You're Living in a Simulation, Wake Up!

The bizarre concept of living in a simulation is fascinating and thought-provoking and challenges the very fabric of our existence. Even Tesla chief Elon Musk had previously?echoed this idea, declaring that there was only a one-in-a-billion chance that we lived in ‘base reality’. But, is it really true?

AIM?got in touch with?Nick Bostrom, the man behind the most influential paper –?Are You Living in a Simulation?(2003) — where he proposed three possible scenarios: Either all human-like civilizations will go extinct before they can create simulated realities, or the civilizations that can create them won't bother, or there are more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones because advanced civilizations can create many simulations.?

“So conditional on there being such civilisation that has an interest in doing this, we should think we are likely to be among the typically stimulated minds, rather than the rare non-simulated minds, given that from the inside it would be possible to tell the difference,” said Bostrom, recalling the essay.?

But, there is an even bigger challenge that worries Bostrom – the rate at which artificial intelligence is evolving, and how we can mitigate them. “If we manage to do things right, the upsides are fantastic,” he added, highlighting three broad concerns, including value misalignment, automation bias, and asymmetries. Read: “Pain in the AIs by Nick Bostrom” to know more.?

Debunking Noam Chomsky

A few weeks ago, celebrity linguist Noam Chomsky reflected upon the “false promise” offered by models like ChatGPT, which far from reasoning, are only able to mimic some regularities in data. This was seconded by several AI scientists, including Gary Marcus, who said, “LLMs don’t reliably understand the world”. In this light, the argument that LLMs can teach us about how humans think seems counterintuitive.?

The proposition was laid out by?Steven Piantadosi, a professor at UC Berkeley, who?argues?that while Chomsky’s ideas are deeply compelling, they exist only at the abstract level. According to him, generative syntacticians like Chomsky have insulated themselves from “engineering, empirical tests, and formal comparisons”.

Recently, OpenAI’s?Ilya Sutskever, in a fireside chat with NVIDIA chief?Jensen Huang, at?GTC23, resonated similar thoughts. He believes that neural networks are nothing but a representation of processes that produce text. “What the neural network is learning is more and more aspects of the world, of people, of the human conditions,” he added. This is one of the ways in which neural networks can teach us about how humans think and use language.?Read the full article here.?

Google Gone Bard?

Google and privacy have long been at odds with each other. But Google may have pushed the envelope again! The tech giant has unveiled its latest chatbot, ‘Bard’, and it’s not just any chatbot—it’s a chatbot that’s possibly trained on your Gmail data. Google is mining your emails for data to train its chatbot. But don’t worry, it’s all in the name of progress.

Kate Crawford, the principal researcher at Microsoft, tweeted a?concerning screenshot?of her interactions with Bard, where the chatbot said that the data from Gmail was included in the dataset that it is trained on. This would be a clear violation of the user privacy policy which clearly states that the company would not use Gmail or Photos data for any purposes whatsoever.?Read more here.?

AI-mazing Deedy?

Deedy?doesn’t like to be called an AI influencer. Former Google and Meta engineer, Debarghya Das, aka Deedy, recently got in touch with AIM, where he spoke at length about his journey into the world of AI, alongside busting myths around internal enterprise search and more. Currently, he leads the engineering team at?Glean?– an AI-powered workplace search engine that uses deep learning-based language models to provide personalised answers to natural language queries.

Originally from Kolkata, Deedy spent most of his childhood back home before heading to Cornell University for his undergrad course and master's in computer science. Much like other Indian folks, he too was tutored in FIITJEE, which he found interesting only until competition came into the picture. Learn more about his journey?here.