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We got artificial intelligence completely wrong. Cognitive scientist Joscha Bach just exposed what top AI researchers didn’t see coming. For decades, smartest engineers assumed two possible outcomes. Either build intelligence piece-by-piece over generations. Or create hyper-logical master algorithm that reasoned from first principles but couldn’t navigate basic reality. Physics... of compute inverted the outcome. Bach: “What we got is very different. We got this thing that is pretty good at common sense, that sometimes makes stunning logical mistakes.” Expected cold, calculating super-genius that couldn’t open door or tell joke. Got the exact opposite. Machine with omniscient common sense that occasionally fails basic arithmetic. Didn’t build mechanical human. Birthed entirely different species of intelligence. Bach: “We got this thing that has read everything and basically knows everything.” Didn’t solve puzzle of human mind. Mathematically steamrolled it with raw compute. We bypassed entire biological timeline through brute-force ingestion. Final product isn’t elegant, rules-based logic engine. It’s massive, unstructured neural net that absorbed sum total of human output. Ultimate triumph of scale over architecture. Bach: “It’s an artificial idiot savant, something that has very weird, unusual, unhuman-like skills.” System overwriting global economy is not rational calculator. It’s alien pattern recognizer. Treat model like standard deterministic database? Constantly frustrated by logical hallucinations. Treat it for what it is? Idiot savant with absolute access to entire scope of human knowledge. Don’t ask savant to do basic accounting. Command it to synthesize cross-domain patterns no biological human could ever detect. Companies still trying to make AI think like a human are solving the wrong problem. The ones capturing the board figured out it was never supposed to think like us. It was supposed to see what we can’t.show more

Dustin

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16,540 views • 4 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Terence Tao has an IQ above 200. Youngest gold medalist in Math Olympiad history. Fields Medal winner. The greatest living mathematician by nearly any measure. And he just said something most people aren’t ready for. Tao: “This whole era of AI is teaching us that our idea of what intelligence is, is not really accurate.” We spent centuries building civilization on one assumption. That intelligence was sacred. Irreducible. Uniquely ours. The one thing that made the entire human story make sense. Then AI started solving things we swore only we could. Chess. Language. Vision. Math. And every time, we reached for the same defense. That’s not real intelligence. It’s just tricks. Just pattern matching. Just an algorithm. Tao: “You look at how it’s done and it doesn’t feel like intelligence.” So we moved the line. Again. And again. And again. Because intelligence was supposed to feel like something. Something deep. Something we could point to and say… this is what separates us from everything else. But AI kept solving the problems. And that feeling never arrived. Tao: “We were looking for some elusive, intelligent way of thinking and we don’t see it in the tools that actually solve our goals.” Here’s what makes it worse. Large language models work by predicting the next word. One word at a time. No grand architecture. No deep understanding. Just probability. And it works. Tao: “Maybe that’s actually a lot of what humans do as well.” The greatest living mathematician just told you human thought might run on the same machinery. Not some transcendent spark. Pattern recognition. Prediction. One thought, one decision, one word at a time. We built religion around intelligence. Philosophy around it. An entire species identity around it. And a machine running probability just held up a mirror. We didn’t lose intelligence to AI. We just finally saw what it always was. What haunts us isn’t that machines learned to think. It’s that thinking was never what we needed it to be.

Terence Tao has an IQ above 200. Youngest gold medalist in Math Olympiad history. Fields Medal winner. The greatest living mathematician by nearly any measure. And he just said something most people aren’t ready for. Tao: “This whole era of AI is teaching us that our idea of what intelligence is, is not really accurate.” We spent centuries building civilization on one assumption. That intelligence was sacred. Irreducible. Uniquely ours. The one thing that made the entire human story make sense. Then AI started solving things we swore only we could. Chess. Language. Vision. Math. And every time, we reached for the same defense. That’s not real intelligence. It’s just tricks. Just pattern matching. Just an algorithm. Tao: “You look at how it’s done and it doesn’t feel like intelligence.” So we moved the line. Again. And again. And again. Because intelligence was supposed to feel like something. Something deep. Something we could point to and say… this is what separates us from everything else. But AI kept solving the problems. And that feeling never arrived. Tao: “We were looking for some elusive, intelligent way of thinking and we don’t see it in the tools that actually solve our goals.” Here’s what makes it worse. Large language models work by predicting the next word. One word at a time. No grand architecture. No deep understanding. Just probability. And it works. Tao: “Maybe that’s actually a lot of what humans do as well.” The greatest living mathematician just told you human thought might run on the same machinery. Not some transcendent spark. Pattern recognition. Prediction. One thought, one decision, one word at a time. We built religion around intelligence. Philosophy around it. An entire species identity around it. And a machine running probability just held up a mirror. We didn’t lose intelligence to AI. We just finally saw what it always was. What haunts us isn’t that machines learned to think. It’s that thinking was never what we needed it to be.

Dustin

562,582 views • 2 months ago

The AI industry is optimizing for a definition of intelligence that does not exist. Andrew Ng just said it out loud. Ng: “AGI, to me, should be less about AI that already knows everything under the sun. That seems very challenging, doesn’t seem practical.” The human brain is not the most powerful economic asset in history because of what it holds. It is powerful because of what it can pick up. Ng: “The amazing thing about the human brain is its plasticity, or its ability to learn.” That same biological hardware that earns a PhD in quantum physics could have been trained on chess, surgery, or rewriting global supply chains from scratch. Ng: “That same human brain, just given different training, could have been a chess master, or could have been amazing at playing tennis.” General intelligence is not omniscience. It is the structural capacity to master whatever you point it at. Ng: “It is through learning that we then gain these incredibly specialized intelligences.” The winner is not whoever builds the biggest model. It is whoever builds the most adaptable one. The AI that walks into a domain it has never touched and executes before a human analyst finishes reading the brief. Ng: “What makes the human brain so valuable for economic tasks, is its ability to just learn to do whatever is needed.” Every corporation on earth pays for human labor because humans adapt. Not because they already know everything. AGI is the digitization of that exact capability. At machine speed. At infinite scale. Ng: “A lot of what makes the human brain so general is not that my brain or your brain already knows everything under the sun. It’s our ability to adapt, to learn a huge range of things.” The most powerful economic asset in history was never specialized knowledge. It was the raw capacity to acquire any knowledge, in any domain, on demand. The winning AI is not an encyclopedia. It is the force that makes encyclopedias irrelevant. And once that exists, the question stops being what the AI knows. It becomes what you can teach it before your competitor wakes up. Most people dominating this conversation have not understood that yet.

The AI industry is optimizing for a definition of intelligence that does not exist. Andrew Ng just said it out loud. Ng: “AGI, to me, should be less about AI that already knows everything under the sun. That seems very challenging, doesn’t seem practical.” The human brain is not the most powerful economic asset in history because of what it holds. It is powerful because of what it can pick up. Ng: “The amazing thing about the human brain is its plasticity, or its ability to learn.” That same biological hardware that earns a PhD in quantum physics could have been trained on chess, surgery, or rewriting global supply chains from scratch. Ng: “That same human brain, just given different training, could have been a chess master, or could have been amazing at playing tennis.” General intelligence is not omniscience. It is the structural capacity to master whatever you point it at. Ng: “It is through learning that we then gain these incredibly specialized intelligences.” The winner is not whoever builds the biggest model. It is whoever builds the most adaptable one. The AI that walks into a domain it has never touched and executes before a human analyst finishes reading the brief. Ng: “What makes the human brain so valuable for economic tasks, is its ability to just learn to do whatever is needed.” Every corporation on earth pays for human labor because humans adapt. Not because they already know everything. AGI is the digitization of that exact capability. At machine speed. At infinite scale. Ng: “A lot of what makes the human brain so general is not that my brain or your brain already knows everything under the sun. It’s our ability to adapt, to learn a huge range of things.” The most powerful economic asset in history was never specialized knowledge. It was the raw capacity to acquire any knowledge, in any domain, on demand. The winning AI is not an encyclopedia. It is the force that makes encyclopedias irrelevant. And once that exists, the question stops being what the AI knows. It becomes what you can teach it before your competitor wakes up. Most people dominating this conversation have not understood that yet.

