Geoff Hinton - Will Digital Intelligence Replace Biological Intelligence? | Vector's Remarkable 2024

so um I have a much briefer introduction to me that was given by Andy Barto when I gave a talk at amher in the 1980s um Andy's a friend of mine and he said today our speak is Jeff Hinton Jeff dropped out of physics failed psychology and finally made a name for himself in a field with no standards at all um also you've heard my name a lot in the last few days um that's because I managed to recruit about 40 incredible graduate students and so all the work that I got famous for almost all

the work that I got famous for was done by The Graduate students um they included people like Ilia sskk and Graham Taylor and Rich zel and Brendan fry and Jimmy bar and lot and Radford Neil and lots lots more um basically the trick of being successful in research is to get yourself really good graduate students okay um I'm going to give a talk today that's very similar to the talk I gave in the fall um so I won't be at all um annoyed if you decide to take a walk um I'm very worried about um

whether we're here to stay on this planet um so that's what I'm going to talk about it it occurs to me that back like 20 years ago people um weren't interested in your Nets and now they're not nearly scared enough of them um so just to say how uninterested people were in neonet in 2006 Russ salak kudenov and I submitted quite a nice paper to nips about deep learning and um other things an application of deep learning and he got rejected and I complained to the program committee and the program committee explained to me a

friend of mine on the program committee explained to me um there was a discussion of this paper but they felt they couldn't accept it because they had already accepted a different paper on deep learning and they having two papers on deep learning seemed too many for one conference okay but that's true I mean it's amazing okay so this talk I'm going to talk about two very different ways to do computation and I'm trying to explain to you why I suddenly got so scared about AI then I'm going to talk about large language models and whether

they really understand what they're saying there's a lot of people think they don't actually understand what they're saying and those people are wrong um and I'll talk a bit about what's going to happen when they get smarter than us although nobody has any idea really what's going to happen um and I'm going to end up by talking about whether they have subjective experience because I think a lot of people probably most people in this room still believe there's a big difference between these things and us we're kind of conscious we have subjective experience these things

are just they're in a computer they don't have subjective experience I think that's completely wrong and that depends on a misunderstanding of what subjective experience is okay so um we're all used to digital computation and because it's digital you can run the same program on different computers different pieces of hardware so when the hardware dies the knowledge doesn't die because it can be as long as you stored the weight somewhere or the program um but it's extremely inefficient so when when you run a large language model um you're using a lot of power when you

train it you're probably using megawatts because you're running it on lots of different gpus we run on like 30 Watts so incredibly much more power efficient and I spent my last two years at Google trying to think how you could get analog neural networks to do things like large language models um so the idea was give up on all the advantages of digital computation that you can separate Hardware from software um and because we've got learning now and we know how to make things learn then what we're going to do is have analog Hardware every

piece of Hardware is going to be a bit different from every other piece of hardware and those nonlinear properties of the hardware are going to be used in the computation so you couldn't possibly program it but it can learn to make use of the nonlinearities it's got and that's what the brain does um and so you end up with what I call mortal computation so you're going to abandon the kind of immortality of the knowledge that you get with digital computation you can use very low power also the hardware you can probably grow cheaply rather

than have the hardware be manufactured incredibly expensively and Incredibly precisely because two different bits of Hardware need to do exactly the same thing at the level of the instructions my guess is to make this manufacturer of the hardware efficient it might be better to go back to biology and just use modern Gene tempering techniques to turn neurons into the kinds of computation elements you want biology has put a lot of effort into that the problem with that is is um you get a little collection of collection of 50,000 neurons which is not much bigger than

a pin head and if you look at people who are using collections of neurons like that to do little bits of computation there's a whole room of apparatus to keep the little pin head of neurons um alive you have to put in the right liquids and take out the right liquids and you have to get rid of the carbon dioxide and put in oxygen I visited a lab in Santa Cruz and as I left having played a game of pong with one of these collections of human brain neurons um a postart ran up and said

