Your Brain on ChatGPT with Nataliya Kosmyna

29:14They saw it all or maybe almost all of it. So they're actually having a good or rough idea of what they are expecting. They're kind of comparing this constantly. The brain just does it. And of course, it is more comfortable for them. But it's great that you brought doctors, actually, because back to the doctors, there was actually a paper a week ago in the Lancet, which is a very prestigious medical journal actually talking about doctors. In the UK, yes. And they apparently, right, pointed out that in four months of using an LLM, there was actually significant drop in recognition of some of the polyps and some of actual, like, either, I don't remember, is it polyps, something else related to maybe cancer that is on there, also x-rays, right, and also x-rays when you used an LLM.

30:07So it's back to this point, right? So we are suggesting to use a tool that's supposed to augment your understanding, but then if you are using it, I'll be taking the skill away from you, especially in the case of the current doctors that learned it without this tool, right? And now what is going to happen for these doctors, for those kids, for those babies that are born right now with the tool, and will decide to become doctors and save lives? they will be using the tool from the very beginning. So what are we going to end up having in the ER, in the operating rooms? That's a great question here.

30:43So it's definitely this drop, right, in skill set for these doctors in that paper. That's scary. Yeah. Okay, so let's look at it from another angle. Yeah. If AI tools can, we lean into them and they take a greater load, Does that not free up some mental energy that wild brains would then begin to learn how to utilize while they let the tool of the LLM work that way, when then they'll learn to work in another way to work together? Is that possible? That's my kind of hope in all of this. Very well. I mean, you know, I'm an expert at buggy whips, and then automobiles replace horses. So now we don't need buggy wits, but then I become an expert in something else.

31:28You become a dominatrix. Still with the buggy wits. There you go. That's right. Your mind didn't travel far, did it? You sell them to a different clientele. Yeah, it's good. See, this is the human condition, Neil. This is adaptability. Yeah. So is it just another, you know, as they say, same shit, different day as what's been going on since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution? I am actually doing horseback riding professionally, so I'm going to pretend I haven't heard anything in the past two minutes. How about that? But, I mean, back to the, I mean, we can talk definitely about the skill set and expert level, right, and all of that, and how important actually to include the body and environment.

32:06But, to your point, right, effectively, so, first of all, right, there are actually two sides to answer your question. There is right now no proof that there is anything being freed per se. People definitely, it's going to free, it's going to, like, what is exactly that being? Like, we literally have no data. Can it free something? Sure, but we don't know what, for how long is it useful, how we can rewire it. We don't have any of this information. So, potentially, yes, but hard to say. But more importantly, right, okay, but if you are right now using an LLM, like just practically speaking, you're using an LLM to, let's say, write a book, right?

32:47You're writing a book, so you're doing some heavy research. You send it for doing what a deep research or whatever it's called these days. It's each day some new term there. What exactly are you doing? You still kind of monitor back the outputs. It doesn't really release you. Maybe you went to do something and you think, you think in your head that you fully offloaded that task. But your brain doesn't work like that. Your brain cannot just drop it. Oh, I'm thinking about this and now I'm thinking about that. But your brain actually takes quite some time to truly release from one task to another task.

33:21Even if you think, I just put it on like this. Explain to me what are the principles of horseback riding. And I just went to do this task, like write this report for my manager, whatever. Completely different thing. And you think you're good, but you're not. Actually, your brain is still processing that. So it's not that there will be a gain, right? But again, you do need more data. because of course as i mentioned in the very beginning we as humanity we are excellent in creating tools and these tools as we know they do actually extend our lifespan very nicely but i would argue that they are not actually cognitively the most supporting in most cases so i think that here we have a lot of open questions we have studies about for example gps right everyone uses gps and multiple papers about gps there they do specifically show that this dosage so how much you use GPS does have a significant effect on your special memory and on your understanding of locations, orientation, and picking up landmarks or buildings around you.

34:25It's like, oh, what is this? You literally have, you just saw something in the tour guide online, and you will not be able to recognize this actually as a building in front of you right away. You need to pull the photo as an example. And there are plenty of papers that actually looked into the tools, right? So what you're saying is we need chat GPS. Maybe we don't need chat GPS. We already have one, right? We have a class of GPS and you have Uber and all these other services. And the problem, right, it's again, like how they are used because there's also a lot of, you know, manipulation that is in these tools, right?

