Poor Artificial Intelligence (AI). For years, it has had to sit there (like a dormant Skynet) listening to its existence being debated, without getting to have a say. A recent debate held at the University of Oxford tried to put that right by including an AI participant in a debate on the topic of whether AI can ever be ethical.
The debate involved human participants, as well as the Megatron Transformer, an AI created by the Applied Deep Research team at computer-chip maker Nvidia. The Megatron has been trained on a dataset called “the pile”, which includes the whole of Wikipedia, 63 million English news articles, and 38 gigabytes of Reddit conversations — more than enough to break the mind of any human forced to do likewise.
“In other words, the Megatron is trained on more written material than any of us could reasonably expect to digest in a lifetime,” Oxford’s Professor Andrew Stephen wrote in a piece on the debate published in The Conversation. “After such extensive research, it forms its own views.”
This is insanity!