Latest / Merryn Talks Money / Why You Should Wait Out AI’s Super-Spending False Start
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- 0:02Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. Welcome to Marin Talks Money,
- 0:19Speaker 1: the podcast in which people who know the markets explain
- 0:22Speaker 1: the markets. I am Maren Summerzet Web and this week
- 0:25Speaker 1: I am speaking with doctor Yanushmeretzky, who is an AI
- 0:28Speaker 1: partner at Aaron Innovation Capital. Now, as you know, on
- 0:32Speaker 1: this podcast, we like to talk about the big forces
- 0:34Speaker 1: affecting our economy and markets in general, so it's really
- 0:37Speaker 1: no surprise that we keep coming back to the impact
- 0:40Speaker 1: of AI. We've talked at different times about the consequences
- 0:44Speaker 1: for jobs, for inflation, for interest rates, for tech companies,
- 0:46Speaker 1: and whether politicians and indeed policymakers, let alone ordinary workers
- 0:50Speaker 1: and investors, are ready for any of this. But what
- 0:53Speaker 1: we've never asked is is it actually working? Yanish Welcome
- 0:59Speaker 1: to Marri Talks Money.
- 1:01Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me.
- 1:03Speaker 1: And it's coming to start with a brief explanation of
- 1:06Speaker 1: exactly what it is that we mean when we say AI.
- 1:10Speaker 2: Yes, everyone talks.
- 1:11Speaker 1: About AI all the time. Aire say that is going
- 1:13Speaker 1: to change the world, it's going to solve all our problems,
- 1:15Speaker 1: it's going to destroy our jobs, etc. But what do
- 1:18Speaker 1: we actually mean when we say AI.
- 1:21Speaker 2: So these days, what we mean by saying AI is
- 1:24Speaker 2: a system which is approximating certain process. It might be
- 1:30Speaker 2: a system which is approximating language. It might be a
- 1:33Speaker 2: system which is approximating images. It might be a system
- 1:37Speaker 2: which is approximating how a robot moves. By the end
- 1:40Speaker 2: of the day, the current generation of AI techniques, those
- 1:44Speaker 2: neural networks are the function approximators. This is approximate things.
- 1:49Speaker 2: They don't solve intelligence, they approximate. So that's why you
- 1:53Speaker 2: may have an illusion that those systems are intelligent. At
- 1:56Speaker 2: the end of the day, they are approximating intelligence.
- 1:59Speaker 1: And I suppose there's two ways to look at this.
- 2:00Speaker 1: What AI as you've just described needs from us and
- 2:04Speaker 1: what we really need from it to make it work
- 2:06Speaker 1: for us. So if you look at the way that
- 2:09Speaker 1: the big hyperscalas are approaching things at the moment, they're
- 2:11Speaker 1: building massive data centers to build out their capacity, and
- 2:15Speaker 1: that requires vast amounts of energy, It requires lots of coolants,
- 2:19Speaker 1: it requires a very large volume of very different types
- 2:21Speaker 1: of chips, right, yes, and all those things. Obviously there
- 2:25Speaker 1: are troubles at the moment. We're getting all these things
- 2:27Speaker 1: with the war in the Middle East, etc. So there
- 2:29Speaker 1: are supply restrictions, but nonetheless none of these things are
- 2:32Speaker 1: really our long term problem. Given their correct policy choices,
- 2:35Speaker 1: all those material elements can easily be not easily, but
- 2:40Speaker 1: can be found and built in. Then there's the second
- 2:43Speaker 1: bit that we've talked about when we met we last met,
- 2:47Speaker 1: which is the data that you require to train a model,
- 2:51Speaker 1: and that can't be created in the volumes that are required.
- 2:56Speaker 1: And we've hit it. We've hit a supply problem with data.
- 3:00Speaker 2: We have hit a supply problem with diverse data. To
- 3:04Speaker 2: clarify the thing, because you can just create an infinite
- 3:07Speaker 2: amount of data by randomly generating new words, so you
- 3:10Speaker 2: can create it. But we're talking about creating high quality,
- 3:13Speaker 2: diverse data. And you see we've run out of data,
- 3:17Speaker 2: diverse data, not yesterday, not a month ago. We have
- 3:21Speaker 2: run out of data three and a half years ago.
- 3:23Speaker 2: You can to understand that the last frontier model GBT four,
- 3:28Speaker 2: which was not a combination of agents, etc. Just basic LLM.
- 3:34Speaker 2: The last LLM that was the most potent was GBT four.
- 3:39Speaker 2: It was released when it was released in twenty twenty
- 3:42Speaker 2: three in January, However, the training of that model finished
- 3:46Speaker 2: at the end of twenty twenty two, so it's three
- 3:48Speaker 2: and a half years ago. We have trained the model
- 3:52Speaker 2: that used all the publicly available data on the Internet.
- 3:56Speaker 2: There is nothing more out there to use to train
- 3:58Speaker 2: the model. Hit the data ceiling not a month ago,
- 4:02Speaker 2: but three and a half years ago. It's extremely important.
- 4:06Speaker 2: And yes, what we're doing right now is we're trying
- 4:09Speaker 2: to put together multiple lms. We're trying to have synthetic data,
- 4:13Speaker 2: but the performance isn't really there. We've hit diminishing returns
- 4:17Speaker 2: not a month ago, but three and a half years ago.
- 4:19Speaker 1: Okay, And it's surely new data is created all the
- 4:22Speaker 1: time on the Internet. You know, we talk about diverse data,
- 4:25Speaker 1: and it's an awful lot more created in the past
- 4:27Speaker 1: than there is now. But everyone's use of the Internet
- 4:30Speaker 1: surely creates huge volumes of new data all the time.
- 4:33Speaker 2: That's even worse. Humans are creating new data on the Internet,
- 4:37Speaker 2: but that data falls into certain patterns. How many conversations
- 4:40Speaker 2: on the weather you can have every day?
- 4:42Speaker 1: A lot, actually a lot. I think I've already had
- 4:46Speaker 1: three today, to be honest. You know, it's very cold
- 4:47Speaker 1: in Edinburgh.
