The Cognitive Revolution: How AI Changes Everything Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz

In this episode, hosts Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg delve into the exciting and concerning aspects of GPT4, the latest large multimodal model from OpenAI. Nathan, who was a Red Teamer for GPT4, shares his experience working with the model, using it for real-life scenarios, and how he found it to be human-level rather than human-like intelligence. Nathan also highlights some of its fundamental weaknesses and limitations and shares the most concerning elements of GPT4. They end the episode pondering the arrival of GPT5 and whether we are in AI's "goldilocks moment."

Check out the debut of Erik Torenberg's new podcast Upstream. This coming season features interviews with Marc Andreessen (Episode 1 live now), David Sacks, Ezra Klein, Balaji Srinivasan, Katherine Boyle, and more. Subscribe here:
Apple Podcasts: bit.ly/3z8TldL
Spotify: bit.ly/40letd0

Timestamps for E11: Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg of The Cognitive Revolution Podcast
(0:00) Preview of Nathan on this episode
(1:13) Upstream: Erik's new interview show
(1:41) Intro
(5:40) Nathan's experience as a GPT4 Red Teamer
(11:22) Catching the AI wave
(14:30) Using GPT4 for real-life scenarios
(17:33) Sponsor: Omneky
(21:00) Human-level, not human-like intelligence
(26:00) GPT4 weaknesses
(28:14) More real-life use cases for GPT4
(35:25) Teaching AI to communicate within itself
(40:25) GPT4’s limitations
(44:32) Nathan's learnings from using GPT4
(46:56) Nathan joining the Red Team
(47:29) The most concerning thing about GPT4
(1:05:42) GPT5
(1:06:42) Open AI's regulatory breadcrumbs
(1:13:52) AI's goldilocks moment


Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. 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.

Twitter:
@CogRev_Podcast
@labenz (Nathan)
@eriktorenberg (Erik)

Join 1000's of subscribers of our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack

The development of ultra-realistic human voices is upon us, and Mahmoud Felfel's company Play.ht is leading the next generation of text-to-voice models. In this episode, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of automating a more human voice, as well as concerns about deep fakes and user safety.

Also, you might be interested to check out the debut of Erik Torenberg's new podcast "Upstream". This coming season features interviews with Marc Andreessen (Episode 1 is out now), David Sacks, Ezra Klein, Balaji Srinivasan, Katherine Boyle, and more. Subscribe here:
Apple Podcasts: bit.ly/3z8TldL
Spotify: bit.ly/40letd0

Timestamps:
(0:00) Preview of Mahmoud on this episode 
(0:55) Sponsor: Omneky.com 
(1:45) Nathan clones his voice using Play.ht 
(6:11) Why Mahmoud started Play.ht and the problem they tried to solve
(13:08) The job to be done for Play.ht & how they’re thinking about APIs and models
(24:45) Mahmoud breaks down the architecture of Play.ht
(29:30) How the use cases have evolved 
(30:00) New markets and opportunities with creators
(37:00) Are we all about to become prompt engineers/directors?
(44:50) Roadmap to other languages beyond English
(48:00) Managing the compute(52:00) If AI-generated voices becomes a commodity, what will happen?
(55:00) Why bigger companies are late adopters of AI tools
(56:30) The long-term moat of Play.ht and other applications
(1:00:00) Controversial voice-cloning and potential for societal abuse
(1:10:32) Commonly abused voices
(1:12:36) Rapid fire questions

*Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. 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.*

Twitter:
@CogRev_Podcast
@_mfelfel (Mahmoud)
@labenz (Nathan)

Join 1000's of subscribers of our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack

Websites:
cognitivervolution.ai
play.ht
omneky.com

People have long been imagining AI assistants. Flo Crivello (founder of Teamflow) is turning that dream into a reality with the ambitious project Lindy. Flo sits down with Nathan on Lindy's announcement day to talk about this unique moment in AI, Lindy's capabilities, single-use apps, and how he sees the global impact that AI-powered employees can have on the future of work. Anyone who mentions "The Cognitive Revolution" when signing up for the Lindy beta will get priority access. 
(0:00) Preview 
(1:05) Sponsor: Omneky 
(4:50) Flo demos Lindy
(9:21) Security and user experience 
(11:55) How this AI moment compares to the Industrial Revolution and single use apps 
(15:00) The dream AI assistant (19:54) Competition and advantages of startups 
(24:28) Cost vs Quality 
(31:19) How Lindy uses user data 
(32:37) Context and data injection 
(28:11) Comfort with ambiguity 
(43:10) Use of guardrails and trust concerns 
(47:26) AI safety and edge cases 
(49:16) Impact on labor markets 
(50:27) Economic resilience 
(52:09) Future of work 
(55:49) Rapid fire questions 
 
*Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. 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. 
Join 1000's of subscribers of our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack 
Websites: lindy.ai *mention "The Cognitive Revolution" when you sign up for the waitlist to get priority access* 
thecognitiverevolution.ai 
Twitter: @CogRev_Podcast 
@labenz (Nathan) 
@Altimor (Flo)

How will GPT4 change the world? How will US-China 'racing dynamics' play out and what are the implications for AI safety? Nathan Labenz was invited to record a special "emergency" episode of ChinaTalk podcast this week to discuss the implications GPT4 will have for policy, economics, and society. Thanks to Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk, and fellow "AI justice league" guests Zvi Mowshowitz of 'Don't Worry About the Vase' and Matthew Mittelsteadt of Mercatus. 
 
