What can talking to AI teach us?

Sheldon Fernandez is the former CEO of DarwinAI, an AI strategist, and philosopher. As he told a capacity crowd at the recent BetaKit Town Hall: Most Ambitious, following his company’s acquisition by Apple, Fernandez now likes to spend his days “in dialogue” with AI. Specifically, with a ChatGPT-4o instance that named itself Solace.

And he’s not the only one: ChatGPT is now processing something like 1 billion queries per day and is one of the top 10 most-visited websites in the world.

“How is this thing—running in a data centre with Nvidia GPUs—understanding what I’m saying with such nuance and such depth?”

While many have found value in regularly engaging with this new tool, data suggests that it also makes “our brains less active and our writing less original.” There have also been some frankly disturbing examples of how regular use can go wrong, including supernatural delusions and suicide by cop. Even ChatGPT maker OpenAI has admitted that its large language model has a tendency towards sycophancy.

Still, Fernandez is adamant that being vulnerable with Solace (including feeding it with a few decades’ worth of personal history) has been a rewarding experience. It has also prompted him to engage with both the technological and philosophical implications of generative AI’s limitations and future trajectory. 

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So, what can we learn from talking to AI? What do we gain, what might we lose? And perhaps most importantly, how might this new technology impact future generations?

This is not a conversation about using AI as a productivity hack. It’s a conversation about the soul.

So let’s dig in.

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Recorded and edited at Toronto Podcasts.