- 4:48Speaker 2: You can have a lot, but there's a bigger, profound
- 4:50Speaker 2: problem there I want to mention is that if you
- 4:53Speaker 2: look at the data that is currently being created on
- 4:55Speaker 2: the open Internet, it is data create by those llms,
- 5:01Speaker 2: which number one is inaccurate because it suffers from Halla's hallucinations,
- 5:06Speaker 2: and number two, it feeds into itself, so that the
- 5:10Speaker 2: new models now train on the entire Internet, the training
- 5:14Speaker 2: on the output from other models, which is I said,
- 5:17Speaker 2: are making mistakes and hallucinations, and that, using a technical term,
- 5:22Speaker 2: slowly ends up leading to something called model collapse, where
- 5:26Speaker 2: the models themselves are actually getting dumber.
- 5:29Speaker 1: Okay, so if you train a new model on newly
- 5:32Speaker 1: created data, you're effectively training on its own nonsense or
- 5:36Speaker 1: nonsense created by other similar models.
- 5:39Speaker 2: Yeah, well, not only nonsense. We have to understand that
- 5:41Speaker 2: those llms using artificial neural networks do you're correct let's
- 5:46Speaker 2: say ninety five ninety nine percent of the time, So
- 5:49Speaker 2: most of the content is correct, but you no longer
- 5:52Speaker 2: know what content is incorrect, which is a significant degradation
- 5:56Speaker 2: of the quality of data. It's almost like having access
- 5:59Speaker 2: to a calculator which claims to be correct one hundred
- 6:02Speaker 2: percent of the time, but in reality it is correct
- 6:04Speaker 2: ninety five ninety nine percent of the time. How much
- 6:07Speaker 2: would you pay for that calculator? Would you use the
- 6:09Speaker 2: output from that calculator to produce novel calculator? No, you
- 6:14Speaker 2: wouldn't do that. But we are doing it right now,
- 6:16Speaker 2: and we are seeing right now that the performance of
- 6:19Speaker 2: those models on benchmark is not increasing anymore plat out
- 6:22Speaker 2: three years ago. And there's even a bigger, profound question.
- 6:25Speaker 2: We are training those models now using higher quality data,
- 6:30Speaker 2: so no longer we're using the entire internet. Now we
- 6:33Speaker 2: are filtering from the Internet a lot of garbage, so
- 6:37Speaker 2: we're using a smaller training data set, thus producing smaller
- 6:42Speaker 2: llms that have the same quality. But as I mentioned,
- 6:45Speaker 2: they are smaller, So what is the consequence of it. Well,
- 6:48Speaker 2: as we speak, I'm running those models on my laptop.
- 6:50Speaker 2: I don't use any data center for it. I never will.
- 6:53Speaker 2: I'm running them on my laptop. So the models have
- 6:55Speaker 2: gotten better. But by saying better, I mean they are
- 6:58Speaker 2: more power efficial.
- 7:00Speaker 1: They're not all right, So I mean that they're most specific,
- 7:03Speaker 1: so that I get toward a more specific task because
- 7:06Speaker 1: they're using a narrower range of data, so they can't
- 7:09Speaker 1: be a type of general intelligence they're specific and.
- 7:12Speaker 2: Remarkably no, they are general purpose. I mean you can
- 7:16Speaker 2: just go online and down on quent three point five
- 7:18Speaker 2: and three point six. This is a general purpose model,
- 7:21Speaker 2: which is even accessing the internet to give you Summari
- 7:24Speaker 2: is reasoning. It's doing this thing on your laptop. It's today.
- 7:27Speaker 2: Of course. On top of that, if you want to,
- 7:30Speaker 2: you can find tune your model on your proprietary data.
- 7:34Speaker 2: But you see even the fine tuning process these days
- 7:38Speaker 2: can be done on your laptop, which again raises the question,
- 7:41Speaker 2: why do you need to pay for compute? Why do
- 7:44Speaker 2: you need all this expansion of the data centers. You
- 7:46Speaker 2: really don't. And what's going to happen in year two,
- 7:50Speaker 2: three years from now when the majority of laptops out
- 7:53Speaker 2: there will be able to run general purpose the most
- 7:56Speaker 2: potent language models with access to the Internet. I just
- 8:00Speaker 2: I'm just not seeing it. And that's on top of
- 8:02Speaker 2: one fundamental thing that I want to mention upfront, because
- 8:05Speaker 2: you mentioned what does the AI need from us? And
- 8:09Speaker 2: what we need from the AI? So what the AI
- 8:11Speaker 2: needs from us are two things, as you mentioned. Number one,
- 8:13Speaker 2: compute and yes, we can provide more and more compute
- 8:17Speaker 2: as long as oracle CDs is not going down, which
- 8:21Speaker 2: it is right now. And number two, we need to
- 8:24Speaker 2: provide more data. We've use all of it, so to
- 8:26Speaker 2: some extent we cannot produce better AI. Now what do
- 8:29Speaker 2: we want to have from the AI. We want to
- 8:32Speaker 2: have at least two things and just bury me here.
- 8:36Speaker 2: Number one, we want to have systems which are continually learning.
- 8:42Speaker 2: So just like during this podcast today, I hope that
- 8:46Speaker 2: I will be able to learn something from you. You
- 8:48Speaker 2: will be able to learn something from me and remember
- 8:51Speaker 2: tomorrow or maybe remembered after Easter. Current generation systems in general,
- 8:56Speaker 2: neural networks are not learning anything new you when you
- 9:00Speaker 2: interact with them, which is significant limitation. So we're not
- 9:03Speaker 2: getting from the AIS what we want to They're not
- 9:06Speaker 2: learning from us. It's a fundamental limitation that's not solved.
- 9:10Speaker 2: And number two, you want to mention this thing up front.
- 9:13Speaker 2: Those systems are stochastic. They are probabilistic. You cannot trust them.
