Physics of Life, Ep 1: What can physics tell us about ourselves?

In the final episode of the season, Abha sits down with Melanie to hear her perspective. They chat about Melanie’s career and research with Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach. They also discuss her opinions on LLMs’ current capabilities, what she thinks of existential questions like the alignment problem, how sustainable the industry is, the difficulty of making claims about concepts like “intelligence” and “understanding,” and what she thinks future technological development should focus on.

When it comes to assessing intelligence, people have all kinds of tests — the SAT, IQ tests, and so on. There’s controversy over how fairly these tests really measure human intelligence, but at the very least, we know that they correlate with some general reasoning skills when people take them. That assumption breaks down when we try to assess intelligence in non-humans. What does it mean when a large language model passes an intelligence test meant for humans? Does it actually have the same reasoning skills that a human does, or is it doing something else? In today’s episode, with guests Erica Cartmill and Ellie Pavlick, we investigate the best ways to assess intelligence in non-humans, whether animals or machines.

There’s an argument to be made that if we train AI systems to learn the way babies do, we’ll get them closer to human-like intelligence. But how our own learning development functions in babyhood is still a mystery that researchers are untangling. We know that the information babies absorb is very different from how an LLM learns, and in today’s episode, with guests Linda Smith and Michael Frank we’ll attempt to look at the world through an infant’s eyes and examine why they’re able to do more with, seemingly, less information.

Large language models, like ChatGPT and Claude, have remarkably coherent communication skills. Yet, what this says about their “intelligence” isn’t clear. Is it possible that they could arrive at the same level of intelligence as humans without taking the same evolutionary or learning path to get there? Or, if they’re not on a path to human-level intelligence, where are they now and where will they end up? In this episode, with guests Tomer Ullman and Murray Shanahan, we look at how large language models function and examine differing views on how sophisticated they are and where they might be going.

Complex language is unique to the human species. It’s part of how we evolved, the backbone of our societies, and one of the primary ways we judge others’ intellect. Is it our intelligence that leads to our language abilities, or conversely, does our ability for language enhance our intelligence, or both? How do language and thinking interact? And can one exist without the other? Guests: Evelina Federenko, Steve Piantadosi, and Gary Lupyan.