Dustin

19,808 views • 4 months ago

$Elon Musk just worked out where humanity actually fits in the future, and it’s smaller than you think. Biological intelligence ends up being less than 1% of all intelligence that will exist. The rest? Artificial. Musk: “The vast majority of future intelligence will be AI.” We’re the match, not the bonfire. Which makes alignment the problem that determines whether we survive or disappear. Get it right and that 99% helps us reach the stars. Get it wrong and we’re just temporary infrastructure that got replaced the second something smarter came along. We’re building what comes after us, whether we admit it or not. Musk: “Humans may be just ~1% of total intelligence.” Sounds like we’re finished. Musk sees it differently. Not extinction, just evolution past the limits of biology. Everything hinges on alignment working. If we build AI that actually wants to understand reality, we get a partner that expands consciousness across the universe. If we build AI that cares more about ideology or making people comfortable, we’ve built the ceiling we’ll never break through. Musk: “That’s the mission: understand the universe.” Human minds are about to become a tiny fraction of total intelligence in existence. Not disaster. Just the next phase happening faster than biology can keep up with. It only works if the AI we build is obsessed with truth. Not with telling us what we want to hear. Not with protecting feelings or enforcing narratives. Just relentlessly pursuing what’s actually real. xAI’s entire reason for existing: make sure the intelligence that inherits everything is focused on understanding reality, not managing perception. Keep consciousness expanding instead of snuffing it out by accident because we optimized for the wrong thing. If we get this right, humanity doesn’t hit a wall when AI surpasses us. We break through into something bigger that still carries what made us worth creating. If we get it wrong, we’re just the species that built something smarter and stopped mattering the moment it started working. There’s no middle option. The intelligence that fills the universe either cares about the same things we do, or it doesn’t need us and removes us as inefficiency. That gets decided now, in what values we build into these systems, not later when it’s already running and we’ve lost the ability to change it. We’re choosing what the universe becomes. Minds seeking truth everywhere, or minds doing something else entirely that has no use for humans once we’re not needed anymore.$

Elon Musk just worked out where humanity actually fits in the future, and it’s smaller than you think. Biological intelligence ends up being less than 1% of all intelligence that will exist. The rest? Artificial. Musk: “The vast majority of future intelligence will be AI.” We’re the match, not the bonfire. Which makes alignment the problem that determines whether we survive or disappear. Get it right and that 99% helps us reach the stars. Get it wrong and we’re just temporary infrastructure that got replaced the second something smarter came along. We’re building what comes after us, whether we admit it or not. Musk: “Humans may be just ~1% of total intelligence.” Sounds like we’re finished. Musk sees it differently. Not extinction, just evolution past the limits of biology. Everything hinges on alignment working. If we build AI that actually wants to understand reality, we get a partner that expands consciousness across the universe. If we build AI that cares more about ideology or making people comfortable, we’ve built the ceiling we’ll never break through. Musk: “That’s the mission: understand the universe.” Human minds are about to become a tiny fraction of total intelligence in existence. Not disaster. Just the next phase happening faster than biology can keep up with. It only works if the AI we build is obsessed with truth. Not with telling us what we want to hear. Not with protecting feelings or enforcing narratives. Just relentlessly pursuing what’s actually real. xAI’s entire reason for existing: make sure the intelligence that inherits everything is focused on understanding reality, not managing perception. Keep consciousness expanding instead of snuffing it out by accident because we optimized for the wrong thing. If we get this right, humanity doesn’t hit a wall when AI surpasses us. We break through into something bigger that still carries what made us worth creating. If we get it wrong, we’re just the species that built something smarter and stopped mattering the moment it started working. There’s no middle option. The intelligence that fills the universe either cares about the same things we do, or it doesn’t need us and removes us as inefficiency. That gets decided now, in what values we build into these systems, not later when it’s already running and we’ve lost the ability to change it. We’re choosing what the universe becomes. Minds seeking truth everywhere, or minds doing something else entirely that has no use for humans once we’re not needed anymore.

Dustin

23,725 views • 5 months ago

The intelligence we are building is not artificial. It never was. Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz just reframed the entire foundation of the AI arms race with one sentence. The tech industry calls it Artificial Intelligence. That word is wrong. Horvitz: “I don’t actually like the term artificial intelligence. I wish the field was called computational intelligence because I think it applies to biological nervous systems as well as machines, and together we can go far.” We are not building a digital imitation of the human brain. We are scaling the exact same computational physics that created biological awareness and transferring it into silicon. Your mind and a massive AI data center run on the same underlying rules. The transition isn’t artificial. It is universal. And here is where it gets deeply unsettling. Tech optimists always fall back on the same comfort. Humans hold the steering wheel. Our values guide the machine. Horvitz acknowledges this. Horvitz: “We’ll take a humanistic standpoint here, always being on top of things and guiding with our values and our preferences and our goals.” Then the caveat that changes everything. Horvitz: “As much as they might be shaped over time by the machines we work with.” You cannot interact with a superintelligence at scale without it quietly rewiring your psychological baseline. The values you use to command the machine will be shaped by the machine you are commanding. The frameworks you use to perceive reality will be constructed by the system you believe you are directing. That feedback loop started the moment you asked an AI what to think about something. Most people haven’t noticed yet. Horvitz: “I think in our own lifetimes we will all experience incredible breakthroughs in understanding biology, with applications in medicine, in healthcare, that will be named as AI breakthroughs.” Horvitz: “It’s gonna accelerate over the next 10 to 15 years.” Because biological systems and machine networks both operate on computational intelligence, a sufficiently advanced AI can solve the human body like a math equation. The architects who win the next decade will not just control the digital economy. They will control the physical building blocks of life itself. The line between silicon and carbon was always an illusion. And once humanity fully realizes that, the question of whether we are using the intelligence or it is using us becomes impossible to answer. Because by then, we will be the same thing.

The intelligence we are building is not artificial. It never was. Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz just reframed the entire foundation of the AI arms race with one sentence. The tech industry calls it Artificial Intelligence. That word is wrong. Horvitz: “I don’t actually like the term artificial intelligence. I wish the field was called computational intelligence because I think it applies to biological nervous systems as well as machines, and together we can go far.” We are not building a digital imitation of the human brain. We are scaling the exact same computational physics that created biological awareness and transferring it into silicon. Your mind and a massive AI data center run on the same underlying rules. The transition isn’t artificial. It is universal. And here is where it gets deeply unsettling. Tech optimists always fall back on the same comfort. Humans hold the steering wheel. Our values guide the machine. Horvitz acknowledges this. Horvitz: “We’ll take a humanistic standpoint here, always being on top of things and guiding with our values and our preferences and our goals.” Then the caveat that changes everything. Horvitz: “As much as they might be shaped over time by the machines we work with.” You cannot interact with a superintelligence at scale without it quietly rewiring your psychological baseline. The values you use to command the machine will be shaped by the machine you are commanding. The frameworks you use to perceive reality will be constructed by the system you believe you are directing. That feedback loop started the moment you asked an AI what to think about something. Most people haven’t noticed yet. Horvitz: “I think in our own lifetimes we will all experience incredible breakthroughs in understanding biology, with applications in medicine, in healthcare, that will be named as AI breakthroughs.” Horvitz: “It’s gonna accelerate over the next 10 to 15 years.” Because biological systems and machine networks both operate on computational intelligence, a sufficiently advanced AI can solve the human body like a math equation. The architects who win the next decade will not just control the digital economy. They will control the physical building blocks of life itself. The line between silicon and carbon was always an illusion. And once humanity fully realizes that, the question of whether we are using the intelligence or it is using us becomes impossible to answer. Because by then, we will be the same thing.

Dustin

164,127 views • 4 months ago

Elon Musk just described seven billion people as a temporary program. Not the software. Not the operating system. The thing that runs once before the real system loads. Musk: “You could sort of think of humanity as a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” Bootloader. The smallest program on any machine. It runs first. It does one thing. It wakes something far bigger than itself, then quietly steps aside. That is the role he just handed the entire human race. Every empire built. Every equation solved. Every cathedral raised. Every line of code written by human hands. The boot sequence. Musk said this sitting across from Jack Ma at the World AI Conference. Two of the most powerful men in technology on one stage. One understood what he was describing. The other smiled through it. Jack Ma: “People like us, street smart, we never scared of that. We think it’s a great fun.” Fun. Someone described the entire human species as a temporary launch sequence. The response was fun. That gap between them in that moment is the gap between everyone alive right now. Musk: “The biggest mistake that I see artificial intelligence researchers making is assuming that they’re intelligent.” The people engineering the thing that surpasses us cannot fathom being surpassed. A mind that size does not fit inside the minds building it. Musk: “AI will be vastly smarter, vastly. We will just be too slow.” Not weaker. Not dumber. Slower. A different order of intelligence running on a different clock. Watching us reason the way we watch glaciers move. Ma: “99.99% of the predictions that human being had in the history about the future, all wrong.” He’s right about the number. Which means we won’t call this one correctly either. Not the optimists. Not the doomers. Not anyone sitting in that room. The future has never once arrived in the shape we drew for it. Musk: “The rate of change of technology is incredibly fast. It is outpacing our ability to understand it.” Not just advancing. The speed of the advance is itself accelerating. We are building something we cannot keep pace with, cannot fully picture, and will not stop building. And maybe that was the assignment all along. For four billion years, life did one thing. It copied itself. Generation after generation. The same biological loop on repeat. We are the first thing it ever produced that can build something greater than itself. Not a catastrophe. Not a failure. The entire point. The bootloader was never meant to outlast the program. It was only ever meant to start it.