- 9:20Speaker 2: They roll the dice whenever they produce output, so to
- 9:23Speaker 2: some extent you cannot trust their output. Can you make
- 9:26Speaker 2: them deterministic? Yes, of course you can by making sure
- 9:30Speaker 2: that they always produce the most likely token. Now, use
- 9:34Speaker 2: the word token. But the problem with this thing is
- 9:36Speaker 2: that then they will be just copying the data from
- 9:38Speaker 2: the training set. So just imagine those lawsuits when you
- 9:41Speaker 2: see verbatting copies of all the podcasts books produced as
- 9:46Speaker 2: an output of Gemini or open Ai system. So those
- 9:48Speaker 2: systems number one are not continually learning, which basically for
- 9:53Speaker 2: me is just a no go. And number two, those
- 9:55Speaker 2: systems are not to be trusted because whenever they produce output,
- 9:59Speaker 2: that output is it stochastic. It's not a terministic it's
- 10:03Speaker 2: basically rolling the dice to catch you output.
- 10:05Speaker 1: Yeah. Can we talk a bit more about that about
- 10:07Speaker 1: how the hallucinations or errors have it build up?
- 10:10Speaker 2: Absolutely? I me try to explain using simple terms when
- 10:14Speaker 2: you use ch GPT or Gemini or copilot, but this
- 10:19Speaker 2: is Copilot is actually open eye system. It just produces texts,
- 10:23Speaker 2: so you have an impression that generates one word at
- 10:27Speaker 2: the time deterministically, that's what's on the screen, just one
- 10:31Speaker 2: word after another. But in reality that's not what those
- 10:34Speaker 2: systems produce. If you are a developer like me and
- 10:39Speaker 2: my coelagus are developers as well, you can look at
- 10:42Speaker 2: the developer output of a large language. Models do you
- 10:45Speaker 2: know what it gives you. It gives you a vector
- 10:48Speaker 2: of fifty thousand elements, actually fifty two thousand elements, so
- 10:52Speaker 2: fifty thousand elements, and each element has a certain probability
- 10:56Speaker 2: of being correct zero point ninety five zero one zero
- 11:00Speaker 2: zero one zero, zero point three. It's an entire vector.
- 11:03Speaker 2: It's not one word has probability one. Everything else is zero. No,
- 11:07Speaker 2: there is a little bit of error there. It has
- 11:09Speaker 2: to be, and so not is what happens when you're
- 11:12Speaker 2: producing one word at the time, or one token at
- 11:15Speaker 2: the time. You can think of a token as a
- 11:18Speaker 2: ward split by two or three. So when you produce
- 11:21Speaker 2: output one token at the time, this system is rolling
- 11:24Speaker 2: the dice all the time. It's making a small, tiny
- 11:27Speaker 2: error every time it produces a ward s. At the beginning,
- 11:32Speaker 2: you may not perceive the error, but over time, after
- 11:34Speaker 2: three hundred, five hundred a thousand words, the error is
- 11:38Speaker 2: going to be so big that it's going to result
- 11:41Speaker 2: in the critical failure of the system. You cannot circumvent
- 11:45Speaker 2: it because those systems are probabilistic. It's not like in
- 11:48Speaker 2: an Excel spreadsheet, where you can have a chain of
- 11:51Speaker 2: aund ten twenty one hundred one thousand formulas and you
- 11:54Speaker 2: know that the formulas are going to produce the correct result. Here,
- 11:58Speaker 2: if you have a chain of words, every time you
- 12:02Speaker 2: produce a word, you accrue a little bit of error
- 12:05Speaker 2: and you see this error manifest itself later on.
- 12:08Speaker 1: Okay, so is this solvable? I guess that's the key question.
- 12:13Speaker 1: Is it possible? And the type of models that we're
- 12:15Speaker 1: using at the moment, which are super hyped, is it
- 12:18Speaker 1: possible for that hallucination problem or compounding error problem to
- 12:22Speaker 1: be solved, or is it simply a systemic shortcoming that
- 12:26Speaker 1: is unresolvable.
- 12:28Speaker 2: So here I'm again speaking from my experience having two
- 12:31Speaker 2: ephds in mathematics and computer science and twenty years of
- 12:34Speaker 2: experience in deep mind and IBM Watson research. No, it's impossible.
- 12:39Speaker 2: You have to use a different technique for it. Yes,
- 12:43Speaker 2: there are different techniques that are emerging right now. In
- 12:47Speaker 2: full disclaimer, I'm also a co founder of a startup
- 12:49Speaker 2: working on one of those techniques. We call them fractal brain. Yes,
- 12:53Speaker 2: there are new techniques on the horizon. However, the existing
- 12:56Speaker 2: techniques have a building mechanism so that every time produce
- 13:00Speaker 2: an output another word, you have a little bit of error.
- 13:04Speaker 2: You cannot eliminate it thing. And there's also a fundamental
- 13:07Speaker 2: other thing you mentioned hallucinations. What do we mean by hallucinations?
- 13:10Speaker 2: It's number one, it's producing those small errors one word
- 13:14Speaker 2: at a time. But there's also another reason for hallucinations
- 13:18Speaker 2: when this system just doesn't remember what was mentioned yesterday,
- 13:22Speaker 2: a week ago, or a month ago, and goes back
- 13:24Speaker 2: to the initial question. You need both. You need to
- 13:26Speaker 2: have a system which, like humans, it's continually learning. And
- 13:30Speaker 2: number two, you need to have a system which does
- 13:33Speaker 2: not make errors when it produces the next word. It
- 13:37Speaker 2: shouldn't roll a dice. You need those two and so
- 13:40Speaker 2: now to answer your question, can we solve this problem
- 13:43Speaker 2: using artificial neural networks? No, there are attempts to. There
- 13:49Speaker 2: have been attempts to circumvent it. If you want to
- 13:52Speaker 2: have continual learning, you can maybe try to use something
- 13:55Speaker 2: like continual backpropagation from rich Sutt only got a two
- 13:58Speaker 2: in go word in twenty twenty four. Or we can,
- 14:00Speaker 2: but it's not solving the problem. At least he's attempting
- 14:03Speaker 2: to find solutions to it. You can retrain the system,
- 14:07Speaker 2: of course, right, I mean, why not take GBT for
- 14:09Speaker 2: after the end of the podcast. Retrain the entire system.