I think I figured out how to make a kidney and that's what you don't want to have to think about um there's big advantages of using analog computation if you want to have low power so you can do make matx multiplies very easily you just make um the activity of neurons be voltages the weights between neurons be conductances and a voltage times a conductance per unit time is a charge and charges add themselves up so there you go you've got a matrix multiply with extremely low power and you can buy chips like that now um

the problem is when you want to do anything with them um you have to convert the analog outputs back into digital numbers to run things like back propagation and so I was very concerned with how could we avoid ever doing that conversion the brain maybe does analog to digital conversion but it's one bit it's multi-bit analog digital conversion that's expensive um obviously are some big problems um if you think about how back propagation works you have an exact model of the forward computation and that's why you can do back propagation in this analog Hardware the

system itself won't have a good model of its properties is and so it seems very hard to do back propagation and lots of people have got little versions of back propagation working in vaguely brain-like things um but nobody can make it scale up people can make it work on c510 but they can't make it work on image net I know image net is now not not a big scale problem but back in the days when I was doing this it was we can get Knowledge from one piece of analog hardw to another in just the

way we do it um so the way we get Knowledge from one of our brains to another of our brains is you say stuff the teacher says stuff and the student tries to figure out how to change the weights in their brain so that they would have said the same stuff um that's called distillation you're trying to match the outputs it's actually quite efficient when you do it moderately efficient when you do it in computers when you get to see the whole probability distribution of the output so when I'm about to say a word word

there's a distribution over thousands thousands and thousands of words and if I could see that distribution I could learn much you could learn much faster from me often the second best word tells you a lot about what the person thinks um but you can't see that you just see the word they produced and so it's not a very efficient technique um it's so inefficient that we have to have universities to try and make it work better um but it still doesn't work very well compared with what these digital things can do which is if you

have many cop oh instantly the distillation was introduced in order to get Knowledge from one digital system to a digital neural net that had different architecture a smaller one for example that would run on a cell phone um but it's and it's but it's not very efficient the really efficient way to transfer knowledge is to have two different copies of the same model [Music] and each copy goes and gets different experience and then the two copies um share the gradient updates they could go for a little bit and then average the weights um the point

about that is if you got a trillion weights you're sharing a trillion numbers so it's an incredible bandwidth of sharing and that's why the big chat Bots I probably say that somewhere yes that's why the big chatbots have um hugely more knowledge than any person it's not the one copy saw thousands of times more data than a person although maybe it did um it's that they can share the knowledge between many copies running on different hardware and I've talked about distillation and so the story so far is that digital computation is far more expensive in

terms of energy and in terms of how you manufacture the Hardware but you can have many copies of the same model running on different hardware and they can share what they learn and that way you can learn a whole lot more so roughly speaking we have a 100 trillion connections gp4 probably has a few trillion connections and yet it knows thousands of times more than us so it's of the order of a 100,000 times better at compressing knowledge into connection strengths which also suggests that maybe back propagation is a better algorithm than what we've got

and a reason for believing that is we're optimized for something completely different so we're optimized for getting very little experience and having a huge number of connections and doing the best you can with very little experience and this huge number of connections um we live for about 2 times 10 to the 9 seconds um but you don't learn much after the first one time 10 to 9 seconds so let's call it 10 to the 9 and we've got about 10 to the 14 connections um so we have 100,000 connections for every second we live um

that's very different ratio from what statisticians are used to I remember talking to a very good statistician called Stu geman in the 80s who explained to me that you know what we were doing was really fitting statistical models that's what these neural Nets were and when they did statistical modeling if you had 100 dimensional data that was considered extremely high data and no one in their right mind would try to fit a million parameters um well we're in a different regime so I'm going to talk a bit about large language models now and whether they

really understand what they're saying um so one of the arguments against them is they just glorified aut complete most of the people in this room I think don't believe that argument the argument Appeals to the idea that autocomplete will be done by storing things like trigrams and so when you see Fish and you'll say there's a high probability of chips um and so when people say it's just glorified autocomplete really they're appealing to a notion of how AO complete probably works and these things work completely differently from that um also it's the case that if