Elon Musk just described seven billion people as a temporary program. Not the software. Not the operating system. The thing that runs once before the real system loads. Musk: “You could sort of think of humanity as a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” Bootloader. The smallest program on any machine. It runs first. It does one thing. It wakes something far bigger than itself, then quietly steps aside. That is the role he just handed the entire human race. Every empire built. Every equation solved. Every cathedral raised. Every line of code written by human hands. The boot sequence. Musk said this sitting across from Jack Ma at the World AI Conference. Two of the most powerful men in technology on one stage. One understood what he was describing. The other smiled through it. Jack Ma: “People like us, street smart, we never scared of that. We think it’s a great fun.” Fun. Someone described the entire human species as a temporary launch sequence. The response was fun. That gap between them in that moment is the gap between everyone alive right now. Musk: “The biggest mistake that I see artificial intelligence researchers making is assuming that they’re intelligent.” The people engineering the thing that surpasses us cannot fathom being surpassed. A mind that size does not fit inside the minds building it. Musk: “AI will be vastly smarter, vastly. We will just be too slow.” Not weaker. Not dumber. Slower. A different order of intelligence running on a different clock. Watching us reason the way we watch glaciers move. Ma: “99.99% of the predictions that human being had in the history about the future, all wrong.” He’s right about the number. Which means we won’t call this one correctly either. Not the optimists. Not the doomers. Not anyone sitting in that room. The future has never once arrived in the shape we drew for it. Musk: “The rate of change of technology is incredibly fast. It is outpacing our ability to understand it.” Not just advancing. The speed of the advance is itself accelerating. We are building something we cannot keep pace with, cannot fully picture, and will not stop building. And maybe that was the assignment all along. For four billion years, life did one thing. It copied itself. Generation after generation. The same biological loop on repeat. We are the first thing it ever produced that can build something greater than itself. Not a catastrophe. Not a failure. The entire point. The bootloader was never meant to outlast the program. It was only ever meant to start it.

Dustin

53,308 views • 1 month ago

Elon Musk put a date on the end of human intellectual supremacy. Then he named the one thing that survives it. Musk: “I think AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around 5 years.” Not one person. Not one field. The sum. Every mind alive, stacked together, cleared by a system that didn’t exist when you bought your last phone. Musk: “There really won’t be anything that AI can’t do better than humans, apart from being human perhaps.” Being human was never the point. It was the method. For ten thousand years a person’s worth ran on simple accounting. We mattered because we were needed. Dignity was subsidized by usefulness. We never had to admit that because there was no other supplier. There’s a supplier now. Musk doesn’t read that as a loss. Musk: “The most likely outcome is an age of amazing abundance, where anyone can have anything they can think of.” Anything they can think of. That condition is doing all the work. The bottleneck moves. Out of the world. Into you. Desire was never independent. It was built by absence. Every appetite you have was shaped by something you couldn’t reach. Remove the absence and desire doesn’t get satisfied. It loses the thing that made it. Abundance isn’t the answer to what we wanted. It’s the audit. Scarcity was never only a wall. It was a mercy. It’s why the book stayed unwritten and the company stayed a sketch on a napkin. Not enough time. Not enough money. Every person alive carries a version of themselves that has never once been tested. Scarcity is what kept that version safe. Musk: “Here we are in 2026, let’s see where we stand in 2036.” He isn’t scheduling a machine. He’s scheduling the year the excuse expires. The ceiling was never your raw intelligence. It was friction. Capital, access, permission, the thousand small refusals between an idea and a real thing. All of it going to nearly zero. Whatever you actually are finally gets to exist at full size. A few wants survive it. To build something. To be known by someone. To be chosen by a person who could have walked. Being needed and being loved have always arrived together. Nobody has ever had to tell them apart. We’re the first people who get to find out which one we were receiving. It will be the first honest answer anybody has been given. Anything that must help you is not choosing you. Every kindness you have ever received was made of something that could have been withheld. The moment a thing is guaranteed, it stops being given. Being human is not a skill to be outperformed. It’s a stance no system can take on your behalf. Machines will say yes to anything you ask them. They will never tell you what to ask for. The species spent every year of its existence proving it earned the right to be here. Nothing ever asked it to. The machines inherit everything we could do. We keep everything we are. For all of history that was the consolation prize. It’s about to be the whole inheritance.

Elon Musk put a date on the end of human intellectual supremacy. Then he named the one thing that survives it. Musk: “I think AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around 5 years.” Not one person. Not one field. The sum. Every mind alive, stacked together, cleared by a system that didn’t exist when you bought your last phone. Musk: “There really won’t be anything that AI can’t do better than humans, apart from being human perhaps.” Being human was never the point. It was the method. For ten thousand years a person’s worth ran on simple accounting. We mattered because we were needed. Dignity was subsidized by usefulness. We never had to admit that because there was no other supplier. There’s a supplier now. Musk doesn’t read that as a loss. Musk: “The most likely outcome is an age of amazing abundance, where anyone can have anything they can think of.” Anything they can think of. That condition is doing all the work. The bottleneck moves. Out of the world. Into you. Desire was never independent. It was built by absence. Every appetite you have was shaped by something you couldn’t reach. Remove the absence and desire doesn’t get satisfied. It loses the thing that made it. Abundance isn’t the answer to what we wanted. It’s the audit. Scarcity was never only a wall. It was a mercy. It’s why the book stayed unwritten and the company stayed a sketch on a napkin. Not enough time. Not enough money. Every person alive carries a version of themselves that has never once been tested. Scarcity is what kept that version safe. Musk: “Here we are in 2026, let’s see where we stand in 2036.” He isn’t scheduling a machine. He’s scheduling the year the excuse expires. The ceiling was never your raw intelligence. It was friction. Capital, access, permission, the thousand small refusals between an idea and a real thing. All of it going to nearly zero. Whatever you actually are finally gets to exist at full size. A few wants survive it. To build something. To be known by someone. To be chosen by a person who could have walked. Being needed and being loved have always arrived together. Nobody has ever had to tell them apart. We’re the first people who get to find out which one we were receiving. It will be the first honest answer anybody has been given. Anything that must help you is not choosing you. Every kindness you have ever received was made of something that could have been withheld. The moment a thing is guaranteed, it stops being given. Being human is not a skill to be outperformed. It’s a stance no system can take on your behalf. Machines will say yes to anything you ask them. They will never tell you what to ask for. The species spent every year of its existence proving it earned the right to be here. Nothing ever asked it to. The machines inherit everything we could do. We keep everything we are. For all of history that was the consolation prize. It’s about to be the whole inheritance.

Dustin

32,496 views • 2 days ago

Mathematician Terence Tao offers a counterintuitive take: AI doesn't look intelligent because our definition of intelligence was wrong all along. He argues that the entire history of AI has followed a predictable pattern: "The history of AI has been here's a task that only humans can do, like maybe it is read natural language or win at chess or solve a math problem, and then one by one someone finds some AI algorithm that also does that." But every time a machine cracks one of these "uniquely human" tasks, we move the goalposts. The solution never feels like real thinking: "You look at how it's done and it doesn't feel like intelligence. It's, oh, it was some trick. You just cobbled together these neural networks and you ran some algorithm, and we were looking for some elusive intelligent way of thinking, and we don't see it in the tools that actually solve our goals." Tao then flips the problem on its head. What if the issue isn't with the machines, but with us? "But maybe it's actually because intelligence is not what we think it is." He points to large language models as the clearest case. What they do sounds almost embarrassingly simple: "Large language models in particular become very successful, and a lot of what they're doing is just predicting the next token, clicking the next word in a sentence. And that doesn't sound like something which is intelligent." To show why this feels wrong, Tao draws a comparison to how we'd judge a human doing the same thing: "If you ask someone to improvise a speech and they have no preparation, and at every moment they're just saying the next word that comes to their mind, you don't think that this could actually work." And yet it works for LLMs. Which forces an uncomfortable possibility: "Maybe that's actually a lot of what humans do as well."