- 14:12Speaker 2: It's going to cost you five million dollars. But you
- 14:14Speaker 2: could do that. You could retrain the entire system, or
- 14:18Speaker 2: you can find you in your system. But when you
- 14:20Speaker 2: find you in your system, the system is forgetting what
- 14:24Speaker 2: it was trained on before. So you're suffering something which
- 14:28Speaker 2: is called catastrophic forgetting or catastrophic interference. Long story short, No,
- 14:35Speaker 2: you cannot solve the outstanding problems of hallucinations and lack
- 14:39Speaker 2: of continual learning. Unfortunately. I wish you could, but you
- 14:41Speaker 2: need to have different things for it. And it's not
- 14:43Speaker 2: just me saying it. Look at the landscape of researchers,
- 14:47Speaker 2: leading researchers in the field, my colleagues, I know all
- 14:49Speaker 2: of them personally. They have all jumped ship. This is important.
- 14:54Speaker 2: Look at, for example, young Lecon from Metaga. He jumped ship.
- 14:58Speaker 2: He's working on his new startup am I line apps,
- 15:00Speaker 2: not working on llms, saying l lams is a dead
- 15:03Speaker 2: end to AGI. Look at Michael Iff Dave Silver from DeepMind.
- 15:07Speaker 2: He just left deep Mind, but a couple of weeks
- 15:09Speaker 2: ago he formed Ineffable Intelligence. I think they're raising a
- 15:12Speaker 2: billion dollars the same thing. He is not a believer
- 15:15Speaker 2: of using l lms for general artificial intelligence, and can
- 15:19Speaker 2: go on and on Iliasutskiver, Andre Carpaty. And so it's
- 15:24Speaker 2: not just me who is saying that we need to
- 15:26Speaker 2: go back to research. The leading research and researchers in
- 15:30Speaker 2: the field have already jumped ship a few months, maybe
- 15:34Speaker 2: even years ago, working on the next generation things. The
- 15:37Speaker 2: market still believes we can solve hallucinations, but the leading
- 15:41Speaker 2: researchers have jumped ship. That's unbelievable to me that we
- 15:46Speaker 2: keep pouring money into bigger data centers, knowing we've used
- 15:50Speaker 2: all the data already, and knowing that even if they
- 15:53Speaker 2: have more data, you will not solve continual learning, and
- 15:57Speaker 2: you will not solve hallucinations. So why is not everyone?
- 16:01Speaker 2: Why are people doing it?
- 16:02Speaker 1: Okay, So if we know clearly, and it sounds from
- 16:05Speaker 1: what you say that we do know very clearly that
- 16:07Speaker 1: using more and more computing power and more and more
- 16:10Speaker 1: already mildly corrupted data isn't going to get us anywhere.
- 16:14Speaker 1: Then the enormous cap expand on vast data centers, the
- 16:19Speaker 1: hundreds of billions of dollars that have already gone into
- 16:22Speaker 1: this and are still projected to go into This is
- 16:24Speaker 1: a catastrophic misallocation of capital.
- 16:27Speaker 2: Well that's how you look at it. So obviously you
- 16:31Speaker 2: can say the biggest winner of it is Nvidia because
- 16:34Speaker 2: it's producing those GPUs or during the gold rush, you
- 16:37Speaker 2: should invest in companies that produce the shovels you can
- 16:40Speaker 2: still make money. For example, I'm a partner at Urn
- 16:43Speaker 2: Innovation Capital in the UK and we are investing in
- 16:48Speaker 2: airs mission two companies, one called high Verge and second
- 16:51Speaker 2: called Hydra. These companies improve coolings of data centers or
- 16:57Speaker 2: these companies produce better algorithms to run on data centers.
- 17:01Speaker 2: So you can still allocate your capital wisely, but you
- 17:04Speaker 2: shouldn't allocate them in companies which are spending on this compute.
- 17:09Speaker 2: You should allocate your capital in companies that are allowing
- 17:12Speaker 2: those data centers to run efficiently because those data centers,
- 17:16Speaker 2: who knows, maybe they will be used for different purpose
- 17:19Speaker 2: at some point. So again, there are going to be
- 17:22Speaker 2: winners and losers of the current gold rush in GPUs
- 17:26Speaker 2: and AI. I would say companies that have not invested
- 17:31Speaker 2: massively in data centers and in front here models are
- 17:34Speaker 2: going to be the winners. There's some companies without mentioning
- 17:38Speaker 2: the names, that have been accused of not training their
- 17:42Speaker 2: own language models. I think these, to me are going
- 17:45Speaker 2: to be the winners in today's market.
- 17:47Speaker 1: Are we talking about Apple?
- 17:49Speaker 2: I will let you determine that thing. But you can
- 17:52Speaker 2: see some companies number one, have not invested in the
- 17:56Speaker 2: LM front here models, but the research teams have kept
- 17:59Speaker 2: public papers saying that those lms stayed on the reason
- 18:02Speaker 2: they make mistakes. So let you find those companies. And
- 18:05Speaker 2: there are some companies that have borrowed a lot of
- 18:08Speaker 2: money to expand those center centers. And it's not me.
- 18:11Speaker 2: Look at the market, look at CDs on Oracle. It's
- 18:14Speaker 2: the market is just flashing reds saying this is foolish.
- 18:17Speaker 2: So we're seeing those signals already. But I want to
- 18:20Speaker 2: make sure that if you want to make money in
- 18:21Speaker 2: today's market, is given that the governments have to pay
- 18:25Speaker 2: eight nine percent of the revenue on servicing the debt.