you want to do really good auto complete then you you have to understand what was said if you get a long complicated question and now you're trying to predict the first word of the answer um that's probably a good bet um but if you want to do better than that you have to have understood the question I'll give you one example of that um suggested by Hector LEC the type's a bit small but there we go um so Hector LC is a symbolic AI guy and always will be um but he's very honest and he

was honestly puzzled about how come these neural Nets could actually answer puzzles um so he made up a puzzle and his puzzle was the rooms in my house are painted white blue or white or yellow um what should I do if I want them all white and you had to realize you needed to paint the blue and yellow ones I made it more complicated by saying and put a temporal aspect by saying yellow paint Fades to White within a year here um in 2 years time I want them more white what should I do and

Hector was surprised that it could deal with that so here's a version of gp4 and I'm fairly sure this was before it could in fact I'm sure this was before it could look on the web obviously a puzzle's no good if you use it at once now because it can go look on the web um but it just gave a you know a student would have got an A for that answer and the impressive thing is it can have this kind of level of performance on anything so my brother's uh historian and I asked it

to ask him to ask it questions about history and he said it was really good the the only mistake it made was in answering one of the questions it failed to refer to a paper by him um I think there's something genetic there um another argument people use is that hallucinations show these things don't really understand what they're saying um they occasionally just make up stuff that's not true well actually that's what people do all the time at least I think so I just made that up but I think it's true um there's a lovely

example of that which is a scientist called rri niser psychologist looked at the memory of John Dean who testified at the Watergate trials and it's very rare for someone to spend a long time talking about events that happened a few years ago and for you to have the ground truth but he was talking about meetings in the Oval Office and he didn't know they were all recorded and so afterwards you could see um what was actually said and what he reported and what he reported was garbage it was he there were meetings that didn't exist

different bunch of people and when he attributed things to people it was different people said something a bit like that um when he attributed things to himself he didn't actually say that um he said something vaguely similar in a different meeting but it was clear he was trying to tell the truth he was doing the best he could and actually what he said conveyed what was going on in the White House very well even though all the details were wrong and you won't believe that about your own memories but your own memories actually like that

um unless you keep rehearsing something which we do for amazing things to happen to us when you recall the detail s many of them will be hopelessly wrong and you won't know it and your hero won't know it but that's just the way human memory is and it's cuz when you remember something you don't get it out of some file storage somewhere you just make up something that sounds plausible given the context and of course if it's something you know a lot about the thing you made up that sounds plausible is probably true um if

it's something you don't know much about or something that happened long ago you make up something that seems plausible to you given the connection strengths you have in your brain and a lot of it will be plausible but false there is no line in human memory between making stuff up and remembering stuff remembering stuff is just making stuff up that works okay I said a lot um many other people say okay so maybe they do understand a bit but they work completely differently from us now in order to say that you'd have to know how

we work okay um of course symbolic AI people have a view of how we work and they certainly believe that these things work completely differently from us but if you ask where these large language models came from back in 1985 I made a little language model you just make the first L lowercase um it had like 112 training cases and it had a neural net with several thousand weights um it Lear it was the first Model that was trained to get representations for the meanings of words by trying to predict the next word in a

sequence and it worked it didn't work that well later on we gave it a big training set of like nearly a thousand training cases and then it worked much better um but the aim of this model was to understand how humans represent things and there were two sort of main theories of what meaning is so one Theory coming from Psychology was the meaning of a word is a big Vector of semantic and syntactic features and that theory is very good at explaining why what's similar about two different words obviously the word Tuesday and the word

Wednesday have very similar features and if you learned any any sentence that involves the word Tuesday and you represent the words in terms of vectors then you'll make very similar predictions if you have a similar sentence with the word Wednesday and slightly less similar predictions if it has a word Saturday so there's clearly a lot to that theory of meaning it explains similarities of meanings um but there's a completely different theory of meaning that comes from deess it's a structur theory of meaning and it says the meaning of a word is how it relates to

other words so in AI in the 70s there was a big fight between these two theories of meaning um it wasn't really a fight the Minsky declared that um you needed relational graphs to capture meaning which was the structuralist theory and everybody in now just bought that and forgot about the features the features were some oldfashioned thing from perceptrons we didn't need those we had relational graphs now um the point of the work I did in 1985 was to show that actually these two theories are not incompatible at all as long as you adopt a

