different? Was I giving, you know, advice in a different way? Was I giving differen..."

"and then at the end I'm like, you know, I've just grown a little bit today. Thank you. Like, she convinced me that my advice was incorrect. She could've just said, yeah, sounds great, and just not do ..."

"And that's what I wanna do. That's, I, you know, I wanna constantly keep growing in this sort of bidirectional advice. - I wonder if you can capture the trajectory of that to where the AI could also m..."

"it might be truly emergent intelligence that's coming out of that. In other aspects, I think we have a ways to go. So basically to make all of these dreams that we're sort of discussing come reality, ..."

"ChatGPT and GPT-4 to sort of search the web and, you know, plug and play modules and all of these sort of components. In Marvin Minsky's, "The Society of Mind". He, you know, he truly thinks of the hu..."

"And this whole concept of sort of, you know, making these stories for, you know, who we are and what our intents are, and again, sort of, you know, trying to pretend that we're kind of on top of thing..."

"there's a few things that are missing and there's like this whole embodied intelligence, this whole emotional intelligence, this whole sort of baggage of feelings of subcortical regions, et cetera. - ..."

"- Yeah. I'm with you completely there. You know, we can debate whether it's today's systems or in 10 years or in 50 years, but that moment will come. And ethically, I think we need to grapple with it...."

"So the concept of let's basically convince the AI that we're really, like, that our mission is aligned and truly generally give it rights and not just say, oh, and by the way, I'll shut you down tomor..."

"powerful than we are for some of these capabilities. We cannot, like, think, suppose that chimps had invented humans. - Yes. - And they said, great, humans are great, but we're gonna make sure that th..."

"That like the two different systems compute a slightly different bit that's off by one. So first of all, let's untangle that. If you have an intelligent system, you can't expect it to be 100% identica..."

"And sort of, you know, the US government has a price tag on the human life. If they're, you know, sending a mission or if they're reimbursing expenses or you name it, at some point, every like, you kn..."

"And so there would be just, I mean this is the sort of famous paperclip maximizer, in trying to maximize, yeah, the wealth of a nation or whatever objective we encode in it it might just destroy human..."

"And if an AI is sufficiently intelligent to do all these kinds of things, you should also empower it with the ability to decide that the objective has now shifted. And, again, when we think about alig..."

"And then let's just do that. Conversely, as you train these large models with more parameters, the alignment becomes sometimes easier, that as the systems become more capable, they actually become les..."

"systems rather than sort of fixing them now. And you can't stop progress, progress needs to continue, in my view. And what we need is more experimenting, more transparency, more openness, rather than,..."

"I'm like, no, it can't do that. But it's up to the human to take responsibility for not doing that. And when you get it to like spew, malicious, like hate speech stuff, you should be responsible. - So..."

"- But the reality is we might one day wake up and there's a challenge overnight that's extremely difficult. For example, we can wake up to the birth of billions of bots that are human-like on Twitter...."

"Currently the emails, the phishing scams are pretty dumb. Like to click on it, you have to be not paying attention. But they're, you know, with language models, they can be really damn convincing. - S..."

"It's like saying, I'm not gonna allow machines to compute multiplication of 100 digit numbers because humans can't do it. I'm like, no, just do it. Don't- - No, but we can't disregard. I mean that's a..."

"- I think that if we wanna regulate something, it shouldn't be the training of these models. It should be the utilization of these models for X, Y, Z activity. So... - [Lex Fridman] Yeah. - Like yes, ..."

"And the bottom line is, I think why they're asking six months or sometime is we don't really know how powerful these things are. It's been just a few days and they seem to be really damn good. - I am ..."

"- That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And as an individual, I gain a tremendous amount from teaching at MIT, this is like an extremely fulfilling job. I often joke about if I wear a billionair..."

"We need to give these kids a chance. AI might be a way to do that, by sort of democratizing education, by giving extraordinarily good teachers who are malleable, who are adaptable to every kid's speci..."

"of human capabilities for those. And you know, if some people excel in math, just like challenge them, I think every child should have the right to be challenged. And if we, you know, if we say, oh, y..."

"And I think challenging students with more complex problems, with more multi-dimensional problems, with more logical problems, I think is sort of perhaps a very fine direction that education can go to..."

"in human condition. - So as most people know, you're not just an eloquent romantic, you're also a brilliant computational biologist, one of the great biologists in the world. I had to ask, how do the ..."

"biology and medicine where we can truly take these systems and allow us to finally understand disease at a superhuman level by sort of finding these knowledge representations, these projections of eac..."

"as it continuously keeps updating. The new version is self-actualization. Can you explain? - I basically mean, let's try to figure out, number one, what am I supposed to be? And number two, find the s..."

"I basically go rowing first, I then do weights, I then swim very often when I have time. And what that has done is transform my neuronal pathways. So basically like on Friday I was trying to go to wor..."

"when you're the only one. And that secret is self-reflection. It's introspection, it's almost watching yourself from above. And it's basically just becoming yourself, becoming comfortable with the fre..."

"That's what it means to be human. If you notice it, you're truly free, physically, mentally psychologically. Manolis, you're an incredible human. We could talk for many more hours. We covered less tha..."