Hassabis: yeah I think certainly we as humans use language as our main generalization communication tool so I think we end up thinking in language and expressing our solutions in language um so it's going to be very powerful uh uh mode in which to uh explain you know the system to explain what it's doing um but I don't think it's the only uh uh modality that matters so I think there's gonna be a lot of you know there's there's a lot of different ways to express uh capabilities uh other than just language

Fridman Yeah vision robotics body language um yeah action is the interactive aspect of all that that's all part of it

Hassabis: but what's interesting with Gato is that it's a it's it's it's sort of pushing prediction to the maximum in terms of like you know mapping arbitrary sequences to other sequences and sort of just predicting what's going to happen next so prediction seems to be fundamental to intelligence

Fridman: and what you're predicting doesn't so much matter

Hassabis: yeah it seems like you can generalize that quite well so obviously language models predict the next word, um, Gato predicts potentially any uh action or any token uh and it's just the beginning really, it's our most general agent one could call it so far but um you know that itself can be scaled up massively more than we've done so far obviously we're in the in the middle of doing that.

Fridman: But the big part of solving AGI is creating benchmarks that help us get closer and closer sort of creating benchmarks that test the generalizability and it's just still interesting that this fella Alan Turing was one of the first and probably still one of the only people that was trying maybe philosophically but was trying to formulate a benchmark that could be followed it is even though it's it's fuzzy it's still sufficiently rigorous to where you can run that test and I still think something like the Turing test will at the end of the day be the thing that truly impresses other humans so that you can have a close friend who's an AI system for that friend to be a good friend they're going to have to be able to uh play Starcraft and they're going to have to do all of these tasks - um get you a beer so the robotics tasks, uh play games with you use language, humor, all those kinds of things, but that ultimately can boil down to language. It feels like not in terms of the AI community but in terms of the actual impact of general intelligence on the world it feels like language will be the place where it truly shines

Hassabis: I think so because it's such an important kind of input output for us. I think you're right. I think the Turing Test that what the the kind of the the philosophy behind it which is the idea of can can a machine mimic the behaviors of a human and men and I would say wider than just language, any text, then you know in terms of actions and everything else creativity all these things then um if it can sort of match or exceed human cognitive capabilities then I think we have a you know true intelligence so I thought from that perspective - you're right, I think he did formulate the right uh kind of uh setup.

Fridman: I just I think there'll be a kind of humor in the AI systems of the future looking back to this conversation and thinking about the Turing test and uh also thinking about by that time they would know which year they were finally able to sort of cross the threshold of human level intelligence and think how funny it is that we humans were still confused about this whole problem that has been long ago been solved. Well hello to the AI agents of the future.

(Emphasis added. Only mention of Gato in the YouTube transcript.)