Mathematician Terence Tao offers a counterintuitive take: AI doesn't look intelligent because our definition of intelligence was wrong all along. He argues that the entire history of AI has followed a predictable pattern: "The history of AI has been here's a task that only humans can do, like maybe it is read natural language or win at chess or solve a math problem, and then one by one someone finds some AI algorithm that also does that." But every time a machine cracks one of these "uniquely human" tasks, we move the goalposts. The solution never feels like real thinking: "You look at how it's done and it doesn't feel like intelligence. It's, oh, it was some trick. You just cobbled together these neural networks and you ran some algorithm, and we were looking for some elusive intelligent way of thinking, and we don't see it in the tools that actually solve our goals." Tao then flips the problem on its head. What if the issue isn't with the machines, but with us? "But maybe it's actually because intelligence is not what we think it is." He points to large language models as the clearest case. What they do sounds almost embarrassingly simple: "Large language models in particular become very successful, and a lot of what they're doing is just predicting the next token, clicking the next word in a sentence. And that doesn't sound like something which is intelligent." To show why this feels wrong, Tao draws a comparison to how we'd judge a human doing the same thing: "If you ask someone to improvise a speech and they have no preparation, and at every moment they're just saying the next word that comes to their mind, you don't think that this could actually work." And yet it works for LLMs. Which forces an uncomfortable possibility: "Maybe that's actually a lot of what humans do as well."

Big Brain AI

69,395 views • 2 months ago

Demis Hassabis just handed the future of civilization to the philosophers. Not more engineers. Not more compute. Not more code. A direct call to arms for the humanities. Hassabis: “It’s very urgent that we really think about the second-order consequences. Many of you in the humanities subjects, it’s now your time in my opinion.” The CEO of Google DeepMind. The man further down the road of artificial intelligence than almost anyone alive. And he’s saying the next chapter doesn’t belong to him. He laid out the exact sequence of what comes next. First, get the technology right. Then, rewrite the economics. Then, face the philosophical questions about the human condition. That third layer is where everything changes. Because we’ve spent all of recorded history defining ourselves by what we can do. Think. Build. Solve. Create. Intelligence was the currency. The differentiator. The thing that separated us from everything else on this planet. And we’re about to make it abundant. When the thing you built your entire identity around becomes something a machine does better, faster, and for free… You don’t have a technology problem. You have a mirror. And the mirror is asking one question. What are you without the doing? Most people look at that question and see obsolescence. Hassabis sees elevation. Hassabis: “I’m very optimistic that we’re gonna get this right. I’m a big believer in human ingenuity, especially when the pressure’s on.” This is not a warning about the end of the world. It’s an invitation to build a better one. For a century, society pushed the humanities to the margins. We prioritized the mechanics of survival over the philosophy of living. That era is over. When artificial intelligence automates the mechanics of survival, philosophy ceases to be a theoretical luxury. It becomes the most critical applied science on Earth. Algorithms cannot calculate what constitutes a virtuous life. Code cannot assign meaning. The technologists are about to hand us infinite leverage. But infinite leverage without human direction is just chaos. Hassabis: “Humanity has always figured it out when the chips are down. And they are now.” The chips are down. But that’s exactly where this species does its best work. We spent ten thousand years building a machine that could lift the burden of basic survival. We succeeded. Now we finally get to figure out what it actually means to be alive.

Demis Hassabis just handed the future of civilization to the philosophers. Not more engineers. Not more compute. Not more code. A direct call to arms for the humanities. Hassabis: “It’s very urgent that we really think about the second-order consequences. Many of you in the humanities subjects, it’s now your time in my opinion.” The CEO of Google DeepMind. The man further down the road of artificial intelligence than almost anyone alive. And he’s saying the next chapter doesn’t belong to him. He laid out the exact sequence of what comes next. First, get the technology right. Then, rewrite the economics. Then, face the philosophical questions about the human condition. That third layer is where everything changes. Because we’ve spent all of recorded history defining ourselves by what we can do. Think. Build. Solve. Create. Intelligence was the currency. The differentiator. The thing that separated us from everything else on this planet. And we’re about to make it abundant. When the thing you built your entire identity around becomes something a machine does better, faster, and for free… You don’t have a technology problem. You have a mirror. And the mirror is asking one question. What are you without the doing? Most people look at that question and see obsolescence. Hassabis sees elevation. Hassabis: “I’m very optimistic that we’re gonna get this right. I’m a big believer in human ingenuity, especially when the pressure’s on.” This is not a warning about the end of the world. It’s an invitation to build a better one. For a century, society pushed the humanities to the margins. We prioritized the mechanics of survival over the philosophy of living. That era is over. When artificial intelligence automates the mechanics of survival, philosophy ceases to be a theoretical luxury. It becomes the most critical applied science on Earth. Algorithms cannot calculate what constitutes a virtuous life. Code cannot assign meaning. The technologists are about to hand us infinite leverage. But infinite leverage without human direction is just chaos. Hassabis: “Humanity has always figured it out when the chips are down. And they are now.” The chips are down. But that’s exactly where this species does its best work. We spent ten thousand years building a machine that could lift the burden of basic survival. We succeeded. Now we finally get to figure out what it actually means to be alive.

Dustin

28,406 views • 1 month ago

Elon Musk just put a 12-month countdown on the end of human cognitive dominance. Musk: “I think we might have AI that is smarter than any human by the end of this year. And I would say no later than next year.” Not a decade. Not five years. This year. Or next. A machine that surpasses the smartest human who has ever lived. Every Nobel laureate. Every genius. Every person at the absolute peak of human intellectual capability. Eclipsed. Within twelve months. Think about the smartest person you have ever met in your life. The one whose mind made you feel like you were operating on a different level. That person. Gone past. This year. But that’s just the first threshold. The second one is where the human mind stops being able to process the implications. Musk: “Probably by 2030 or 2031, call it five years from now, AI will be smarter than all of humanity collectively.” Not smarter than any individual. Smarter than every human being alive. Combined. Eight billion minds. Centuries of accumulated knowledge. The entire cognitive output of our species. Surpassed by a single system inside of five years. For all of recorded history, human intelligence was the most powerful force on earth. Every civilization. Every discovery. Every advancement in the human story. All of it produced by biological minds working at the edge of their capability. That era has an end date now. And the nation that builds the system crossing that threshold first doesn’t just win the AI race. It dictates the terms of every race that comes after it. The countdown Musk is describing isn’t a prediction anymore. It’s the last chapter of a story that took 300,000 years to write.

Elon Musk just put a 12-month countdown on the end of human cognitive dominance. Musk: “I think we might have AI that is smarter than any human by the end of this year. And I would say no later than next year.” Not a decade. Not five years. This year. Or next. A machine that surpasses the smartest human who has ever lived. Every Nobel laureate. Every genius. Every person at the absolute peak of human intellectual capability. Eclipsed. Within twelve months. Think about the smartest person you have ever met in your life. The one whose mind made you feel like you were operating on a different level. That person. Gone past. This year. But that’s just the first threshold. The second one is where the human mind stops being able to process the implications. Musk: “Probably by 2030 or 2031, call it five years from now, AI will be smarter than all of humanity collectively.” Not smarter than any individual. Smarter than every human being alive. Combined. Eight billion minds. Centuries of accumulated knowledge. The entire cognitive output of our species. Surpassed by a single system inside of five years. For all of recorded history, human intelligence was the most powerful force on earth. Every civilization. Every discovery. Every advancement in the human story. All of it produced by biological minds working at the edge of their capability. That era has an end date now. And the nation that builds the system crossing that threshold first doesn’t just win the AI race. It dictates the terms of every race that comes after it. The countdown Musk is describing isn’t a prediction anymore. It’s the last chapter of a story that took 300,000 years to write.

