Azeem Azhar: The Exponential View

Episode 122
I spoke with Azeem Azhar about:
* The speed of progress in AI
* Historical context for some of the terminology we use and how we think about technology
* What we might want our future to look like
Azeem is an entrepreneur, investor, and adviser. He is the creator of Exponential View, a global platform for in-depth technology analysis, and the host of the Bloomberg Original series Exponentially.
Reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.
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Outline:
* (00:00) Intro
* (00:32) Ad read — MLOps conference
* (01:05) Problematizing the term “exponential”
* (07:35) Moore’s Law as social contract, speed of technological growth and impedances
* (14:45) Academic incentives, interdisciplinary work, rational agents and historical context
* (21:24) Monolithic scaling
* (26:38) Investment in scaling
* (31:22) On Sam Altman
* (36:25) Uses of “AGI,” “intelligence”
* (41:32) Historical context for terminology
* (48:58) AI and teaching
* (53:51) On the technology-human divide
* (1:06:26) New technologies and the futures we want
* (1:10:50) Inevitability narratives
* (1:17:01) Rationality and objectivity
* (1:21:13) Cultural affordances and intellectual history
* (1:26:15) Centralized and decentralized AI systems
* (1:32:54) Instruction tuning and helpful/honest/harmless
* (1:39:18) Azeem’s future outlook
* (1:46:15) Outro
Links:
* Azeem’s website (azeemazhar.com) and Twitter (twitter.com/azeem)
* Exponential View (exponentialview.co)

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