philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Why Bill Gates says AI Superintelligence requires some self-awareness

...

Reporting on and writing about AI has given me a whole new appreciation of how flat-out amazing our human brains are. While large language models (LLMs) are impressive, they lack whole dimensions of thought that we humans take for granted. Bill Gates hit on this idea last week on the Next Big Idea Club podcast. Speaking to host Rufus Griscom, Gates talked at length about  “metacognition,” which refers to a system that can think about its own thinking. Gate defined metacognition as the ability to “think about a problem in a broad sense and step back and say, Okay, how important is this to answer? How could I check my answer, and what external tools would help me with this?”

The Microsoft founder said the overall “cognitive strategy” of existing LLMs like GPT-4 or Llama was still lacking in sophistication. “It’s just generating through constant computation each token and sequence, and it’s mind-blowing that that works at all,” Gates said. “It does not step back like a human and think, Okay, I’m gonna write this paper and here’s what I want to cover; okay, I’ll put some text in here, and here’s what I want to do for the summary.” ...

HOW THE SUPREME COURT’S LANDMARK CHEVRON RULING WILL AFFECT TECH AND AI 

... As Axios’s Scott Rosenberg points out, the removal of the Chevron Doctrine may make passing meaningful federal AI regulation much harder. Chevron allowed Congress to define regulations as sets of general directives, and left it to the experts at the agencies to define the specific rules and settle disputes on a case-by-case basis at the implementation and enforcement level. Now, it’ll be on Congress to hash out the fine points of the law in advance, doing their best to anticipate disputes that might arise in the future. And that might be especially difficult with a young and fast-moving industry like AI. ...

But there’s no guarantee that the courts will rise to the challenge. Just look at the high court’s decision to effectively punt on the constitutionality of Texas and Florida regulations governing social networks’ content moderation. “Their unwillingness to resolve such disputes over social media—a well-established technology—is troubling given the rise of AI, which may present even thornier legal and Constitutional questions,” Mercatus Center AI researcher Dean Ball points out. ...

See the full story here: https://www.fastcompany.com/91150606/bill-gates-ai-superintelligence