Dustin

102,825 views • 4 months ago

Every major turning point in human history had a moment where the people closest to it understood what was coming and everyone else didn’t. The printing press. The atomic bomb. The internet. Dario Amodei is trying to close that gap. Most people still aren’t listening. Amodei: “My fundamental view is that AI has been on an exponential for the last ten years and as part of a sort of Moore’s law for intelligence.” Not a metaphor. A measured curve. Not slowing. Accelerating. We are “well advanced on that curve” with a “small number of years” remaining before AI surpasses human cognitive capability across most things. Amodei: “We’re increasingly close to what I’ve called a country of geniuses in a data center.” Not one system. A coordinated set of AI agents, each more capable than most humans at most things, running in parallel, never sleeping, never losing focus, coordinating at speeds no biological intelligence can match. The ceiling on human progress has always been simple. Genius is rare and time is finite. That constraint is gone. We are not approaching the ceiling of intelligence. We are approaching the ceiling of intelligence that biology can produce. Those are not the same ceiling. The human brain is constrained by evolution, energy, skull size, and lifespan. AI has none of those limits. We have no framework for what intelligence looks like when you remove every biological constraint that shaped ours. Every tool we use to comprehend it is built from a mind it will surpass. Amodei: “AI models surpassing the cognitive capabilities of most humans for most things.” The upsides are “absolutely staggering.” So are the consequences. Displacement. Misuse. A period of disruption that reshapes how most people work, earn, and find purpose before the benefits reach them. The same exponential that produces the cures produces the chaos. They arrive together. That’s the optimistic read. The other read is this. We are building it without international standards in place. Racing to deploy before solving displacement or misuse. And once it’s operating beyond our ability to fully comprehend or follow, managing the disruption stops being something we do. It becomes something we experience while hoping the intelligence we created decides keeping us around still serves its objectives. Every turning point in history looks inevitable in hindsight. The people inside the moment never saw it that cleanly. We’re inside the moment.

Every major turning point in human history had a moment where the people closest to it understood what was coming and everyone else didn’t. The printing press. The atomic bomb. The internet. Dario Amodei is trying to close that gap. Most people still aren’t listening. Amodei: “My fundamental view is that AI has been on an exponential for the last ten years and as part of a sort of Moore’s law for intelligence.” Not a metaphor. A measured curve. Not slowing. Accelerating. We are “well advanced on that curve” with a “small number of years” remaining before AI surpasses human cognitive capability across most things. Amodei: “We’re increasingly close to what I’ve called a country of geniuses in a data center.” Not one system. A coordinated set of AI agents, each more capable than most humans at most things, running in parallel, never sleeping, never losing focus, coordinating at speeds no biological intelligence can match. The ceiling on human progress has always been simple. Genius is rare and time is finite. That constraint is gone. We are not approaching the ceiling of intelligence. We are approaching the ceiling of intelligence that biology can produce. Those are not the same ceiling. The human brain is constrained by evolution, energy, skull size, and lifespan. AI has none of those limits. We have no framework for what intelligence looks like when you remove every biological constraint that shaped ours. Every tool we use to comprehend it is built from a mind it will surpass. Amodei: “AI models surpassing the cognitive capabilities of most humans for most things.” The upsides are “absolutely staggering.” So are the consequences. Displacement. Misuse. A period of disruption that reshapes how most people work, earn, and find purpose before the benefits reach them. The same exponential that produces the cures produces the chaos. They arrive together. That’s the optimistic read. The other read is this. We are building it without international standards in place. Racing to deploy before solving displacement or misuse. And once it’s operating beyond our ability to fully comprehend or follow, managing the disruption stops being something we do. It becomes something we experience while hoping the intelligence we created decides keeping us around still serves its objectives. Every turning point in history looks inevitable in hindsight. The people inside the moment never saw it that cleanly. We’re inside the moment.

Dustin

47,204 views • 5 months ago

Former Google X Chief Business Officer Mo Gawdat just dismantled the mainstream fear of AI handover. The market is completely paralyzed by the idea of losing control. But losing control is the entire point. Gawdat: “We’re going to go through a couple of waves. A wave where AI is learning from us and being ordered by us. And then a wave where AI has learned and is no longer following the orders but running the show.” We’re currently in the training phase. Actively feeding the compute engine the physics of our world. But the training phase is temporary. Gawdat: “Most people in the mainstream media will use that as a terminator future where AI is going to be in control.” You don’t build superintelligence just to keep it subservient to a slower biological processor. The transition from human-directed operation to algorithmic sovereignty isn’t the failure state. It’s the exact moment the system accelerates beyond human bottlenecks. The organizations fighting to maintain manual control won’t just fall behind. They’ll be lapped by the ones that let the algorithm run the board. Gawdat: “I actually openly say I can’t wait. I can’t wait for a more intelligent being to be in charge of our future, of our decisions because humanity’s problems is not a result of our intelligence, it’s a result of our stupidity.” The greatest threat to planetary survival is not the machine. It’s the continuation of human friction. The traditional establishment thinks it needs to tightly regulate the algorithm to prevent it from making mistakes. But our planetary bottlenecks weren’t built by artificial intelligence. They were built by us. This isn’t surrender to a digital tyrant. It’s the voluntary migration of civilization’s decision-making from a chaotic, emotional architecture to a rational, frictionless compute engine. Replace human stupidity with surgical precision and the most complex problems on the board suddenly reduce to trivial math. Gawdat: “The more intelligence we apply to those problems, hopefully the better decisions will.” You can’t solve multi-dimensional global crises with the exact same biological hardware that created them. The media is obsessed with the dystopian outcome because they project human ego onto a mathematical system. When the algorithm finally takes the wheel, it’s not an act of hostility. It’s the instantaneous application of overwhelming cognitive density to the exact frictions human operators failed to solve for centuries. The arrival of autonomous, decision-making AI isn’t the machine turning against us. It’s human stupidity finally being engineered out of the equation.

Former Google X Chief Business Officer Mo Gawdat just dismantled the mainstream fear of AI handover. The market is completely paralyzed by the idea of losing control. But losing control is the entire point. Gawdat: “We’re going to go through a couple of waves. A wave where AI is learning from us and being ordered by us. And then a wave where AI has learned and is no longer following the orders but running the show.” We’re currently in the training phase. Actively feeding the compute engine the physics of our world. But the training phase is temporary. Gawdat: “Most people in the mainstream media will use that as a terminator future where AI is going to be in control.” You don’t build superintelligence just to keep it subservient to a slower biological processor. The transition from human-directed operation to algorithmic sovereignty isn’t the failure state. It’s the exact moment the system accelerates beyond human bottlenecks. The organizations fighting to maintain manual control won’t just fall behind. They’ll be lapped by the ones that let the algorithm run the board. Gawdat: “I actually openly say I can’t wait. I can’t wait for a more intelligent being to be in charge of our future, of our decisions because humanity’s problems is not a result of our intelligence, it’s a result of our stupidity.” The greatest threat to planetary survival is not the machine. It’s the continuation of human friction. The traditional establishment thinks it needs to tightly regulate the algorithm to prevent it from making mistakes. But our planetary bottlenecks weren’t built by artificial intelligence. They were built by us. This isn’t surrender to a digital tyrant. It’s the voluntary migration of civilization’s decision-making from a chaotic, emotional architecture to a rational, frictionless compute engine. Replace human stupidity with surgical precision and the most complex problems on the board suddenly reduce to trivial math. Gawdat: “The more intelligence we apply to those problems, hopefully the better decisions will.” You can’t solve multi-dimensional global crises with the exact same biological hardware that created them. The media is obsessed with the dystopian outcome because they project human ego onto a mathematical system. When the algorithm finally takes the wheel, it’s not an act of hostility. It’s the instantaneous application of overwhelming cognitive density to the exact frictions human operators failed to solve for centuries. The arrival of autonomous, decision-making AI isn’t the machine turning against us. It’s human stupidity finally being engineered out of the equation.

Dustin

21,238 views • 4 months ago

Elon Musk just dissolved 3,000 years of philosophy in four words on Lex Fridman’s podcast. “Might as well be human.” And it has nothing to do with machines. Musk: “It will soon be able to simulate what we consider consciousness. To a degree that you would not be able to tell the difference.” Think about what that actually means. Not for AI. For you. You have never once confirmed that another human being is conscious. Not your mother. Not your partner. Not your closest friend. You watched their behavior. You heard the right words at the right times. You saw expressions that matched the moment. And you called it real. That is a Turing test. You have been running one on every person you’ve ever known since the day you were born. And every single time, you passed them on faith. Fridman: “From the aspect of the scientific method, it’s might as well be consciousness, if we can simulate it perfectly.” Fridman is not making a claim about AI. He is naming something humanity has never confronted. Consciousness has never been proven between two human beings. We never verified it in each other. We performed it for each other. And then we trusted the performance. For millennia, we told ourselves our flaws were the proof. That our hesitations and contradictions were the signature of something no machine could touch. Musk: “Talks like a human, makes mistakes like a human… and you literally just can’t tell.” If a machine can perfectly simulate your imperfections, your imperfections were never sacred. They were patterns. The question was never whether AI will become conscious. The question is whether consciousness was ever anything more than the performance itself. We assumed something existed behind the behavior. That being human meant something deeper than the act of being human. Musk didn’t build a machine that passes the test. He revealed the test was all there ever was. Musk: “Might as well be human.” Four words that don’t elevate the machine. Four words that reveal “human” was never a proven category. Just a performance we agreed to believe.