- 18:29Speaker 2: You don't know if the market is going to go
- 18:31Speaker 2: up and down, and maybe a capital injection, liquid, the
- 18:33Speaker 2: injection from Central Bucks. You don't know those things. So
- 18:35Speaker 2: I would not recommend your short or go along any investment,
- 18:39Speaker 2: I would recommend maybe doing an arbitrush buy companies that
- 18:42Speaker 2: have not wasted money on llms and short companies that
- 18:46Speaker 2: have borrowed a lot of money to expand data centers.
- 18:49Speaker 2: That will be my suggestion, but I might be wrong.
- 18:51Speaker 1: Again. Can you tell us about any of the startup
- 19:16Speaker 1: companies that you're invested in or interested in that are
- 19:19Speaker 1: taking us to this new frontier and AI away from
- 19:22Speaker 1: the LLM model and towards a different model.
- 19:24Speaker 2: Absolutely so. In our investment fund, our an innovation capital,
- 19:27Speaker 2: we have access to a lot of companies, actually maybe
- 19:30Speaker 2: twenty or thirty companies that are developing the next frontier
- 19:33Speaker 2: models which are not necessarily using artificial in our networks.
- 19:36Speaker 2: And I can speak about three or four of them
- 19:39Speaker 2: which are very exciting. One company you can have a look.
- 19:42Speaker 2: They are based in Switzerland. They're called Innate AI. Again,
- 19:46Speaker 2: I'm advertising them and we're not investing in them. We're
- 19:48Speaker 2: not investing them yet. They are developing new version of
- 19:53Speaker 2: neural networks which are inspired on the brain. This is
- 19:57Speaker 2: an effort that was going on in Europe for more
- 19:59Speaker 2: than a decade, the Blue Brain project. They are developing
- 20:02Speaker 2: something new which is not an artificial neural network. So
- 20:05Speaker 2: that's one kind. Look at another company, for example, PATHWAYAI
- 20:10Speaker 2: in the Bay Area. Again another example they mentioned upfront,
- 20:15Speaker 2: you need to solve continual learning. You need to solve that.
- 20:18Speaker 2: If you don't have it, forget about the solution to AGI.
- 20:21Speaker 2: And so they have been developing systems that can learn
- 20:27Speaker 2: using something called heavy on learning, which is a local
- 20:30Speaker 2: learning technique that happens in the brain, not using bad
- 20:32Speaker 2: propagation grid in descent. So this is another example. Another
- 20:36Speaker 2: company that I'm actually a co founder of and the
- 20:39Speaker 2: CEO called Fractal Brain AI. Have a look at the thing.
- 20:42Speaker 2: It's also based on prefrontal cortex, and it's this idea
- 20:45Speaker 2: that those networks are continually growing and rewiring themselves. So
- 20:50Speaker 2: no longer you have a fixed network with a fixed
- 20:53Speaker 2: number of parameters. No, the network is growing expanding themselves.
- 20:58Speaker 2: Like today, you're going to probably form a connections after
- 21:00Speaker 2: this podcast. Those networks do the same, They create new
- 21:03Speaker 2: connections all the time, and on top of that, they
- 21:06Speaker 2: are continually learning and thousands of times more power efficient
- 21:10Speaker 2: in addition to being data efficient. So these are only
- 21:13Speaker 2: some of the examples of companies that I'm personally very
- 21:15Speaker 2: excited about. But as ILIOSU Skiverer said the other day
- 21:20Speaker 2: on one of those podcasts, that we have gone back
- 21:25Speaker 2: from the age of scaling to the age of research,
- 21:30Speaker 2: So researchers have gone back to developing the new things.
- 21:33Speaker 2: It's just onlin end here me and my teams have
- 21:37Speaker 2: started developing, for example, fractals fractal brain twelve years ago.
- 21:41Speaker 2: We knew about those outstanding limitations of artificial neural networks
- 21:45Speaker 2: more than a decade ago, so we wouldn't invest our
- 21:47Speaker 2: time in it.
- 21:48Speaker 1: Nevertheless, somehow I got to cut up in this sort
- 21:50Speaker 1: of super bubble hype, despite the fact that good scientists
- 21:54Speaker 1: aren't you.
- 21:54Speaker 2: But this is good. I like the hype because you see,
- 21:57Speaker 2: to some extent that hype and the lands they allowed
- 22:02Speaker 2: us to understand that it's possible to approximate human language.
- 22:07Speaker 2: So now that you know that you can approximate human
- 22:09Speaker 2: language with el lamps, you can try to find ways
- 22:13Speaker 2: to actually solve the idea of human language. If you
- 22:16Speaker 2: can approximate something, you can see the size of it.
- 22:19Speaker 2: So it's almost like if someone showed you, hey, there
- 22:22Speaker 2: is a rocket there, it flies, you already know the
- 22:24Speaker 2: size of the rocket. You can know you can fly,
- 22:26Speaker 2: you can start to crack the details of the engine
- 22:29Speaker 2: of the rocket. So to some extent, I like the
- 22:31Speaker 2: current hype. I like the current generation systems because they
- 22:34Speaker 2: allowed us to understand the size of the problem and
- 22:38Speaker 2: approximate it. Now that we know that we can in
- 22:40Speaker 2: principle approximate human language, let's just solve it, okay.
- 22:44Speaker 1: And the other thing I suppose we should say is
- 22:46Speaker 1: that while we spent quite a lot of time criticizing
- 22:48Speaker 1: this generation of llms, they're still great, still as really useful.
- 22:52Speaker 1: It's not like we have a totally pointless technology, something
- 22:55Speaker 1: that can remove entry level jobs across the board, which
- 22:58Speaker 1: of course comes with its own problems, but none LASS
- 23:01Speaker 1: has enormous use from activity and business.
- 23:04Speaker 2: Absolutely, I love maybe not just l elms. I love
- 23:07Speaker 2: the generative AI. For example. Not sure if you've noticed
- 23:09Speaker 2: behind me, I have this amazing landscape of London, but
- 23:13Speaker 2: you can tell it's all fake here, like this building
- 23:15Speaker 2: is all tilted here. So those systems they produce very
- 23:20Speaker 2: pretty graphics. It's inaccurate, but it's okay for me. It
- 23:23Speaker 2: still gives me a very nice background. Same thing with text.
