Episode 122
I spoke with Azeem Azhar about:
The speed of progress in AI
Historical context for some of the terminology we use and how we think about technology
What we might want our future to look like
Azeem is an entrepreneur, investor, and adviser. He is the creator of Exponential View, a global platform for in-depth technology analysis, and the host of the Bloomberg Original series Exponentially.
Reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(00:32) Ad read — MLOps conference
(01:05) Problematizing the term “exponential”
(07:35) Moore’s Law as social contract, speed of technological growth and impedances
(14:45) Academic incentives, interdisciplinary work, rational agents and historical context
(21:24) Monolithic scaling
(26:38) Investment in scaling
(31:22) On Sam Altman
(36:25) Uses of “AGI,” “intelligence”
(41:32) Historical context for terminology
(48:58) AI and teaching
(53:51) On the technology-human divide
(1:06:26) New technologies and the futures we want
(1:10:50) Inevitability narratives
(1:17:01) Rationality and objectivity
(1:21:13) Cultural affordances and intellectual history
(1:26:15) Centralized and decentralized AI systems
(1:32:54) Instruction tuning and helpful/honest/harmless
(1:39:18) Azeem’s future outlook
(1:46:15) Outro
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