Do LLMs Understand? AI Pioneer Yann LeCun Spars with DeepMind’s Adam Brown.

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 00:00.440

It needs to have kind of a way of observing itself and configuring itself to um solve a particular problem. We We certainly can can do this. And so, um, perhaps that's what gives us illusion of of consciousness. I have no doubt this will happen at

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 00:17.080

some point. And will the machines have moral worth

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 00:19.320

when it happens? Yeah, absolutely. I mean they will have some moral sense whether it aligns with us or not will depend on how we define those objectives and guardrails. Um, but yeah, they will have a sense of of moral.

Janna Levin (Professor of Physics and Astronomy) 00:32.640

Let me ask Adam this question a slightly different way or you can answer the same question as well. Um, Are we too attached to the human subjective experience? Our sense of consciousness uh clearly we've already know that animals don't have the same experience that we do

Janna Levin (Professor of Physics and Astronomy) 00:50.040

and uh why should we imagine that the superintelligence will have the same subjective experience as human beings?

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 00:57.180

Okay, let me answer all your questions then. Just my my gut. I I think machines can certainly be conscious in in in principle that if they're doing at the you know the artificial neurons end up doing the same information processing in the same way as human neurons, uh then then

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 01:16.860

you know at the very least that will give rise to to consciousness.

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 01:19.140

It's not about the substrate, whether it's silicon or carbon. It's just about the nature of the information processing. We'll give rise to consciousness. Um, what we're missing to get there um as as David knows there's you know there are these things called the neural correlates

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 01:35.260

of consciousness.

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 01:36.340

People who don't want to say they're studying consciousness directly can look at human brains or perhaps animal brains and say what is the processes going on in the neurons that give rise to conscious experience. Um, and

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 01:51.140

uh There's a number of number of theories and from my point of view they all kind of suck. Um there's there's the recurrence theory that you need to be able to take your outputs and plug them back in to the inputs and that's an essential part of consciousness.

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 02:04.580

There's something called global workspace theory, integrated information theory. Every you know physicist and neuroscientists like to have their own def set of criteria for what it is for a machine for a information processing system to be conscious.

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 02:18.700

I don't find any of them particularly compelling and I think we should have extreme humility about recognizing consciousness in other entities. We are very bad at doing it in, you know, in animals. We very much change our mind over history whether animals are conscious, whether

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 02:36.220

babies experience consciousness. So,

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 02:39.860

my question is a little bit don't know, um but I do think that if you just told me about neural networks or told, you know, if I if I didn't know about consciousness, and I just heard about the processing of information that happens in neural neural networks, human neural

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 02:57.420

networks. I would not have predicted that gives rise to consciousness.

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 03:00.180

That's a great surprise. And we should be for that reason extremely humble even about what the form of the consciousness would make. So so to answer Janet's question, we have seen that what we used to think of as a reasonably unified idea of intelligence, human intelligence,

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 03:15.540

which is a whole bunch of different abilities and and skills, we've unbundled that with

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 03:21.100

these machines intelligence is where we constructed things that have some of them but not others. Very superhuman in some, subhuman in others. Perhaps we will be unbundling consciousness as well. And this thing that we think of as consciousness, we will realize that there is uh

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 03:36.020

you know many different aspects to it that we can have some and not the others. And

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 03:40.020

maybe as you indicated, we can even transcend human consciousness in in some capacities. I'm pretty excited about answering this question though. I I think we finally finally finally have a model organism for intelligence in the form of these artificial minds that we're building

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 03:59.500

and maybe we can turn that model organism for intelligence into a model organism for consciousness and answer some of these questions sort of intrigue mankind.

David Chalmers (Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science) 04:09.780

I just didn't think I heard an answer to

Adam Brown (Research Scientist) 04:11.260

when. Oh, um I I can neither confirm nor deny, I think it's the standard phrase we're using here. Um I think if if progress keeps going 2036

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 04:28.180

Okay, not in the next two years.

Janna Levin (Professor of Physics and Astronomy) 04:31.940

Just one closing question, we're a little bit over time, but I'm going to ask this to you young. In many ways you're a contrarian maybe not by choice. Maybe this is just how it's happened. You've called it the cult of LLM's. You you sort of often refer to the fact that in

Janna Levin (Professor of Physics and Astronomy) 04:45.900

Silicon Valley you don't have the most conventional approach.

Janna Levin (Professor of Physics and Astronomy) 04:50.220

But yet you have an optimism. You You really do not indulge in the Doomsday sort of rhetoric. What is your most optimistic vision for if not two years from now, 2036?