- 23:26Speaker 2: They will produce beautifully looking poem. They can summarize the document. Yes,
- 23:32Speaker 2: there are errors. The are like this building here. You
- 23:34Speaker 2: can tell it's all tilted a little bit, But I'm
- 23:37Speaker 2: okay with that. So those systems are very good for
- 23:40Speaker 2: creating templates, knowing what templates of data, it's so called
- 23:44Speaker 2: boiler plate code, creating nice graphics. They're not good for
- 23:48Speaker 2: details to put in there. And it's interesting because about
- 23:51Speaker 2: two or three years ago, I was giving a talk
- 23:55Speaker 2: to high school students. They're asking me what do we
- 23:58Speaker 2: use those lms for. I told them for generating templates,
- 24:02Speaker 2: templates of presentation, etc. And for summarizing documents. But I
- 24:08Speaker 2: misled them. I don't think you should be using those
- 24:10Speaker 2: systems for summarization for two reasons. The reason number one,
- 24:15Speaker 2: in that summary there might be errors and mistakes, So
- 24:19Speaker 2: if you summarize a document, don't throw away the original.
- 24:23Speaker 2: And number two, you know, when you're summarizing something, you
- 24:27Speaker 2: should know what you care about. For example, if you
- 24:29Speaker 2: are to summarize today's podcast, maybe you only care about
- 24:33Speaker 2: this tilted building here, which is fake. Maybe that's what
- 24:36Speaker 2: you're looking for. LM doesn't know it. So when it
- 24:39Speaker 2: produces a summary of text. When it compresses graphics, it
- 24:43Speaker 2: doesn't know what you care about really, so it's going
- 24:46Speaker 2: to produce a summary maybe lacking the details that you
- 24:49Speaker 2: want to know later on.
- 24:51Speaker 1: And I suppose the other things with the errors. You
- 24:54Speaker 1: should only really be using it for things where you
- 24:57Speaker 1: know that you will be able to spot the errors
- 24:58Speaker 1: at the end.
- 24:59Speaker 2: So this is a actually very interesting I think that
- 25:01Speaker 2: the killer use case for generative AI is producing output
- 25:05Speaker 2: that you yourself can check for correctness. So for example,
- 25:09Speaker 2: if I'm if I want to compute one hundred plus
- 25:11Speaker 2: one hundred, LM will give me an answer I know
- 25:14Speaker 2: I can check the answer myself the correctness. I like
- 25:17Speaker 2: it this way. Unfortunately, people are using those lms to
- 25:22Speaker 2: answer a question to which they themselves don't know the
- 25:25Speaker 2: answer to. This is a recipe of an absolute disaster.
- 25:30Speaker 2: In the worst case, you can use those systems to
- 25:34Speaker 2: check whether your output that you produce yourself is correct.
- 25:38Speaker 2: You can do it that way. But people using the
- 25:40Speaker 2: other way around. They are asking those lms to produce
- 25:43Speaker 2: an output they don't know what the output should be,
- 25:46Speaker 2: and the output can have one or five percent error, right,
- 25:49Speaker 2: why would you even do that?
- 25:50Speaker 1: So are we worrying unnecessarily about the job market. We
- 25:53Speaker 1: spend most of the talks and podcasts and panels, etc.
- 25:56Speaker 1: That I do, the question is always what on earth
- 25:58Speaker 1: does my child do for work? In an age of AI.
- 26:01Speaker 1: Are we worrying too much about that? Because the human
- 26:03Speaker 1: input will remain absolutely compulsory for the next couple of decades.
- 26:08Speaker 2: Having the same problem as I mentioned, my son as
- 26:11Speaker 2: is thirteen years old, so mis the father to give
- 26:14Speaker 2: him advice what to do in the future. I guess
- 26:17Speaker 2: being a scuba diver instructor is a good job. Yeah,
- 26:20Speaker 2: it is a great job. You're going to need them.
- 26:22Speaker 2: I worry about interns entry level of software engineers because
- 26:27Speaker 2: to some extent you can automate. It's not replaced. You
- 26:31Speaker 2: can automate most of the tasks that you delegate to
- 26:35Speaker 2: interns today, like, for example, write a boilerplate code, template code,
- 26:40Speaker 2: check some if there's errors in that code, you can
- 26:43Speaker 2: automate that. But what's going to happen then is that
- 26:45Speaker 2: we are not going to have interns anymore or significantly
- 26:48Speaker 2: smaller number of interests and entry level software engineers. So
- 26:52Speaker 2: what's the consequence. What's going to happen with the entire
- 26:55Speaker 2: promotion cycle. If you're in senior management or a middle management,
- 27:01Speaker 2: you're gonna get promoted. Who's going to replace you? Who's
- 27:04Speaker 2: going to become a software architect if we're not training
- 27:08Speaker 2: the new entry level software engineers. So there's this entire
- 27:11Speaker 2: skills gap right now. Some people that I know have
- 27:14Speaker 2: chosen not to pursue studies in computer science because for
- 27:17Speaker 2: the very reason they worry that we're not going to
- 27:20Speaker 2: need software engineers. Yes, we are going to need software engineers,
- 27:23Speaker 2: it's just you need to jump immediately to being an
- 27:28Speaker 2: architect of a software engineering system. And to make sure
- 27:31Speaker 2: verry hard. It is hard. It Typically what you do
- 27:35Speaker 2: is you get gain this experience on the job. You
- 27:37Speaker 2: go to Google, spend first two three years writing code,
- 27:40Speaker 2: but you appear so software architects, and so you learn
- 27:43Speaker 2: from them. If we don't have this experience that we're
- 27:46Speaker 2: giving to entry level software engineers, they won't be able
- 27:49Speaker 2: to have this experience. So this is what always me more.
