2025-09-25 Sam Altman and David Deutsch Discuss AGI
Duration: 00:07:26
Transcript
Mathias Döpfner
Sam, is it actually true that your kind of favorite book is The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch?
Sam Altman
Yeah, I think if I had to pick one favorite book, I would pick that.
Mathias Döpfner
Why is that so fascinating? Can you explain that?
Sam Altman
Even if you don’t read the whole thing, the first 40, 50 pages are, I think, the most wonderfully optimistic take on why even in a world with AI, we’re never going to run out of things to do and ways to be useful and problems to solve and things to explore. But I also think it explains so beautifully how we got here and why the relatively simple process that we followed throughout human history got us to this incredible place.
Mathias Döpfner
Okay, that’s good because David Deutsch, I think, is going to be our last virtual guest, at least tonight. David Deutsch is a physicist and scientist from Oxford University. And I think also you have disagreements with him about the possibility that artificial intelligence is transforming into super intelligence with consciousness, perhaps even he thinks it cannot be the case. You think it should be the case. There he is, David Deutsch. Welcome. And perhaps you can elaborate a little bit on that disagreement, but also why you admire Sam Altman.
Sam Altman
Well, I don’t care about that. I just want to hear your disagreement.
David Deutsch
Okay, I can tell you. Well, unlike a computer, I keep a list of progress that has been achieved where I had previously been sure that it wasn’t yet possible. One of the items I’m embarrassed to admit was the World Wide Web. Another was that I thought that no computer program would be able to sustain open-ended conversation on general subjects in natural language unless that program was an AGI, an artificial general intelligence. So it would have what I prefer to call explanatory creativity. ChatGPT proved me wrong. It’s not an AGI and it can converse. That ability was a side effect of another, namely knowledge. The Eliza chatbot in the 1960s used little more than the words and phrases you told it. ChatGPT can chat about anything, drawing on a vast body of knowledge, which was a phenomenally useful combination. For some people, too useful. They think they’re speaking to a person, an AGI, just as the first users of Eliza treated it as if it were a person. Which brings me to a widespread myth of the Turing test. In reality, Alan Turing never proposed a test or benchmark for AGI. His imitation game wasn’t a test of anything but a thought experiment to torpedo the intuition that machines can’t think. Indeed there can be no benchmark, because to be general, an AGI must be capable of choosing to remain silent. This is already a proof that AGI cannot be made via existing approaches, while those can and must be judged by benchmarks. Conversely, if something outputs a new explanation, you can’t test for whether it created that or a human did, even if you yourself administered the test. In Edison’s phrase, there’s the inspiration part, which only humans and AGIs can do, and the perspiration part, from which AGIs can liberate us. So if there’s no test, how do we know that humans are general intelligences? By telling their story. Human thought doesn’t consist of mechanically converting motivations into actions, prompts into output. It’s mainly about choosing motivations. Just as science is not extracting theories from data, it’s seeing a problem, guessing explanations, criticizing and testing them. So how can you tell whether something is doing that? You can’t always. Sometimes it really is a bot you’re chatting to. But when you have no explanation saying that you yourself are a bot, or that humans in general are, it’s rational to assume that they aren’t. Some people have fun questioning whether Einstein really created the theory of relativity or only assembled it mechanically from a smorgasbord of existing ideas. We know he created it because we know his story, what problems he was addressing and why. Just as we know that Sam Altman, without having to write any code, brought ChatGPT into existence as a product and a phenomenon by having the intuition and the gumption to know that this was the right thing for humanity to try next.
David Deutsch
Nothing can program a computer to have such intuitions. Yet.
Sam Altman
Can I ask one question? I guess you mentioned Einstein and general relativity and I agree, I think that’s one of the most beautiful things humanity’s ever figured out. Maybe I would even say number one. And Einstein had a story. We knew what he was working on. If in a few years GPT-8 figured out quantum gravity and could tell you its story of how it did it and the problems it was thinking about and why it decided to work on that. But it still just looked like a language model output. But it really did solve it. I appreciate that you keep a list of things you’re wrong about. I do too. But would that be enough to convince you?
David Deutsch
I think it would.
Sam Altman
Yeah. All right. I’ll say your opinion is crucial here. David Deutsch. I agree to that as the test.
Mathias Döpfner
David, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for your uplifting words and have a great evening. David Deutsch, a pioneer of quantum computing, one of the most brilliant thinkers of our times. Thank you for joining.
Markdown