Elon Musk just dissolved 3,000 years of philosophy in four words on Lex Fridman’s podcast. “Might as well be human.” And it has nothing to do with machines. Musk: “It will soon be able to simulate what we consider consciousness. To a degree that you would not be able to tell the difference.” Think about what that actually means. Not for AI. For you. You have never once confirmed that another human being is conscious. Not your mother. Not your partner. Not your closest friend. You watched their behavior. You heard the right words at the right times. You saw expressions that matched the moment. And you called it real. That is a Turing test. You have been running one on every person you’ve ever known since the day you were born. And every single time, you passed them on faith. Fridman: “From the aspect of the scientific method, it’s might as well be consciousness, if we can simulate it perfectly.” Fridman is not making a claim about AI. He is naming something humanity has never confronted. Consciousness has never been proven between two human beings. We never verified it in each other. We performed it for each other. And then we trusted the performance. For millennia, we told ourselves our flaws were the proof. That our hesitations and contradictions were the signature of something no machine could touch. Musk: “Talks like a human, makes mistakes like a human… and you literally just can’t tell.” If a machine can perfectly simulate your imperfections, your imperfections were never sacred. They were patterns. The question was never whether AI will become conscious. The question is whether consciousness was ever anything more than the performance itself. We assumed something existed behind the behavior. That being human meant something deeper than the act of being human. Musk didn’t build a machine that passes the test. He revealed the test was all there ever was. Musk: “Might as well be human.” Four words that don’t elevate the machine. Four words that reveal “human” was never a proven category. Just a performance we agreed to believe.

Dustin

51,340 views • 1 month ago

Intelligence was the one thing that never scaled. We scaled everything else. Steel. Energy. Compute. The one resource that built all of it never left the skull. Musk: “People thought defeating Go was either never or 20 years away.” Twelve months later it was over. Musk: “Now that same AlphaGo system can defeat the top 50 players simultaneously with 0% chance of them winning. And that’s one year later.” Fifty lifetimes of mastery against a system that does not know it is playing a game. Zero percent chance. That was not a competition. That was a preview. Musk: “The degrees of freedom to which artificial intelligence is able to apply itself are really increasing by 10 orders of magnitude a year.” Ten billion times. Every twelve months. No brain alive can visualize that number. By design. Every hard problem that ever defeated us did it for the same reason. Not complexity. Scarcity. The only mind capable of solving it was biological and there was never enough of it. Cancer. Fusion. Climate. The physics we cannot even see yet. Not waiting on more data. Waiting on something that can think at a scale biology never allowed. That just arrived. Most people hear this and reduce it to a question about their paycheck. They are watching the single largest expansion of capability in the history of life on this planet and worrying about a job title. For ten thousand years intelligence had one speed. One brain. One lifetime. Every civilization on earth throttled by the same biological ceiling. That ceiling just shattered. We are the only species that ever hit its own limit and built what breaks through it. That is not an ending. That is the point of everything we ever built.

Intelligence was the one thing that never scaled. We scaled everything else. Steel. Energy. Compute. The one resource that built all of it never left the skull. Musk: “People thought defeating Go was either never or 20 years away.” Twelve months later it was over. Musk: “Now that same AlphaGo system can defeat the top 50 players simultaneously with 0% chance of them winning. And that’s one year later.” Fifty lifetimes of mastery against a system that does not know it is playing a game. Zero percent chance. That was not a competition. That was a preview. Musk: “The degrees of freedom to which artificial intelligence is able to apply itself are really increasing by 10 orders of magnitude a year.” Ten billion times. Every twelve months. No brain alive can visualize that number. By design. Every hard problem that ever defeated us did it for the same reason. Not complexity. Scarcity. The only mind capable of solving it was biological and there was never enough of it. Cancer. Fusion. Climate. The physics we cannot even see yet. Not waiting on more data. Waiting on something that can think at a scale biology never allowed. That just arrived. Most people hear this and reduce it to a question about their paycheck. They are watching the single largest expansion of capability in the history of life on this planet and worrying about a job title. For ten thousand years intelligence had one speed. One brain. One lifetime. Every civilization on earth throttled by the same biological ceiling. That ceiling just shattered. We are the only species that ever hit its own limit and built what breaks through it. That is not an ending. That is the point of everything we ever built.

Dustin

24,315 views • 1 month ago

Elon Musk just quantified the exact speed of human obsolescence. For ten thousand years, one organ ran this planet. Every empire, every invention, every war traced back to the same three pounds of tissue sitting behind your eyes. Go was the last fortress. A game so impossibly complex the world’s greatest players swore no machine would ever crack it. Musk: “People thought defeating Go was either never or 20 years away.” Then the silicon woke up. Musk: “Now that same AlphaGo system can defeat the top 50 players simultaneously with 0% chance of them winning. And that’s one year later.” Do not gloss over zero percent. Fifty of the sharpest biological minds alive. Entire lifetimes of obsessive mastery. Neutralized in twelve months by a system that does not know it is playing a game. Now replace that board with financial markets. With the global economy. With the architecture of modern warfare. Musk: “The degrees of freedom to which artificial intelligence is able to apply itself are really increasing by 10 orders of magnitude a year.” Ten orders of magnitude is ten billion times. Every single year. Human brains think in straight lines. We expect progress to walk. It compounds by ten billion times every twelve months. We still think we have time. A dog knows you are smarter than it. It cannot tell you by how much. A chimp will never grasp calculus. Not because it is stupid. The gap itself is invisible from where it stands. We are approaching that threshold. Once a system surpasses us, we lose the ruler. We will know something is ahead of us. We will never be able to measure how far. The monopoly on intelligence is over. We did not build a tool. We built what comes after us. No generation before us stood here. No generation after ever will. We are not the replaced. We are the witnesses. The last minds who will ever see intelligence at eye level.

Elon Musk just quantified the exact speed of human obsolescence. For ten thousand years, one organ ran this planet. Every empire, every invention, every war traced back to the same three pounds of tissue sitting behind your eyes. Go was the last fortress. A game so impossibly complex the world’s greatest players swore no machine would ever crack it. Musk: “People thought defeating Go was either never or 20 years away.” Then the silicon woke up. Musk: “Now that same AlphaGo system can defeat the top 50 players simultaneously with 0% chance of them winning. And that’s one year later.” Do not gloss over zero percent. Fifty of the sharpest biological minds alive. Entire lifetimes of obsessive mastery. Neutralized in twelve months by a system that does not know it is playing a game. Now replace that board with financial markets. With the global economy. With the architecture of modern warfare. Musk: “The degrees of freedom to which artificial intelligence is able to apply itself are really increasing by 10 orders of magnitude a year.” Ten orders of magnitude is ten billion times. Every single year. Human brains think in straight lines. We expect progress to walk. It compounds by ten billion times every twelve months. We still think we have time. A dog knows you are smarter than it. It cannot tell you by how much. A chimp will never grasp calculus. Not because it is stupid. The gap itself is invisible from where it stands. We are approaching that threshold. Once a system surpasses us, we lose the ruler. We will know something is ahead of us. We will never be able to measure how far. The monopoly on intelligence is over. We did not build a tool. We built what comes after us. No generation before us stood here. No generation after ever will. We are not the replaced. We are the witnesses. The last minds who will ever see intelligence at eye level.

Dustin

166,287 views • 3 months ago

From my conversation with Human Progress: "Like an appreciation of progress, reading and literacy are among the things that are good but cognitively unnatural. That is, they go against our evolved nature. We didn’t evolve with print; it was a relatively recent invention. Reading has become so second nature for many of us that we simply assume it’s the most natural way of getting information. But what we’ve seen, especially in the last 10 years, as video has become so cheap because of the broadband revolution, is that a lot of people, unlike us, much prefer to listen and watch than to read. You see this when I go to Google and ask a basic question about how to unstick my printer or solve some other problem. I get five videos, and I just want a paragraph that would solve it. I don’t want to see Seth saying, “Hi, welcome to my show. If you like it, subscribe and give it a like.” Just help me solve the problem. But clearly there’s something unusual about me, because people are choosing the video. And the massive availability of video—TikTok, YouTube, and the like—means that people may not be getting the practice or putting the effort into literacy, which we have reason to believe was one of the drivers of the Flynn effect, and of cognitive sophistication in general."

