Transcript
Geoffrey Hinton (0:01)
For me, that's the most important question in neuroscience. How similar is the way the brain learns to how these large language models learn? And at a very abstract level, I believe it's quite similar.
Jascha Monk (0:14)
And now the good fight with Jascha Monk. My guest today is none other than Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the godfather of AI. Geoffrey has invented some of the key architectural innovations that have made the current AI boom possible. For example, he was one of the people who figured out how to use the principle of back propagation in such a way as to allow deep learning. He is also the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. Well, my agenda for this conversation was twofold. Firstly, for him to explain to us what that means. What is machine learning with artificial neural networks? And what exactly was his so important contribution to this field? Building on the recent episode with David Bau, I think of this as my 101 and 102 of understanding AI. And Jeffrey is, I think, very clear in helping us think conceptually about what this way of producing information and of enabling machines to think about the world actually consists in. Well, the second part of a conversation may be of interest to you, even if you're not that interested in the details of how AI works. We're asking all of the big questions. Is artificial intelligence actually intelligent? Is it going to take the jobs of a lot of people? How should we think about the different kind of risks that are involved in AI? Is it just about bad people doing things to us? Or is it also about bad AI doing bad things to us? And it's in the final part of a conversation, which is reserved for paying subscribers, that we really try to answer that final question. Why is it that Geoffrey Hinton takes concerns about AI destroying humanity very seriously? Why is it that but the goal architecture of AI systems and the evolutionary advantages of any AI system that is trying to reproduce itself creates such a serious risk for humanity. To listen to that part of the conversation, to support what we do here, to stop hitting these annoying paywalls at the end of the podcast, please become a paying subscriber. Please go to yashamonk.substack.com that's yashamonk.substack dot com. Geoffrey Hinton, welcome to a podcast.
Geoffrey Hinton (3:24)
Thank you for inviting me.
Jascha Monk (3:26)
You are known as the godfather of AI. AI has gone through these strange periods, periods when there was great excitement about AI even in the past. And then these AI winters when people thought that the Technical requirements for making AI work didn't yet exist. Or perhaps that the whole concept just was misguided and it wasn't ever going to work out in any way that's useful. Tell us about why it took so many run ups, so many attempts to get to the huge AI boom we have now, and the way in which AI, you know, whatever its future is, and I hope that we'll have a chance to talk more about that towards the end of our conversation, clearly is now integrated in all kinds of useful processes in the world.
