The Top 30 Quotes from this Amazing MIT AI Conference
Just a stunning gathering of AI talent in one room
The Imagination In Action conference last week at MIT was just remarkable. I have never been to a better conference (kudos to John Werner). Below are the top quotes. If you just have two minutes, read the ones from Stephen Wolfram.
Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Alpha and Wolfram Research
“AI is an enabling technology, like electricity. ChatGPT is the like the first telephone that works”
“Aristotle founded or discovered logic by observing the world. ChatGPT thinks logically. Why? Because it notices all the logic in the data in its training set”
“ChatGPT is a linguistic interface…ChatGPT digested 1 trillion words and tries to guess the next best word based on a prompt. …This does not allow precise (mathematical) calculations….
“Math is based on starting axioms, which allows precision in calculations….ChatGPT provides a linguistic interface to deep computation”
“I don’t consider raw intelligence any different than computational capabilities at the fundamental level…the questions is whether AI is aligned with how humans think….the trillion words it trained on helped it [ChatGPT] to be aligned with humans….”
“ChatGPT has further democratized access to sophisticated computation.”
“What’s going to happen that is going to scare us? …ChatGPT is good at analogies…as ChatGPT gets better…it noticed more patterns…ChatGPT discovered a new type of language pattern”
“Will ChatGPT help physicists?...ChatGPT has a great ability to notice patterns and analogies because of its training on a trillion words….as AI gets better, the value of being a generalist grows versus being a specialist….AI can’t define WHAT we want to do…this comes from humans… AI grows the opportunity set and thus creates more need for humans to define what we want.”
“Education needs to move to teaching people how to ask the right questions”
“Should you learn to program? Probably not. You should learn how to think about things computationally. ….All the people who are teaching low-level programming - it’s not clear that that is worthwhile.”
“..the thing that people should be doing is to learn how to think broadly…learn what types of questions to ask…much of (today’s) education is based on industrial age thinking of learning to build specific things..”
“..personalized and adaptive education is now possible….it is easy to have AI make up a math problem about lizards if, say, the student loves lizards…it will become much easier to learn things…”
Lex Fridman “ChatGPT is good at sounding correct, without actually being correct.” Stephen Wolfram replied, “Just like humans”
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
“we were all surprised about the leap in capability from GPT 3 to GPT 3.5
“….we need to keep focus on rapidly increasing capability, not rapidly increase number like parameters. The number of parameters that a model is trained on is no longer the the key metric….who knows the CPU speed of their smart phone? ”
“…our goal is to find out what [software] developers want and give it to them….many developers are using the base model and it appears there is less of a market need to change the weights [i.e. fine tuning]…”
"I don't believe in a super fast take-off .. it just takes too much time to build new data centers."
Sam was asked: How do we know you’re not an AI, but you’re really you? Sam replied “you don’t”
Vinod Khoskla, Khoshla Ventures (an early investor in OpenAI)
“…Let’s work from the future back….64% of all jobs in world will done by AI”
“all the best doctors will be in AI… the AI-only doctors (not AI-assisted doctors) will be here in 5 years… FDA will approve an AI app to be an approved therapist…”
“… GPT3.5 wasn’t a planned product in September…GPT5 and GPT6 will be a big jump in capability…today is just the beginning of a path of massive new capabilities.”
Brian Halligan, Hubspot co-founder
“Every piece of the enterprise is going go through a transformation of the user interface. …at Hubspot instead of reports, users now just ask an AI-interface what my is the month lead growth is…the user interface to enterprise apps has fundamentally changed. This is as big as the move away from DOS”.
Lauren Clement, VP Prudential
“Our data scientists spend 90% of their time getting data ready”
Lisa Huang- Head of AI at Fidelity Investments
“Generative AI is teaching us that the way you speak is actually code itself”
“Large language models can give (good) financial at scale”
Karl Roessner, CEO Vestmark
“a 84 trillion wealth transfer in next 10 years. 80% of financial adviser time is not value add”
“Financial advising is a zero growth market, but the majority of assets are managed by humans nearing retirement…huge opportunity for AI to step in.”
Catherine Havasi, Chief of Innovation Babel Street
“One bank has 100 people doing KYC. We need AI to give them superpowers to move to continuous KYC”
Kunal Tangri
“AI is driving deprecation of the $100B cookie industry. We are moving toward hyper-personalized, AI-driven web experience”
Dave Blundin, partner at Link Ventures
”In our portfolio companies we are seeing a 5% to 20x improvement with software developers using LLM”
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"Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter." - Albert Einstein
Onward,
Paul
Video read of quotes is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob-Iwx1hnKY