It sounds like this interview was a bit controversial but I haven't seen any mentions of it here. Wright (who basically invented the concept of podcasting) has spent the last two years writing a book about AI, and here he gets completely schooled by scholarly sceptics who present him just the most basic understanding of the state of the industry. Apparently this led to at least one of the guests to get harassed online about it.

I've followed Wright for a long time and respect him immensely, but my most generous summary of his take on AI has to be "gee whiz it can make a website, certainly it will take over to world any day now." Especially coming off of Ed's recent interview with Cal Newport is makes Wright look insanely out of touch, and yet his upcoming book on AI is very likely to become a best seller.

Just this week he had his regular chat with Paul Bloom where Wright presented this case, and Bloom asked him a simple question, essentially "name a single metric that will show how AI will disrupt the world in the next 3 years" and it catches him so off guard that it derails their entire conversation.

How can anyone convince themself of the inevitable coming of the Singularity and yet never once consider how it will actually manifest? Wright's only defense is basically "but haven't you heard all of this hype in the media?!"

This has solidified my own pet theory about why so many people are bewitched by the promise of LLMs. I call it the "gee whiz" theory of AI.

Apparently even the most plugged in tech and media journalists of our time have never written a line of code in their lives, and so a trillion dollar app that can do what DreamWeaver did 20 years ago (and what any semi-competent person can learn in less than a week) is a sign of the apocalypse.

The Case Against AI (Robert Wright, Alex Hanna, and Emily Bender)