Understanding AI "Understanding" with Robert Wright of Nonzero Newsletter & Podcast

In this special crossover episode of The Cognitive Revolution, Nathan Labenz joins Robert Wright of the Nonzero newsletter and podcast to explore pressing questions about AI development. They discuss the nature of understanding in large language models, multimodal AI systems, reasoning capabilities, and the potential for AI to accelerate scientific discovery. The conversation also covers AI interpretability, ethics, open-sourcing models, and the implications of US-China relations on AI development. Subscribe to The Nonzero Newsletter at https://nonzero.substack.com and Podcast at https://www.youtube.com/@Nonzero/videos Apply to join over 400 founders and execs in the Turpentine Network: https://hmplogxqz0y.typeform.com/to/JCkphVqj RECOMMENDED PODCAST: History 102 Every week, creator of WhatifAltHist Rudyard Lynch and Erik Torenberg cover a major topic in history in depth -- in under an hour. This season will cover classical Greece, early America, the Vikings, medieval Islam, ancient China, the fall of the Roman Empire, and more.Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/36Kqo3BMMUBGTDo1IEYihm Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-102-with-whatifalthists-rudyard-lynch-and/id1730633913 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@History102-qg5oj SPONSORS: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds; offers one consistent price, and nobody does data better than Oracle. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive of OCI at https://oracle.com/cognitive The Brave search API can be used to assemble a data set to train your AI models and help with retrieval augmentation at the time of inference. All while remaining affordable with developer first pricing, integrating the Brave search API into your workflow translates to more ethical data sourcing and more human representative data sets. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://bit.ly/BraveTCR Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off https://www.omneky.com/ Head to Squad to access global engineering without the headache and at a fraction of the cost: head to https://choosesquad.com/ and mention “Turpentine” to skip the waitlist. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) About the Show (00:00:22) About the Episode (00:03:39) Introduction and Background (00:06:58) AI Capabilities and Understanding (00:12:22) Discussing Martin Casado's Views (Part 1) (00:14:44) Sponsors: Oracle | Brave (00:16:48) Discussing Martin Casado's Views (Part 2) (00:21:51) Multimodal AI and Concept Representation (Part 1) (00:31:40) Sponsors: Omneky | Squad (00:33:26) Multimodal AI and Concept Representation (Part 2) (00:38:05) AI's Potential and Limitations (00:45:35) AI Safety and Risk Assessment (00:53:31) AI Development and Global Implications (01:03:30) Open Source AI and International Relations (01:11:27) AI Ethics and Human Values (01:22:06) AI Risk and Existential Threats (01:31:21) Open Source AI Concerns (01:38:20) China-US AI Relations (01:48:36) State Space Models in AI (02:02:32) Conclusion and Recommendations (02:03:54) Outro --- SOCIAL LINKS: Website : https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai Twitter (Podcast) : https://x.com/cogrev_podcast Twitter (Nathan) : https://x.com/labenz