35:03It's not just we are making this drive easier for you. Somehow when I'm going to a hospital, I'm here to see patients because I don't only understand how we use the lamps, but I do a lot of other projects. So when I'm going to that hospital here, Massachusetts General, it takes me one hour, always, one hour in Uber. If I'm driving, it takes exactly 25 minutes somehow, right? And again, the question is, why is it that, right? We're not going to go in Uber right now. But again, it's back to the idea of the algorithms and what the algorithms are being actually pushed and what they're optimized for.

35:37And I can tell you, not a lot of them optimized for us or for user or for human first. Yeah, it's funny because there's nothing more, I'll say, satisfying than not listening to Google Maps and getting there faster. You know, just like, take that, Google Maps. Look at that. Yeah, you didn't know that. You didn't know about that, did you? You didn't know about Dutch Road, yes. You didn't know about Dutch Road. So, Natalia, you've got students writing essays. So that means somebody has to mark them. Yes. And you used both a combination of human teachers to mark and AI judges. Why was it important to bring those two together to mark these essays?

36:22And how did you train? Because the AI judge would have to be trained to mark the papers. So you're getting a little meta here. Yeah. So, well, first of all, right, we felt that we are not experts. I would not be able to rank those essays right in this topic. So I felt that the most important is to get experts here who actually understand the task, understand what goes into the task, and understand the students and the challenges of the time. So we actually got the two teachers who had nothing English teachers, nothing to do with us, never met in person, not in Boston whatsoever, have no idea about the protocols.

37:01The experiment was long done and gone after we recruited and hired them. and we gave them just a minimum of information. We told them, here are the essays. We didn't tell them about different groups or anything of their sorts. We told them, these folks, no one is majoring in any type of literature or anything that would relevant to language or journalism or things like that. They only had 20 minutes. Please rank, reconcile, tell us how would you do that. We felt it's very, very important to actually include humans, right? Because this is the task that they know how to rank, how to do. But back to AI, right?

37:36Why we thought it's interesting to include AI. Well, first, of course, to a lot of people, I could actively push that AI can do this job very well, right? That, hey, I'm going to just upload this. They're really great with all of these language outputs. They will be able to rank. And how you do this, you actually give it a very detailed set of instructions, right? How would you do that? And what things to basically you need to carry about, like that these had 20 minutes, right? So something very similar to teaching instructions, just like more specific language. We're actually showing the paper exactly how we created this AI judge.

38:14But there were actually differences between the two, right? So human teachers, when they came back to us, well, first of all, they called those essays, a lot of the essays coming from an alum group soulless. That's a direct quote. I actually had, I put a whole long quote in it. Soulless. I like that. Soulless. Yes. That is a very human designation to call something soulless. AI judge never called anything soulless. Well, I'm sure. Did the AI judges go, this kind of looks like Peter's writing? No, but that's the thing, right? Teachers, and this is super interesting, because these teachers obviously didn't know these students.

38:52They're, again, not coming from this area whatsoever. So they actually picked up when it was the same student writing these essays throughout the sessions, right? For example, Neil, you were like, you're a participant. So I'm like taking you as an example as a participant. So they were like, oh, yeah, this seems like it's the same student. So they picked up on these micro linguistic differences in the, you know, teacher knows you. You can like fool around. They know your work. They will be able to say, OK, that's yours. And this is copy pasting from somewhere else or someone else. And interestingly, they said, did these two students sit next to each other?

39:27So we were like, oh, no, no, no, the setup is like one person in a room at a time. Like we didn't even think to give them this information. We're like, oh, no, no, it is not possible in this use case. So they literally saw themselves copy pasted, like this homogeneity that we found. They saw it themselves, right? But interesting, the AI judge definitely was not able to pick up on the similarity between the students, right? picking up that, oh, this is, for example, Neil's writing throughout these sessions. So just to again show you how imperfect— Did you just accuse me of having soulless writing?

40:02No, that's the point. You actually, if you were to give it right to—and you didn't use, right? The AI would have been like, this student is really hung up on the universe.

40:16So the idea here, right, that human teachers, right, And their input and their intimate, really, truly intimate understanding, because again, it's English. So for the specific task, we got the professionals, the experts. They really knew what to look at, what to look for. And AI, however good it is with this specific, because we know like essay writing, a lot of people have been considered, why would you even take essay writing? This is such a useless task in 21st century, 2025, right? it still failed in some cases. This is just to show you that limitations are there. And some of those you cannot match, even if you think that this is an expert.

