If you could put anything on a

billboard, metaphorically speaking, for

millions, billions of people to see,

could be anything, image, quote,

question,

preferably not commercial.

What would it be? What might it be?

>> So, a billboard, which lots of people

are going to see, I would put, prepare

your mind. M this is a saying which is

originally Louis Pastor I think the

scientist

who said chance favors the prepared

mind. If you're ready for things you can

make the most of the opportunity that

comes your way. And the amazing thing

about this saying is that it's come up

randomly in different contexts in

different books I've done. So when I was

writing about venture capital, Excel

Capital

>> and one of the founders, Arthur

Patterson, used this phrase as a

description of how he wanted Excel to

invest that they would run these kind of

scenario exercises where they would

think, okay, there's a new technology

coming down the pike. What kind of

company needs to be built to make the

most of that new platform? What type of

entrepreneur is going to fit this

opportunity? what should we be expecting

so that the person walks into the office

into the conference room and pitches to

us we already know 90% of what he says

because we've prepared our minds and

that way we can make a good judgment and

a fast judgment if it's a competitive

situation so I kind of wrote about the

prepared mind in the context of venture

capital and then I'm doing the infinity

machine and I'm interviewing Ilia Satska

from open AI and I'm asking him why was

it you who understood the significance

of the transformer architecture

when it came out immediately like on the

day it was up on the website you read it

you ran down the corridor you went to

see your collaborator Alec Radford and

you said we're going to build a language

model on top of this architecture

>> well not only that he said stop

everything you're doing

>> right right

>> and do this

>> yeah this vision of the kind of you know

overcaffeinated charismatic

seizing on the engineer and saying drop

it whatever you're doing [laughter]

and you know in his answer was prepared

mind that he'd been thinking about IU

model sequential data ever since his PhD

in Canada. And when he saw the solution,

this was what he'd been waiting for for

like a decade. And so he could jump on

it. And then when you start thinking

about prepared mind, you know, you would

probably remember this better than I do,

but wasn't there a um Seattle Seahawks

Super Bowl final against the New England

Patriots where the New England

quarterback like does an interception in

the last second of play and clinches the

victory. And when he's asked after the

play, how did you know to make that run?

Where did you how did you know where the

quarterback was going to throw the ball?

The answer was prepared mind. basically

he didn't use that phrase but you know

in training they had studied

the play that the Seattle Seahawks were

going to make and they knew that given a

certain formation when the ball was

snapped back there was a certain pass

that was coming so the guy just takes

off and he runs right into where the

ball comes and he catches it and

intercepts and New England wins and so

that's a prepared mind in sports

>> and the other reason last thing

>> I would put on the billboard prepare

your mind is that for the age of

artificial intelligence. This is what we

need to hear. And this is a serious

point, right? The risk with large

language models is that we just get lazy

and whenever we need to know something,

we just get it to tell us what to think.

That is not the route to happiness or

satisfaction or anything. We need to

continue to do the hard work of

preparing our minds because that's what

makes us people. You know, I think,

therefore I am. And so I think prepare

your mind is entering a time when it

becomes a more important slogan than

ever.

>> How do you do that for yourself? What

guard rails or policies have you

established for your own use of AI?

>> And it makes me also think of going to

the gym, lifting weights, getting in

cardio. You don't have to do that, but

it is beneficial for you on a lot of

levels. And people, some people find it

quite enjoyable, right? And hence they

do that. And I'm wondering

what the equivalent is for knowledge

workers or people who are preparing

their minds and

don't want to become sort of impotent in

the way that people with directions have

mostly become impotent because of Google

maps and other tools like that. Right?

So what do you what do you do for

yourself personally or how are you

thinking about that? The first thing I

think is that the Google Maps analogy is

the wrong one in the sense that it's

fine to offload a very specific mental

task which to most people is a pain in

the neck.

>> Mhm.

>> And let the machine do that for you.

It's not fine to offload all thinking,

[laughter] right? The point of

offloading something should be you get

to focus your mental energy more on the

other stuff that you really get

satisfaction and meaning from. And so

for me, what that means is that I'm very

happy to use large language models to

learn about the scientific output of

somebody I'm going to interview next

week.

>> Mhm. All of these AI papers are on

archive and the model has ingested all

of them and the model is extremely good

at telling me okay the scientist you're

seeing next week has these three papers

and the progression between the three

papers is this and this and this and the

comparison with the person you saw two

weeks ago is this and this and this and

you know you learn a lot from the system

like really bootstraps you to learn

faster so that's helping me to think

more not to think less.

>> It's cutting out the time it would take

me to go find all the papers by myself

and then labor through them. It's

cutting to the chase and nourishing me

intellectually.

>> And by the way, I'm not worried about

hallucination because I'm going to

interview the human scientist anyway.

So, I get to cross-check it all.

>> What I would never do is get the AI to

write because frankly, it's not very

good at long form. In fact, it really

sucks. It's fine for writing an email,

although I don't do that either because

I like writing. But it really is. I've

tried it once. It's terrible for

anything longer than about 800 words.

But even if it could do it, I don't

think I would ever outsource that

because that's me,

>> right? This is what I do. This is the

thinking process. I think through my

writing, I come to understand what I

understand and think what I think and

believe what I believe through writing.

And I'm not going to give that up.

>> I'm letting out a pensive exhale because

I was thinking of this. A friend said to

me, well, I'll give him credit. Kevin

Rose, at one point I was I wouldn't say

complaining, observing that AI couldn't

do X or it wasn't very good at Y.

>> He said, when was the last time you

tried that? I was like six months ago.

And he's like, try it again. And

[laughter] so the rules will become

really important as also the power of

these things increases. And there I want

to say it was the New Yorker. There was

a piece in the New York or it might have

been the New York Times with some very

famous I want to say novelist could have

been Pulitzer Prize winner in literature

somebody at the top and they took three

or four pieces of their own writing had

AI generate three or four pieces of

writing in their voice and gave it to

professional readers

editors and so on and it wasn't clear

people couldn't figure out they claimed

that what he or she wrote was AI.

>> How long was the piece of writing? I

knew that was the question you're gonna

ask and I and I don't recall. So I want

to go back and look at that piece to

see.

>> So there was a story precisely like that

from an economist writer who's very

funny and also does podcasts

>> and he ran that experiment and it was

just as you said, you know, his friends

who were professional economist

journalists couldn't tell which was the

witty column that he'd written versus

the equally witty ones [laughter] which

the Lamb had generated. And he was very

pissed off with this. And I look, I take

your point. I mean, for now, I can be

all complacent and say, "Yeah, it only

works for 800 words. It doesn't work for

a whole chapter, which is 20 pages

long." But no doubt it'll get better and

better. But I still think I'm going to

cling on to the thing that makes me me.

>> For sure, 100%. And I think doing the

thinking, preparing your mind

in part, asking that question, which is

not an easy question, perhaps there's a

different way to phrase it, but like

what what are the things that make me

me? So you don't accidentally make

sacrifices that start to erode your

sense of self, [snorts] but also sense

of selfworth.