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Robert Wright's Nonzero
Does AI Understand Things? (Robert Wright & Gary Marcus)
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Does AI Understand Things? (Robert Wright & Gary Marcus)

0:00 Gary’s background and place in the AI world
1:17 Are Gary’s views on AI paradoxical?
8:48 Bob: Searle’s Chinese Room argument is dead
19:01 Have LLMs demonstrated "theory of mind"?
26:06 Arguing the semantics of an LLM's “semantic space”
31:36 Do LLM representations map onto the real world?
40:52 Can (and should) we slow down AI development?
51:43 Gary: I’ve never seen a field as myopic as AI today
54:25 The (symbolic?) future of AI

Robert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv, The Evolution of God, Nonzero, Why Buddhism Is True) and Gary Marcus (https://garymarcus.substack.com/, Humans vs. Machines, The Algebraic Mind, Kluge). Recorded February 13, 2024.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Bob's piece on Searle's "Chinese Room" argument:

Yes, AIs ‘understand’ things

·
February 22, 2024
Yes, AIs ‘understand’ things

By far the most famous philosophical argument deployed by skeptics of artificial intelligence is the “Chinese Room” thought experiment, put forth in 1980 by John Searle. The argument holds that, no matter how successful an AI is in emulating human behavior—even if it answers questions the way a person would answer them, thus passing the Turing Test—it c…

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