No Priors Ep. 1 | With Noam Brown, Research Scientist at Meta

AGI can beat top players in chess, poker, and, now, Diplomacy. In November 2022, a bot named Cicero demonstrated mastery in this game, which requires natural language negotiation and cooperation with humans. In short, Cicero can lie, scheme, build trust, pass as human, and ally with humans. So what does that mean for the future of AGI?

This week’s guest is research scientist Noam Brown. He co-created Cicero on the Meta Fundamental AI Research Team, and is considered one of the smartest engineers and researchers working in AI today.

Co-hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil talk to Noam about why all research should be high risk, high reward, the timeline until we have AGI agents negotiating with humans, why scaling isn’t the only path to breakthroughs in AI, and if the Turing Test is still relevant.

00:00 Introduction
01:43 What sparked Noam’s interest in researching AI that could defeat games
06:00 How the Alexa.NET and AlphaGo changed the landscape of AI research
08:09 Why Noam chose Diplomacy as the next game to work on after poker
09:51 What Diplomacy is and why the game was so challenging for an AI bot
14:50 Algorithmic breakthroughs and significance of AI bots that win in No-Limit Texas Hold'em poker
23:29 The Nash Equilibrium and optimal play in poker
24:53 How Cicero interacted with humans
27:58 The relevance and usefulness of the Turing Test
31:05 The data set used to train Cicero
31:54 Bottlenecks to AI researchers and challenges with scaling
40:10 The next frontier in researching games for AI
42:55 Domains that humans will still dominate and applications for AI bots in the real world
48:13 Reasoning challenges with AI