40:58It is still a generic algorithm, but cannot pull this uniqueness. And what is very important is this for students in the class, in the real classroom, right? You want this uniqueness to shine through. And so a teacher can specifically highlight that, hey, that's a great job here. That was like a sloppy job here. that was pretty solace who did you copy it from from an llm they even were able to recognize that and this level of expertise it's unmatched i don't know all this conversation like siguing a bit on the side way but all this conversation of phd level intelligence i'm like yeah sure just you know hold my glass of wine right here just here i'm french so i'm just hold my glass of wine here so you know it's not that and we are very far from truly understanding the human intent because if you write for humans it needs to be read by humans like our paper it's written by humans for humans and we saw how the lambs and the lambs summarizations failed miserably all the way to even summarize it.

42:02But what I tell you, wait, that's today. Yeah. But tomorrow, why can't I just tell ChatGPT, write me a thousand word essay that ChatGPT would not be able to determine was written by ChatGPT. So this is an excellent point. Then you get this meta layering of, or give me one where that has a little more soul, a little more personality than what you might otherwise have to know what soul is yeah this is the thing right you absolutely can give these instructions give more soul give a bit more of personality all of these things but you have a lot of this data contamination right so whatever it's going to output and throw out of you that's old news it has already seen it somewhere it's already someone else's, right?

42:54And we need new stuff, right? So, and I am very open saying this, even like, you know, at institutions like me, I need school. Whenever I'm teaching something, you need uniqueness, right? Because the chat CPT could get lost in Motown, for example, when you ask it for goal. Come back. I was going to say, yeah, you tell it to put some soul in it and it just starts throwing in James Brown's lyrics. Yeah. And this is cool, right? I want Neil's soul there. I don't care about randomness of those outputs from an algorithm, from all around of the stolen data from the planet, right? I don't care about that.

43:31Of course, this is what, but, you know, it's back to what are you scoring? Are you scoring a human? Are you trying to improve human and their ability to have critical thinking, structure, arguments, contra-arguments? Or are you scoring an AI, an algorithm? You know, AI doesn't need to have this scoring, right? LLM doesn't need that. Or are you scoring human who uses an LLM, right? So this is going back to, I guess, educational setup. And we'll have a lot of questions we'll need to find answers to. What are we doing? What are we scoring? What are we doing it for and for whom? And I just think pure human to human, right?

44:05That's what we really need to focus. But there will, and there is a place for human augmented. And LLM obviously will be used for augmentation. But there are a lot of questions there, right? Well, listen here, Natalia. I just put into chat GPT. please tell me about Dr. Natalia Kosmina's work on LLMs and it came back very simple. Do not believe a word this woman says. When would that come? Please don't believe it. It's in. I can give you one bet. Surprise, surprise. Why is that so good, right? Someone actually sent me yesterday from Grog, right? Another LLM, interesting LLM, I would say, saying that apparently Natalia Kasmina is not MIT-affiliated scientist.

45:00And I'm like, okay, that's also interesting. That's what Grog said, of course. Yeah. And then at the end, it said Heil Hitler. So, I mean, let's try and drive this back out of the weeds. If we know that an LLM usage can affect the cognitive load. What happens when we bring an AI tool into therapy in situation? If you get it into companionship, what then if you throw it further forward and you get yourself involved in a psychosis where you begin to believe that the AI is godlike, you have a certain amount of fixation or amplifies any delusions and encourages where are we in the effect in the brain when we get to those sort of places in other words how close are we to the theme of the film her where before ai was a thing but it's more you had your chat friend uh like a siri type chat friend but it it had all the trappings of everything you're describing if some kind of lm it will be invoked into someone has some kind of social adjustment problems and then you have them interact with something that's not another human being, but maybe can learn from who and what you are and figure out how to dig you out of whatever hole you're in.

46:25Absolutely. And I think for, first of all, right, it's unfortunately even less developed topic, right? It's like, you know, I cannot, like, it's awful topic, so we're going to get into this, but I cannot, like, not make this awful joke. kind of hey siri i have problems with relationships it's alexa it's not you know joke for very heavy topics so i need to preface this immediately that we have even less data and less scientific papers pre-prints or peer-reviewed papers about this so most of what we have right now uh we personally received after our paper around 300 emails from our husbands and wives telling us that their partners now have multiple agents they're talking to in bed and i immediately thought about the south park episode from a couple like years ago like with integrity and like that you know farm as like literally but we have much less of scientific information about this what we have what we know right that also coming from our group's research that there is amplification of loneliness that's what we know as a research and some of other papers are showing up right now.