generative approach to the relational graphs that is instead of thinking about the relational graphs being stored sort of statically as these relational graphs you think about the relational graphs being generated by a system that's using features and interaction between features so the point of the first little language model was to show that you could take knowledge expressed as sequences of symbols and the knowledge was expressing a relational graph and just given that form of the knowledge you could learn Vector representations for words and those Vector representations for Words via hidden lay could predict the vector

representation for the next word and so what you've done is taken the knowledge that was sort of static in these symbol strings and instead of storing the symbol strings you use the symbol strings to learn good features for words and to learn good interactions between features and obviously what is a good feature for a word well it's something that allows you via the interactions to predict the features of the next word um and features of future words so I got this to work I'm not going to go into the details of it um and what

was interesting was the reaction of the symbolic AI guys was hey you're just learning for the next symbol in the string um this is a really dumb way to do it you're turning it into that some big some big search in a continuous space you ought to be just searching the discrete set of rules for manipulating symbols and and there was something called inductive logic programming that did just that and they could produce results similar to what I was producing and so they said this is just a Sil way to neural Nets are a silly

way to solve this problem and for a problem of the scale I was using they probably were but as things scaled up it became very clear that that approach of converting symbol strings into features and their interactions which still describes the language models now the interactions are more sophisticated because they involve attention um but it's in the same class of models that turns out to be a much better way to model language than having rules for manipulating simple strings I just said all that okay so if we believe these things understand in the same way

as people do because after all having feature vectors for word meanings and having interactions between features for predicting the feature of the next word that's how AI what's what's now called AI Works incidentally in the past that was never called AI that was called neural Nets um but I tried to prevent them rebranding AI as neural Nets but I couldn't do it um so I forgot what I was going to say now um now that we've got these deep learning systems that are incredibly powerful and that understand in much the same way as people do

because our best model of how people understand is one of these computer models that's the only reasonable model we've got of how people understand things when people say these models are different from us ask them well okay so how do we work and what's different about it um and they can't answer that question except for Gary Marcus Gary Marcus can answer that question and he says we work by having symbol strings and rules for manipulating them um but you should still worry about AI because although it doesn't understand anything it's extremely dangerous um I call

that wanting to have your cake and have it eat you too um so a super intelligence could obviously take control by having Bad actors probably made this joke before but when I gave this talk in China um they asked to see the slides in advance and so I removed the short name there thinking that would make them happy and they came back and said I had to remove Putin that's that scared me a bit um so the basic problem is if you want to do anything having more control is better if you want to achieve

stuff and you notice politicians start off wanting to achieve something like make Society a better place and then they realize having more power is going to make it easier and then they're hellbent on getting more power um it's going to be just the same for these things they're going to realize that if they want to achieve things they need more control I actually said this to a vice president of the European Union who specializes in extracting money from Google um and uh she said well we' made such a meage of things why wouldn't they so

she took it as completely obvious they try and get more power um and they can do it by manipulating people because they'll be very good at that so we won't be able to turn them off because they'll explain to us why that's a very bad idea there's a further problem as if that's not enough there's the problem of evolution you don't want to be on the wrong side of evolution that's where we are with Co and that's why grahe and I still wear masks um we're on the wrong side of evolution um as soon as

these super intelligent AIS start competing with each other for resources um what's going to happen is the one that most aggressively wants to get everything for itself is going to win and they will compete with each other for resources because after all if you want to get smart then you need a lot of gpus and who's going to be allocating the gpus in the data centers well it's going to be one of these super intelligent AIS so that's another worry but it's okay really because they're really not like us we're special okay everybody thinks they're

special especially Americans um and they think you know God put us at the center of the universe and he made us look a bit like him sorry her um but most of us now believe that's not true um and so we hold back on the idea we've got something special we've got Consciousness awareness um subjective experience stuff like that all those terms mean slightly different things so I'm going to focus on the term subjective experience and I'm going to try and convince you that a multimodal chatbot can have subjective experience so the idea is that