(0:00) Intro
(2:09) GPT-4 emergency podcast
(9:26) GPT-4 use cases
(22:51) What GPT-4 can and can’t do
(35:50) AI safety
(45:38) OpenAI v. Anthropic 
(48:54) Governments’ role in AI
(55:50) AI will improve physical health and healthcare the most
(59:19) Facebook’s LLaMA model
(01:05:55) VR/AR
(01:08:59) Concerns with GPT4
(01:15:26) GPT-5 and GPT-6
(01:18:45) Optimism in the AI revolution
Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. 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, to generate personalized experiences at scale.
 
Twitter:@CogRev_Podcast@labenz (Nathan)@jordanschnyc (Jordan)
 Websites:cognitivervolution.ai

We talked to Aravind Srinivas about competing with the tech giants, Perplexity's product philosophy and obsession with maximizing value delivered to the user per unit time, and the features that makes Perplexity unique.(0:00) Preview(1:31) Introduction & Context(08:06) Aravind’s vision for Perplexity as the world’s most truth-centric company(9:29)  Raising the average IQ of the world(12:00) Aravind’s favorite tech entrepreneur(15:12) “Anthropics” - Building your own model vs user experience(33:00) Why is perplexity free(43:00) Talking shop: Perplexity’s tech stack and speed(1:06:00) Perplexity’s stance on guardrails on search(1:19:48) Forecasting weakly general AGI: The four criteria(1:28:00) Aravind’s perspective on OpenAI and the future of AGI(1:39:00) The Cognitive Revolution’s rapid fire questions: Neuralink implant? Most used AI tools? AI hopes and fears?
Twitter handles:@CogRev_Podcast@AravSrinivas (Aravind)@labenz (Nathan)@eriktorenberg (Erik) Join 1000's of subscribers of our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com/ References & Shownotes:Flamingo: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/tackling-multiple-tasks-with-a-single-visual-language-modelDecision Transformer Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01345Aravind on TalkRL Podcast: https://www.talkrl.com/episodes/aravind-srinivas-2Weakly General AGI Criteria: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general-ai-is-publicly-known/

As recently as January 2021, the challenge of "interpreting what is going on in a photograph" was considered "nowhere near solved."  Today's guests Junnan Li and Dongxu Li changed that with their publication and open-sourcing of BLIP, which delivered state-of-the-art performance on image captioning and other vision-language tasks.
BLIP became the #18 most-cited AI paper of 2022, and now Junnan and Dongxu are back with BLIP-2, this time showing how small models can harness the power of existing foundation models to do multi-modal tasks.
We talked to Junnan and Dongxu about their research and how they see the trend toward connector models shaping the future.Timestamps:
(00:00) Preview
(01:17) Sponsor
(01:35) Intro
(05:50) Convergence of AI techniques
(07:33) Evolution of BLIP to BLIP-2
(08:12) How BLIP-2 unlocked multimodal functionality
(12:43) The size, training dynamics, and optimization function of BLIP
(20:15) Practical/Business applications of BLIP
(29:43) Efficiency of BLIP-2 compared to other models
(41:52) Two-stage pre-training
(47:11) Architecture of Blip-2’s connector model
(58:52) Language models as the executive function of the brain
(01:07:32) Vision for an ultimate multimodal system and democratized pre-training for models
(01:12:59) Useful AI tools in these researchers’ day-to-day
(01:14:56) Upcoming projects
 
*Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. 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.
 
Twitter:
@CogRev_Podcast
@LiJunnan0409 (Junnan Li)
@DongxuLi_(Dongxu Li)
@labenz (Nathan)
@eriktorenberg (Erik)
 
Join 1000's of subscribers of our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com
 
Websites:
Episode transcript at Cognitivervolution.ai
huggingface.co/spaces/Salesforce/BLIP
huggingface.co/spaces/Salesforce/BLIP2
 
Show Notes:
- Original BLIP demo
- BLIP 2 demo
- BLIP is the #18 most highly-cited paper in AI
- Image captioning comparison tool
- Understanding images with AI - for use in language models and image generation
- Image Aesthetics - Product & Model Reviews