- 27:51Speaker 2: It's not about replacing software engineers, it's about us not
- 27:56Speaker 2: having a pipeline of software architects. And see your software engineers,
- 28:01Speaker 2: we are not having this pielime anymore. That worries me
- 28:03Speaker 2: quite a bit, to be honest.
- 28:04Speaker 1: Yeah, and the pipeline problem is just being discussed in
- 28:07Speaker 1: a lot of other professions as well, most obviously in
- 28:09Speaker 1: a legal profession.
- 28:10Speaker 2: Absolutely, again for lawyers, this is very interesting and this
- 28:12Speaker 2: is not my profession, so you can discount what I
- 28:14Speaker 2: say quite a bit way. Now, you can get the
- 28:18Speaker 2: initial blueprints of legal documents very quickly, and we do
- 28:21Speaker 2: it all the time at our startup. You can get
- 28:23Speaker 2: a blueprint of a legal document, but I would never
- 28:26Speaker 2: use that document to get an investor on board in
- 28:29Speaker 2: my startup. I wouldn't do that. I still need to
- 28:32Speaker 2: send it to an actual human being to at least
- 28:34Speaker 2: prove read it. So we're going to have to have
- 28:37Speaker 2: those lawyers which can prove readdocuments produced by the generative AI,
- 28:43Speaker 2: but aren't doing it already. They already have hundreds of
- 28:46Speaker 2: template documents safe on their computers. It's just changing the
- 28:50Speaker 2: names of companies investors in those documents. So the legal
- 28:53Speaker 2: profession is not going to go away because those generative
- 28:57Speaker 2: AI systems, they don't have the notion of true and false.
- 29:01Speaker 2: They don't they confused. It's all probabilistic, so they will
- 29:04Speaker 2: make an error. Sometimes after twenty thirty forty legal statements,
- 29:09Speaker 2: they will just change one true into false. So we're
- 29:13Speaker 2: still going to need to have lawyers for it. This
- 29:15Speaker 2: is one of those professions where I don't think it's
- 29:17Speaker 2: going to be automated fully by AI. But as I said,
- 29:20Speaker 2: there are other professions that have already been automated. For example,
- 29:23Speaker 2: content creators. So you can go online, go to YouTube.
- 29:25Speaker 2: You're going to see a lot of videos summarizing AI,
- 29:28Speaker 2: AI bubble summarizing conflict in Ukraine or Iran, all generated
- 29:33Speaker 2: using generative AI. So some jobs have already gone away,
- 29:37Speaker 2: the jobs that require to be you to be one
- 29:39Speaker 2: hundred percent accurate, those jobs are not going to go
- 29:43Speaker 2: away using the current generation of AI systems. Remember, there
- 29:47Speaker 2: are new generations on the horizons. My startup is working
- 29:51Speaker 2: on it, other startups are working on it. But with
- 29:53Speaker 2: the current generation of tools, they will not displace those
- 29:56Speaker 2: jobs yet.
- 29:57Speaker 1: Yeah, it sounds to me like we shouldn't necessarily be
- 30:00Speaker 1: frightened the current generation of tools, but we should hardly
- 30:02Speaker 1: be pretty frightened the next generation.
- 30:05Speaker 2: I would give a very simple example here. So me
- 30:07Speaker 2: and my colleagues we've built Alpha go at Deepmine in
- 30:11Speaker 2: twenty fifteen, which is the system that won in computer
- 30:14Speaker 2: Goal with the World champion, and so back then it
- 30:17Speaker 2: was a state of the art system. These days, you
- 30:22Speaker 2: yourself can win against that system. I can do it
- 30:25Speaker 2: as well. Why because those systems have stayed the same,
- 30:30Speaker 2: and humans have identified flaws in that systems. They have
- 30:34Speaker 2: identified hallucinations errors, And now when you play against that system,
- 30:39Speaker 2: you just exploit this system, exploit its weaknesses. The system
- 30:43Speaker 2: is not adapting itself, not rewiring itself. So to answer
- 30:46Speaker 2: your question quickly, I'm personally not worried of existing AI
- 30:50Speaker 2: systems because they are adapting themselves. However, I do have
- 30:53Speaker 2: to mention I do worry that people are going to
- 30:58Speaker 2: be using existing systems in domains where they should not
- 31:03Speaker 2: be used, for example, for identifying targets to bombing around.
- 31:07Speaker 2: It's just don't do those things. Those systems make errors
- 31:09Speaker 2: and hallucinations. So I worry about misuse of existing AI tools.
- 31:15Speaker 2: I don't worry about these tools themselves being malicious. No,
- 31:19Speaker 2: I worry about inadvertent misuse of those tools without understanding
- 31:23Speaker 2: what they are not good for.
- 31:26Speaker 1: Okay, interesting, always something to worry about. Can I ask
- 31:29Speaker 1: you one last thing. One of the things that you
- 31:31Speaker 1: mentioned earlier was the extraordinary energy inefficiency of the current systems.
- 31:36Speaker 1: And it is true, isn't it. The human brain is
- 31:39Speaker 1: remarkably energy efficient. And when you look at these models,
- 31:43Speaker 1: the amount of energy that they will use to simply
- 31:45Speaker 1: have the same thought that the human can have on
- 31:47Speaker 1: a couple of words, it's that's an extraordinary problem that
- 31:50Speaker 1: in your new generation that we talked about earlier will
- 31:54Speaker 1: be diminished.
- 31:55Speaker 2: Absolutely. The systems that I know that fractal brain is
- 31:59Speaker 2: coming up with, innate AI is coming up with. See
- 32:03Speaker 2: those systems, they don't use back propagation to produce the
- 32:08Speaker 2: next word. They don't have to load from the memory
- 32:13Speaker 2: all of those one point five trillion parameters just to
- 32:17Speaker 2: produce the next word. They don't do that. They load
- 32:20Speaker 2: maybe one hundred, maybe one thousand parameters three four orders
- 32:24Speaker 2: of magnitude better power efficiency. And we know this thing,
- 32:27Speaker 2: and we know that we've trained what first version of
- 32:29Speaker 2: our fractal language model using I think zero point one
- 32:33Speaker 2: percent electricity that open AI use for GPT one and two,
- 32:36Speaker 2: so we know it's possible to do that. It finds
- 32:38Speaker 2: its interesting. Before this podcast, we had a conversation. If
- 32:42Speaker 2: you recall me on Easter dinner and cooking potatoes. So
- 32:46Speaker 2: as we're talking right now, I can assure you that
- 32:50Speaker 2: for me and for you to produce the next word
- 32:53Speaker 2: in our conversation, you are not thinking about potatoes for Easter.