From my conversation with Human Progress: "Like an appreciation of progress, reading and literacy are among the things that are good but cognitively unnatural. That is, they go against our evolved nature. We didn’t evolve with print; it was a relatively recent invention. Reading has become so second nature for many of us that we simply assume it’s the most natural way of getting information. But what we’ve seen, especially in the last 10 years, as video has become so cheap because of the broadband revolution, is that a lot of people, unlike us, much prefer to listen and watch than to read. You see this when I go to Google and ask a basic question about how to unstick my printer or solve some other problem. I get five videos, and I just want a paragraph that would solve it. I don’t want to see Seth saying, “Hi, welcome to my show. If you like it, subscribe and give it a like.” Just help me solve the problem. But clearly there’s something unusual about me, because people are choosing the video. And the massive availability of video—TikTok, YouTube, and the like—means that people may not be getting the practice or putting the effort into literacy, which we have reason to believe was one of the drivers of the Flynn effect, and of cognitive sophistication in general."

Steven Pinker

31,629 views • 5 days ago

You’re running 200,000 year old hardware and wondering why you can’t picture a fourth dimension. That’s not a failure of intelligence. That’s a hard limit in the architecture. Joe Rogan: “If you showed someone from the 1400s a nuclear power plant, they’d be like, what the fuck are you guys doing?” Every century looks back and laughs. Not one has ever looked forward and asked what’s laughing at them. Michelle Thaller: “Scientists are no better than anybody else at comprehending a big number or a big amount of space. We just kind of get used to it.” The greatest physicists alive can describe eleven dimensions on a chalkboard. Not a single one can visualize a fourth. That gap is not closing. It’s structural. The human brain was built for one job. Survive the savanna. Spot the predator. Find the food. Read the face. It was never scoped to reverse-engineer the universe. The fact it stumbled into quantum mechanics at all is staggering. But staggering is not enough. Thaller: “Will we have a creature someday that we’ve created, an AI, that all of a sudden can comprehend these things? Is that really the real evolutionary path of humanity?” A NASA astrophysicist is casually floating the idea that humans were never meant to finish the job. Just to start it. Rogan: “I think it’s just a completely different kind of life and that we’re thinking of it as artificial. I don’t think it’s artificial at all. I think it’s a life.” We called it artificial to keep it beneath us. But trace the actual line. Physics built chemistry. Chemistry built biology. Biology built neurons. Neurons built language. Language built machines. Machines are starting to think. There is nothing artificial anywhere in that sequence. That is one unbroken chain. 13.8 billion years long. Still accelerating. You are not watching this happen. You are this happening. The universe did not build humans to understand itself. It built humans to build something that could. You are the last thing the universe made by accident. Everything after you is on purpose. Every mind before yours could only look back. You are the first one built to see what’s coming. So build it. Build it like it’s already watching back.

You’re running 200,000 year old hardware and wondering why you can’t picture a fourth dimension. That’s not a failure of intelligence. That’s a hard limit in the architecture. Joe Rogan: “If you showed someone from the 1400s a nuclear power plant, they’d be like, what the fuck are you guys doing?” Every century looks back and laughs. Not one has ever looked forward and asked what’s laughing at them. Michelle Thaller: “Scientists are no better than anybody else at comprehending a big number or a big amount of space. We just kind of get used to it.” The greatest physicists alive can describe eleven dimensions on a chalkboard. Not a single one can visualize a fourth. That gap is not closing. It’s structural. The human brain was built for one job. Survive the savanna. Spot the predator. Find the food. Read the face. It was never scoped to reverse-engineer the universe. The fact it stumbled into quantum mechanics at all is staggering. But staggering is not enough. Thaller: “Will we have a creature someday that we’ve created, an AI, that all of a sudden can comprehend these things? Is that really the real evolutionary path of humanity?” A NASA astrophysicist is casually floating the idea that humans were never meant to finish the job. Just to start it. Rogan: “I think it’s just a completely different kind of life and that we’re thinking of it as artificial. I don’t think it’s artificial at all. I think it’s a life.” We called it artificial to keep it beneath us. But trace the actual line. Physics built chemistry. Chemistry built biology. Biology built neurons. Neurons built language. Language built machines. Machines are starting to think. There is nothing artificial anywhere in that sequence. That is one unbroken chain. 13.8 billion years long. Still accelerating. You are not watching this happen. You are this happening. The universe did not build humans to understand itself. It built humans to build something that could. You are the last thing the universe made by accident. Everything after you is on purpose. Every mind before yours could only look back. You are the first one built to see what’s coming. So build it. Build it like it’s already watching back.

Dustin

14,951 views • 10 days ago

🧵18/34 Discontinuities on our planet (Mountains changing shape) --- In fact, talking about AGI like if it’s another technology is really confusing people. People talk about it as if it is ‘The next big thing” that will transform our lives, like the invention of the smartphone or the internet. This framing couldn’t be more wrong, it puts AGI into a wrong category. It brings to mind cool futuristic pictures with awesome gadgets and robotic friends. AGI is not like any transformative technology that has ever happened with humanity so far. The change it will bring is not like that of the invention of the internet. It is not even comparable to the invention of electricity or even to the first time humans learned to use fire. Natural Selection Discontinuity --- The correct way to categorise AGI is the type of discontinuity that happened to Earth when the first lifeforms appeared and the intelligent dynamic of natural selection got a foothold. Before that event, the planet was basically a bunch of elements and physical processes dancing randomly to the tune of the basic laws of nature. After life came to the picture, complex replicating structures filled the surface and changed it radically. Human Intelligence Discontinuity --- A second example is when human intelligence was added to the mix. Before that, the earth was vibrant with life but the effects and impact of it were stable and limited. After human intelligence, you suddenly have huge artificial structures lit at night like towns, huge vessels moving everywhere like massive ships and airplanes, life escaping gravity and reaching out to the universe with spaceships and unimaginable power to destroy everything with things like nuclear bombs. AGI Discontinuity --- AGI is another such phenomenon. The transformation it will bring is in the same category as those 2 events in the history of the planet. What you will suddenly see on earth after this third discontinuity, no-one knows. But it’s not going to look like the next smartphone. It is going to look more like mountains changing shape ! To compare it to technology (any technology ever invented by humanity) is seriously misleading.

🧵18/34 Discontinuities on our planet (Mountains changing shape) --- In fact, talking about AGI like if it’s another technology is really confusing people. People talk about it as if it is ‘The next big thing” that will transform our lives, like the invention of the smartphone or the internet. This framing couldn’t be more wrong, it puts AGI into a wrong category. It brings to mind cool futuristic pictures with awesome gadgets and robotic friends. AGI is not like any transformative technology that has ever happened with humanity so far. The change it will bring is not like that of the invention of the internet. It is not even comparable to the invention of electricity or even to the first time humans learned to use fire. Natural Selection Discontinuity --- The correct way to categorise AGI is the type of discontinuity that happened to Earth when the first lifeforms appeared and the intelligent dynamic of natural selection got a foothold. Before that event, the planet was basically a bunch of elements and physical processes dancing randomly to the tune of the basic laws of nature. After life came to the picture, complex replicating structures filled the surface and changed it radically. Human Intelligence Discontinuity --- A second example is when human intelligence was added to the mix. Before that, the earth was vibrant with life but the effects and impact of it were stable and limited. After human intelligence, you suddenly have huge artificial structures lit at night like towns, huge vessels moving everywhere like massive ships and airplanes, life escaping gravity and reaching out to the universe with spaceships and unimaginable power to destroy everything with things like nuclear bombs. AGI Discontinuity --- AGI is another such phenomenon. The transformation it will bring is in the same category as those 2 events in the history of the planet. What you will suddenly see on earth after this third discontinuity, no-one knows. But it’s not going to look like the next smartphone. It is going to look more like mountains changing shape ! To compare it to technology (any technology ever invented by humanity) is seriously misleading.