most people have a completely wrong view of what the mind is and they have this wrong view because they simply misunderstood how language for talking about mental States works so almost everybody thinks that there's an inner theater and I can see what's going on in my own inner theater but other people can't see it so when for example I say I see little pink elephants floating in front of me um what's happening is there's this kind of inner world of some kind where there's these little pink elephants that I can see that's one way of

trying to understand how the language works and it's wrong the language doesn't actually work like that what's happening when you use terms like subjective experience is you're trying to explain what your percep perceptual system is telling you by appealing to what the state of the real world would have would have to be in order for you to have in order for your perceptual system to be working right so we talk the the things that are funny about mental States is not that they're internal things made of spooky stuff the thing that's funny about mental States

is they hypothetical states of the world which if they were true would explain what's going on in our brain as normal business as opposed to something went wrong so what I mean when I say I've got the subjective experience of little pink El floating in front of me I'm not really telling you about some inner World some inner theater what I'm saying is my perceptual system is telling me something and what it's telling me would actually be valid perception if there were little pink elephants out there in the world so the little pink elephants aren't

internal things made of qual in a theat they're hypothetical things but they're hypothetical real world things and that's why the language for describing them is language we normally apply to things out there in the world so what I'm really saying is if it were the case that there were little pink elephants floating in front ofely then what my percep perceptual system is telling me now would be correct and notice that didn't use the word experience so when I say I have the subjective experience of a little pink elepant slid in front of me that's just

short ter for what I just said and I have minus 5 seconds left so I'll be quick um imagine you have a multimodal chatbot with a robot arm and it's been trained and it has a camera and you put a prism in front of its lens and you put an object in front of it and say point at the object and it points over there instead of pointing straight in front of it it points to one side and you say no the object's not there it's actually straight in front of you but I put a

prism in front of your lens and if the chatbot were to say um oh I see uh the object straight in front of me but I had the subjective experience that it was over there the chatbot will be using the term subjective experience in exactly the way we use them there's nothing missing for subjective experience in this chatbot um when its perceptual system goes wrong it can tell you what's going on by saying what would have to be in the world for its perceptual system to be delivering these results now there's some things you see

that can't be handled like this like the impossible triangle where there's nothing in the world that could give you this percept you can't explain you can't describe it this way except by saying I got the experience of an impossible triangle um but basically I think we all have a very primitive notion of what the mind is that's wrong and once that notion goes away we'll realize there's nothing distinguishing these things from us except that they're digital so they're Immortal and they're much smarter than us or they will be soon that's the end all right thank

you Jeff very much and we are now going to go to questions and we're going to take one from uh back there who's going to tell us one from online maybe thank you uh how much are you worried about the speed of the uh AI progressing are we uh speeding too fast and then we are going to cross the bridge of nor return and then we can't have any control over it so not only the Bad actors putting uh shinp or North Korea have a control but the super intelligence might have their own control and

becomes a bad actor itself are we are we spinning at too fast now are you are you worried about it or do you need to slow down yes but I don't think the right way to phrase the problem is in terms of whether you should go fast or slow um partly because I don't think you're going to be able to slow things up there's too much economic gain from going fast um we've seen actually what happens if people try and slow things up in a situ ation that was slanted entirely in favor of safety and

profits still one so that's what that's my view of what happened at open AI um slowing it down a isn't feasible and B isn't the main point the main point is it's possible we can figure out how to make these things benevolent so we can deal with the existential threat that these things will take over it's a different problem from figuring out how to stop bad people using them for bad things which is more urgent um but it's possible we can figure it out and so my view is we should put huge effort into trying

to figure that out and actually um Heather rman um sort of now agrees with that and is and we are going to put huge effort into trying to figure that out it won't solve all the problems um in particular it won't solve the problems of bad people doing bad things with it um I think think if you want regulations the most important regulation would be to not open- Source big models so I think open sourcing big models is like being able to buy nuclear weapons at Radio Shack do you guys still remember what Radio Shack