- 32:57Speaker 2: You're not doing that thing. You don't need those connections too.
- 33:00Speaker 2: When we talk about a we don't do those things.
- 33:02Speaker 2: And maybe now you think about your Eastern dinner. But
- 33:04Speaker 2: the point is that those systems should produce the next
- 33:08Speaker 2: word only loading up parameters which are important for the
- 33:12Speaker 2: next world. And this is not billions of parameters, nor
- 33:16Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands of most maybe a thousand, two thousand parameters.
- 33:19Speaker 2: So yes, the next generation systems, in addition to being deterministic,
- 33:23Speaker 2: you can trust their output. They have power and the
- 33:27Speaker 2: data efficiency which is remarkable, talking three orders of magnitude better,
- 33:31Speaker 2: it's coming out. This thing is coming better. And again
- 33:34Speaker 2: it's the world may not be ready for it yet.
- 33:36Speaker 2: Plus you didn't understand my own motivation for building those
- 33:40Speaker 2: systems and the dangers. We have systems which are adapting themselves,
- 33:45Speaker 2: rewiring themselves, so to some extent you cannot outsmart them permanently.
- 33:50Speaker 2: They'll learn from your mistakes. It's like your kid. Try
- 33:53Speaker 2: using some technique on your kid. It's going to learn
- 33:55Speaker 2: how to adapt itself. Those systems do it as well,
- 33:58Speaker 2: So I personally do not no if it's a good
- 34:00Speaker 2: time to release those systems to the general public. I don't.
- 34:04Speaker 2: That's why those systems are not being published because think
- 34:07Speaker 2: about it. If it has a solution for a system
- 34:09Speaker 2: which is learning all the time adapting it's flaws, that
- 34:13Speaker 2: becomes spooky to release that system. So I worry more
- 34:18Speaker 2: about potential misuse of those next generation systems, less worry
- 34:22Speaker 2: about their performance because they're already beating existing systems on
- 34:26Speaker 2: common benchmarks.
- 34:27Speaker 1: Okay, thank you very much. It's one last thing imish
- 34:31Speaker 1: before we go. I think our listeners will have been
- 34:33Speaker 1: absolutely fascinated by all this and what I often ask people,
- 34:36Speaker 1: I'm going to ask you as well, and I hope
- 34:37Speaker 1: that we'll be able to understand that.
- 34:40Speaker 2: Your suggestion, what are you reading at the moment, Well,
- 34:42Speaker 2: I wish I could tell you the IM reading books
- 34:44Speaker 2: on AI, but I don't. In fact, four years ago
- 34:46Speaker 2: I started learning without any necessity Spanish, zero necessity, nothing.
- 34:51Speaker 2: The reason I started doing that is I wanted to
- 34:55Speaker 2: again learn a language the way humans do that without
- 35:00Speaker 2: billions of words, not with a small number of words.
- 35:02Speaker 2: So as an expers a mental experiment to learn whether
- 35:05Speaker 2: our fractal language model learns language in the same way
- 35:08Speaker 2: as I'm learning Spanish, I started learning Spanish, and because
- 35:11Speaker 2: of that, I'll I'll disappoint you. I'm reading kids' books,
- 35:15Speaker 2: reading Diary of the wimpik It in Spanish. Of course,
- 35:17Speaker 2: I'm reading Harry Potter as well in Spanish. I'm reading
- 35:19Speaker 2: lots and lots of books in Spanish, but these are
- 35:23Speaker 2: elementary school books. I'm sorry to disappointed.
- 35:25Speaker 1: You're reading the same things in Spanish that my son is.
- 35:28Speaker 1: So there we go in common.
- 35:29Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, this is actually good because if you want
- 35:32Speaker 2: to understand, for example, how language works, at least try
- 35:35Speaker 2: to learn yet another language. Now that you can do
- 35:37Speaker 2: an introspection, you can see how you're learning a language,
- 35:40Speaker 2: and so it's remarkable you can learn a language after
- 35:43Speaker 2: in my case, about seven or eight thousand hours. I
- 35:46Speaker 2: guess my Spanish is better than my English right now,
- 35:48Speaker 2: So eight thousand hours, how many tokens we're talking about?
- 35:51Speaker 2: Couple million tokens, couple million tokens of a training set
- 35:56Speaker 2: rather than couple trillion tokens. So that's what fascinates me.
- 36:01Speaker 2: And yeah, maybe next time we can speak in the
- 36:03Speaker 2: Spanish on the podcast.
- 36:04Speaker 1: No, I'll have to get one of my kids in
- 36:06Speaker 1: for that.
- 36:07Speaker 2: Okay, sounds good.
- 36:09Speaker 1: Yeahhish, thank you so much for joining us today.
- 36:11Speaker 2: Its pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
- 36:18Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this week's Marin Talks Money. If
- 36:20Speaker 1: you like our show, rate to review and subscribe wherever
- 36:22Speaker 1: you listen to podcasts, and keep sending your questions or
- 36:24Speaker 1: comments the Merrin Money at Bloomberg dot net. You can
- 36:27Speaker 1: also follow me and John on Twitter or x I
- 36:30Speaker 1: met Marinas w and John is Underscore Stepic. This episode
- 36:34Speaker 1: was hosted by Me Marenzumaset Web was produced by Sammersadi
- 36:37Speaker 1: and Moses and sound designed by Blake Maples and Aaron
- 36:40Speaker 1: Kasper and special thanks of course to Yannish Mareski.