In his trademark black suit, well built, not tall — reserved when speaking in person, self effacing at all times, thoughtful, listening, attentive, and never interrupting others.

For once, Lex was responding to questions, instead of asking them. Gracious thanks to the host, Manolis Kellis, for hosting, organizing, and asking Lex the right questions:

AGI:

  • Concerns about AI: How chatbots can do great good, but also poison social media. How the world is on a hair trigger, with much depending on the mood of a few people who can trigger nuclear war.
  • Lex initially supported the open letter which called for a 6 months moratorium in ChatGPT4-grade model training. Now, he changed his mind, the only path is forward.
  • He visited OpenAI for two weeks, thinks greatly of the people at OpenAI.
  • The people inside OpenAI are pretty deliberate, and are asking between themselves the same questions everybody is asking from the outside, about AGI safety.
  • He asked the audience if ChatGPT4 should be open sourced. He did not say it, but thinks it does not have to be open sourced.

Impact on sciences

  • Lex says it’s good to think on three levels - students, midlevel scientists, and master scientists. He thinks ChatGPT will help the first two levels of people
  • The pace of learning will be a lot faster with ChatGPT
  • Are there serious linguists trying to theorize about ChatGPT? No, he says.
  • Lex stopped using Emacs, and started using VSCode, with Github Copilot. About 85% of his code, now, is auto-generated.
  • He’s working for MIT CSAIL still, remotely, on a project related to feelings for robots
  • Advice to scientists - praise other scientists, even when it’s a competitive environment

Politics:

  • He was asked what is the best way to explain to Washington politicians about AGI. Lex says it’s hopeless to explain it to them.
  • He says, up to the Obama administration, Washington still assembled a panel of scientists for this or that. Even those panels were getting things wrong, and assembled the wrong experts - but it was better than nothing.
  • Since Trump, there’s none of that anymore. Things are even worse.
  • Safety regulations for self-driving are an example of botched approach.
  • The way he sees the world moving: Startups come up with ideas. Big companies are forced to react. Example - Google, Facebook reorganizing to do AGI. Facebook canned the entire Metaverse project, and is now focusing on AGI.
  • Government brings no innovation, he says. Only innovation is originating from startups.

Self driving cars, general robotics:

  • He was asked no questions about that.

Podcast work and reward:

  • Lex takes a lot of time to prepare interviews
  • That’s a very unglamourous part of his work
  • He sends a list of questions a few hours before the interview.
  • Says Manolis Kellis was the best prepared on the podcast - preparing 8 pages of written notes in 2 hours ahead of interview. Manollis responded - it was because the Lex podcast has an audience of a million, while the class he teaches at MIT has an audience of 200.
  • Lex got a lot of pushback, and got attacked, early when he started the podcast. He was researching something about Tesla self driving cars, and he had an interview at the same time with Elon Musk. Which seemed like a conflict of interest. Was so impacted by these attacks, that he decided to drop the Tesla research, even if he did not have to do it.
  • It helped Lex, at that time, when Musk told him “you’re doing all right”. That cleared the doubts Lex was feeling.

What are people not paying enough attention to?

  • The Ukraine war. Lex has relatives on both sides. He’s been on the front lines. The war is fought with old WW2 style weapons, mostly. Ukraine is getting some weapons from the Occident.
  • Not enough Americans know, or care enough of this war.
  • Lex will go back in a couple of weeks and interview Zelensky. Who is one of the few disruptive political leaders in the world.

Thinking about love and death

  • Life’s meaning is love
  • When doing podcasts, Lex is very attentive to not use trigger words. He sometimes even edits the triggers out, and gives guests a chance of a retake.
  • Lex meditates daily, and constantly thinks about death.
  • He imagines what it would be to die when the night’s event is over. And asks himself what he accomplished that night.
  • He noticed that, when asking guests about how they think about death - religious people have a more thought-out response.
  • Engineers, usually, are annoyed with the question
  • Lex used to ask the “what do you think about death” question at the very end of the interview.
  • Then, he noticed how, after the interview has finished - it is only then that the guest really thinks the question through, and opens up.
  • Now, Lex asks the question fifteen minutes before the end of the interview, to give the guest enough time to absorb the question.

What are common traits he noticed in the people he speaks to?

  • All his guests are very human, and have to figure out how to schedule their finite amount of time in the day - even when they seem, from the outside, to be super-human
  • The tech leaders, who are atop wealthy companies - live life their own way. They don’t follow the grain. They do what they want, and have a lot more time on their hand than you’d assume.
  • About leadership style - it helps to give good praise to the people you work with.
  • Elon Musk is a good example. He’s known to assign unsolvable problems to young people around him - tell them “I know you can do it!” - then, he walks away. He’s done this many times.Among guests:
  • Engineers are very focused, neatly dressed, result-oriented.
  • Biologists have a much wider view of the diversity of the world
  • Physicists really know how to think about a problem. They are the best thinkers.
  • Entertainers are much more famous than all the above. They are the weirdest. Sometimes, they show up drunk at the interview.
  • Best CEOs are those with the vision, and with the attention to detail. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is an example.
  • Lex does not like it when guests “suit up” in front of him, and don’t open up. His interview with the Pfizer CEO is an example.
  • CEOs who are also founders are a lot more relaxed. They’re not accountable to anybody.