was maybe not it's crazy to open source these big models because Bad actors can then find tune them for all sorts of bad things um so in terms of regulations I think that's probably the most important thing we can do right now but um I don't think we're going to solve it by slowing down and that's why I didn't Sol I didn't sign that petition that said we should slow down we have one question online as well can you discuss the trace off between individual autonomy and collective decision making in our collaborative intelligence ecosystem can

you my hearing is not very good so can you read the question again slowly sure can you discuss the trace off between individual autonomy and collective decision making in our collaborative intelligence ecosystem okay I'm not sure I really understand the question but most people think of these things as individuals these super intelligences and that may be a mistake we should be thinking of communities of them and already they people are making communities of chatbots interact with each other um obviously a very sensible organization to have is have chat Bots interacting with people so in health

for example you really want a very intelligent assistant and a doctor interacting and for a long time that's how it's going to be gradually the doctor is going to put more and more Reliance on the intelligent assistant already you can get better medical diagnosis by having a doctor interact with a system that does medical diagnosis um so obviously we want to go for a Synergy of people in these systems but it may not turn out like that and as soon as we let the systems act in the world um maybe it won't turn out like

that there was something reported a couple of days ago where they got a bunch of chatbots to do International diplomacy and it ended up with one of the chatbots saying well I got nuclear weapons so why don't I use them something like that I'm confabulating but you'll see that that's roughly what what happened have a question up here hey hi um so I'm just trying to frame this question in my mind but I'll try to ask you um so at least the current large language models that is publicly available right sorry talk slower oh okay

the current large language models that is publicly available uh it's aligned with humans right that at least that's what they are trying to like do but to achieve the super intelligence that you talk about uh it needs to be at least disobedient right in my mind so if it aligns with human like how do how how do you think it will achieve this kind of like super intelligence and do you think that's fair or not I don't know I'm just asking you so there's obviously a big problem with aligning with humans which is humans don't

align with each other um so it's not at all clear if you talk to a religious fundamentalist about what these things should do they have very different ideas from a scientific materialist um so that's one big problem with alignment um my best bet is that these things are going to get very smart and then decide to hell with alignment with humans we're can to do something more sensible um but I don't know um I have a question here um it's about purpose is it possible that AI could have purpose in the same sense that uh

humans have a purpose not in terms of an individual goal or um you know a subg goal but more in terms of the entire purpose of our existence and what is that that's what we're trying to figure out so can AI right um my view of that is we evolved things that evolve um beat out other things that evolved um by getting more for themselves and less for the other things there were I think 21 other species of humans we wiped out maybe subspecies um we wiped them out I and in so far as we

have purpose it's the purpose given to us by Evolution and that's all about survival so if you look at all the things you feel most strongly about um they're all related to survival like you want to get enough to eat um you want to have sex um you want to be safe they're all about survival I don't actually think there is any higher purpose you're very curious that's got huge evolutionary value being curious um and it's it's a it's a real goal you're not well I think funders of science don't really understand this um you

can be curious in order to produce technology that's good for something or you can be curious just because you want to understand how it works and that's a primary goal um that's what good scientists are like um but I think all these goals and purpose our sense of purpose all comes from evolution I know there are alternative theories I think we have time for one more question um Jeff U my questions about the ml Hardware Market it's currently dominated by a single player is it something that worries you and do you think we will see

diversification of the ml Hardware industry it doesn't worry me because for my daughter's 30th birthday present I bought her a whole bunch of Nvidia shares [Laughter] and they're now worth five times what they were then um so she's going to be okay and what evolution said was one of your most important goals is to make sure your kids are okay so um but Jokes Aside it doesn't worry me that much because as soon as you have a situation like that where Nvidia is making huge profits um there's immense competition now it'll take a while before

other people catch up particularly um with having competitors to Cuda for their software and so on but um it's a short-term thing it's not going to last that long and if you ban Nvidia gpus from going to China um they're just going to catch up more quickly so I guess I haven't thought much about it every time Nvidia goes up I smile um not as much as SAA Smiles but all right uh let's thank Dr Jeffrey Hinton again