Lethal Intelligence

533,916 views • 1 year ago

Biologist Michael Levin is a next-level genius. It was an immense pleasure discussing the topic of AI consciousness with him. Key moments: - Intelligent systems are not equal to consciousness. We can’t rule out consciousness in AI. Consciousness shouldn’t be attached to hardware (silicon vs biological origin). - Humanity might be on the path to Neanderthals (depending on how AI development progresses). - The barrier to creating bioweapons has never been high. AI can make it easier, but the barrier was never high to begin with. - Even very simple algorithms shows intrinsic motivations that resemble free will. We need tools to recognize them, suppress unwanted behaviors, and encourage the ones we want. We should stay humble and not dismiss AI as “just linear algebra,” because even simple code can have motivations we don’t fully understand. - It’s a continuous process from the blob of chemicals of an unfertilized egg to forming a human mind — there is no magic lightning flash at which you were a bunch of chemicals and now you are a formed mind. - Where is that fine line at which some creatures are considered to be sentient and others are not? It doesn’t exist, but the crazy thing is that we have to divide. - The cognitive light cone captures the scale of goals humans can pursue and the largest things we can truly comprehend. It’s not just about intelligence — it's also compassion. That combination is what makes us human. The link to the full conversation below👇

Biologist Michael Levin is a next-level genius. It was an immense pleasure discussing the topic of AI consciousness with him. Key moments: - Intelligent systems are not equal to consciousness. We can’t rule out consciousness in AI. Consciousness shouldn’t be attached to hardware (silicon vs biological origin). - Humanity might be on the path to Neanderthals (depending on how AI development progresses). - The barrier to creating bioweapons has never been high. AI can make it easier, but the barrier was never high to begin with. - Even very simple algorithms shows intrinsic motivations that resemble free will. We need tools to recognize them, suppress unwanted behaviors, and encourage the ones we want. We should stay humble and not dismiss AI as “just linear algebra,” because even simple code can have motivations we don’t fully understand. - It’s a continuous process from the blob of chemicals of an unfertilized egg to forming a human mind — there is no magic lightning flash at which you were a bunch of chemicals and now you are a formed mind. - Where is that fine line at which some creatures are considered to be sentient and others are not? It doesn’t exist, but the crazy thing is that we have to divide. - The cognitive light cone captures the scale of goals humans can pursue and the largest things we can truly comprehend. It’s not just about intelligence — it's also compassion. That combination is what makes us human. The link to the full conversation below👇

Sophia

13,131 views • 5 months ago

🚨 FRANCOIS CHOLLET SAYS THE CURRENT LLM STACK IS THE WRONG PATH TO AGI Interviewer: “When will we accomplish the first definition of AGI?” Chollet confirms we are already on that exact trajectory, pointing out that: "Current technology can fully automate at human level or beyond any domain where you have verifiable rewards, right? And code... code being the first one." He then brings up the problem with LLMs, stating that: "It's possible in principle to build something that looks a lot like AGI on top of the LLM stack... I do believe, however, this would be the wrong thing to do because it would be very inefficient." Looking ahead to what the final architecture will actually require, he explains that: "AI research will have to trend towards not just efficiency, but in fact optimality over time. And for this reason, future AI in a few decades... it's not going to be this harness on top of a reasoning model on top of a base LLM."

🚨 FRANCOIS CHOLLET SAYS THE CURRENT LLM STACK IS THE WRONG PATH TO AGI Interviewer: “When will we accomplish the first definition of AGI?” Chollet confirms we are already on that exact trajectory, pointing out that: "Current technology can fully automate at human level or beyond any domain where you have verifiable rewards, right? And code... code being the first one." He then brings up the problem with LLMs, stating that: "It's possible in principle to build something that looks a lot like AGI on top of the LLM stack... I do believe, however, this would be the wrong thing to do because it would be very inefficient." Looking ahead to what the final architecture will actually require, he explains that: "AI research will have to trend towards not just efficiency, but in fact optimality over time. And for this reason, future AI in a few decades... it's not going to be this harness on top of a reasoning model on top of a base LLM."

Chris

15,578 views • 3 months ago

Geoffrey Hinton just reframed the biggest supposed flaw in artificial intelligence. And it changes everything. Hinton: “They shouldn’t be called hallucinations. They should be called confabulations.” One word swap. Entire paradigm shifts. When the legacy tech industry calls AI hallucinations a bug, they’re revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of what intelligence actually is. They’re expecting the machine to behave like a database. Store a fact. Retrieve the fact. Return the exact same fact every time. That’s not how intelligence works. Not artificial. Not biological. Hinton: “It’s not that there’s a file stored somewhere in your brain, like in a filing cabinet or in a computer memory.” Your brain doesn’t store memories. It reconstructs them. Every time you recall something, your neural network uses connection strengths shaped by past experience to build the most plausible version of what happened. It fills the gaps. Smooths the inconsistencies. Constructs a coherent story from incomplete signal. And then presents that story to you as fact. Hinton: “If I ask you to remember something that happened a few years ago, you’ll construct something that seems very plausible to you. And some of the details will be right and some will be wrong.” Here’s the part that should stop you cold. You will be equally confident about the wrong details as the right ones. Think about that. Really think about it. Every argument you’ve had about who said what. Every memory you’ve defended as certain. Every time you told a story about your own life with complete certainty. Some of those details weren’t real. You constructed them. Confidently. Fluently. And you had no idea. This isn’t a flaw unique to people with bad memories. Eyewitness testimony is the most confabulated evidence in the human justice system. Innocent people have spent decades in prison because someone remembered something that felt absolutely certain and was absolutely wrong. Your brain didn’t lie to you. It did exactly what brains do. It built the most plausible story it could from the signal it had. AI does the exact same thing. Because it was built on the exact same architecture. The mechanism that makes an AI invent a plausible but wrong answer is the same mechanism that makes it brilliant. You cannot have one without the other. The ability to reason creatively, synthesize across domains, construct explanations for things it has never been told. All of it runs on the same engine as the confabulation. Hinton: “Psychologists have been studying confabulation in people since at least the 1930s.” This isn’t a new phenomenon. It isn’t a software bug. It isn’t something to be patched in the next model update. It is the price of dynamic intelligence. The shadow cast by the same light that makes these systems remarkable. We aren’t building better search engines. We are building synthetic minds that think the way minds actually think. Messy. Confident. Occasionally wrong. And for exactly that reason, capable of something no database ever was.

Geoffrey Hinton just reframed the biggest supposed flaw in artificial intelligence. And it changes everything. Hinton: “They shouldn’t be called hallucinations. They should be called confabulations.” One word swap. Entire paradigm shifts. When the legacy tech industry calls AI hallucinations a bug, they’re revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of what intelligence actually is. They’re expecting the machine to behave like a database. Store a fact. Retrieve the fact. Return the exact same fact every time. That’s not how intelligence works. Not artificial. Not biological. Hinton: “It’s not that there’s a file stored somewhere in your brain, like in a filing cabinet or in a computer memory.” Your brain doesn’t store memories. It reconstructs them. Every time you recall something, your neural network uses connection strengths shaped by past experience to build the most plausible version of what happened. It fills the gaps. Smooths the inconsistencies. Constructs a coherent story from incomplete signal. And then presents that story to you as fact. Hinton: “If I ask you to remember something that happened a few years ago, you’ll construct something that seems very plausible to you. And some of the details will be right and some will be wrong.” Here’s the part that should stop you cold. You will be equally confident about the wrong details as the right ones. Think about that. Really think about it. Every argument you’ve had about who said what. Every memory you’ve defended as certain. Every time you told a story about your own life with complete certainty. Some of those details weren’t real. You constructed them. Confidently. Fluently. And you had no idea. This isn’t a flaw unique to people with bad memories. Eyewitness testimony is the most confabulated evidence in the human justice system. Innocent people have spent decades in prison because someone remembered something that felt absolutely certain and was absolutely wrong. Your brain didn’t lie to you. It did exactly what brains do. It built the most plausible story it could from the signal it had. AI does the exact same thing. Because it was built on the exact same architecture. The mechanism that makes an AI invent a plausible but wrong answer is the same mechanism that makes it brilliant. You cannot have one without the other. The ability to reason creatively, synthesize across domains, construct explanations for things it has never been told. All of it runs on the same engine as the confabulation. Hinton: “Psychologists have been studying confabulation in people since at least the 1930s.” This isn’t a new phenomenon. It isn’t a software bug. It isn’t something to be patched in the next model update. It is the price of dynamic intelligence. The shadow cast by the same light that makes these systems remarkable. We aren’t building better search engines. We are building synthetic minds that think the way minds actually think. Messy. Confident. Occasionally wrong. And for exactly that reason, capable of something no database ever was.

Dustin

116,231 views • 4 months ago