#15: Tools, not gods: IBM VP on AI, neuroscience and the nature of intelligence - David Cox

The Deep View: Conversations

At HumanX, I sat down with Dr. David Cox — the VP for AI models at IBM Research and the IBM Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab — to dissect those complex, nuanced differences between biological brains and the artificial neural networks behind LLMs, and how it all relates to the pursuit of AGI.

Episode links:

• Neural networks: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/neural-networks
• Convolutional neural networks: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/introduction-convolution-neural-network/
• Everything we know about the human brain: https://ny.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/stn15.sci.neuro.colbrain/what-we-still-dont-know-about-the-brain/
• MIT Flywire diagram: https://www.nature.com/immersive/d42859-024-00053-4/index.html
• Language and thought are not the same thing:https://mcgovern.mit.edu/2019/05/02/ask-the-brain-can-we-think-without-language/
• Decoding internal monologues: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7252628/
• Anthropic’s anthropomorphization: https://www.thedeepview.co/p/the-public-health-crisis-of-ai
• AGI and existential risk: https://www.thedeepview.co/p/the-nobel-prize-and-the-mainstreaming-of-ai-s-x-risk#4

Outline

0:00 — Intro

2:07 — What is intelligence?
4:36 — How AI boosts our understanding of the brain
8:09 — The differences between neurons and artificial neurons
12:13 — How much do we know — and not know — about biological brains
15:49 — LLMs and the illusion of intelligence
20:07 — Language vs Thought

23:37 — Should we train models not to use the first person?
28:04 — The pursuit of AGI

34:26 — IBM’s model approach
35:49 — AGI is a distraction
40:02 — How big a deal is AI?
45:26 — The risk of the AI brain drain

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Artificial intelligence is a complicated topic, bound by a number of complex threads — technical science, ethics, safety, regulation, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, investment and — above all — humanity. On The Deep View: Conversations, Ian Krietzberg, host and Editor-in-Chief at The Deep View, breaks it all down, cutting through the hype to make clear what's important and why you should care.