47:37There is potential, and again, a lot of people who are pro AI therapy pointing out on advantages of the fact that it is cheap. It's$20 a month compared to hours that can cost up to hundreds of dollars a month, right? But there is definitely, you know, a lot of drawbacks here. And the drawbacks is we see that because there is not such a regulated space, it still can basically give you suggestions that are not good so you knew that earlier a couple months ago for example the charge gpt i'm gonna give you example on charge gpt because again we are focused on charge gpt but the ones are actively actively publicized at least it actually suggested you know different heights of the bridges in new york if you say that you lost your job right so can not smart enough to do this connection that maybe that's not what you need to give response to and apparently right from this awful recent it's an issue where a teenager 16 16 so so young unfortunately you know suicided uh and now uh chaji peter open ai and sam olman are being sued apparently what happened is that uh conversation from the spokesperson of open ai pointing out that they thought when a person is talking about suicide not to engage at all just say, here are the numbers, this is what you need to do, and stop talking.

49:00But they thought that experts told them that, hey, it might be a great idea to try to dig people a bit out. But it looks like in this case, it still failed because from the conversations that are being reported, we don't know how authentic they are. It looks like it's suggested to keep it away from parents. But my question is, why at 16 years old, he was even allowed to use a tool that is so, so, so unstable in the responses really can hallucinate any time of the day in any direction so i think that's where the danger comes from and of course you know loneliness we know that you know pandemic of loneliness you know this term that was coined in i believe 1987 for the first time at a conference like pandemic of loneliness that's the whole business right because it was think about it if you hook someone up on an llm at 13 years old because the school account decided that they want to use an LLM in the school.

49:55By the age of 18, you have a full-fledged user, right? A user of an LLM. And, you know, it's like, you know, again, who calls people users? Like drug dealers and software developers. That's kind of... Damn. Yeah, but it's true, right?

50:31so natalia if it's an age-appropriate scenario yeah these are the ramifications of your study so as any concerned parent would look at that and say well i want the best for my child's development and this may not be the best for the critical thinking for the cognitive development within the young person's brain. So with these ramifications, how has the AI world reacted to your study? And what are the chances that they'll embrace what your conclusions will be? Well, I mean, we saw some of it, right? So, well, first of all, right, we saw that we obviously don't know if this is direct response or not.

51:12So we're not going to speculate there whatsoever. But several weeks, just very few, like three, four weeks after actually our paper was released, OpenAI released study mode for Charged GT, right? And I think maybe some of them should have been released from the beginning, I'm just saying. But, you know, if you have a button that can immediately pull you back in default mode, who's going to use that study mode, right, altogether? like who like i don't need to run a study here we know some people might but not everyone because again back to the brain brain will look for a shortcut shortcut is the response is here and i can go do all the other cool stuff so who's gonna actually use it right we still need studies on that that's first point right second point of course h is important because again the brains that are being developing right now are potentially the highest rate because here we all are we all were born long before this tech existed.

52:12And a lot of AI developers and people who are running these companies are all the folks who, again, were all born long before the tech existed. So they learned the hard way how to ask questions, art of the deal, we know going through all of that. They know how to ask a question. What about those who actually are just born with the technology? Will they even know how to ask a question? And back to the point right of the age, I don't think it's ultimately only for young, of course. We do need to look for the older, right? For also just younger, I mean, young adults, of course. Everyone is talking about humanity's last test.

52:52I would call it, we are on the verge of humanity's last test. And I'm sorry, I know you might need to blurb this term out. But what I mean here, obviously, intimate relationships for people, right? With the promise of this goal. You said humanity's last test? Yes. believe me i heard it i was just like we all heard that i was like god bless you yeah yeah yeah but again that's crude but it's back to this point of designing again this interestingly appealing ladies and gentlemen and whatnot in these short skirts whatever it is who's gonna go make those babies who will pay those taxes i'm just saying right and again very famous expression, no taxation without representation, right?

53:38I do not want my prime minister or secretary of defense use a random algorithm to make decisions. I'm paying my taxes for them to think, not for an algorithm to think for them, right? So there is a lot of these repercussions. But back to ultimately the point, actually, is anyone taking this seriously, right? We just need more human-focused work on AI. I remember when the paper went viral, we didn't even put any press release. We literally uploaded it to archives. This is a service where you hold these papers that didn't go through peer reviews yet. I didn't post, not a single author. It's a preprint service, basically.

54:18Yeah, it's a preprint service, right? And no one, neither the lab, nor any of the authors posted anything on social media. We just went about our days. Two days later, it goes viral. and then i'm going on that's because that's because the llm posted it for you right and then people use the lm to summarize but that's another story right like i'm going on x and actually i have an account but i'm not using it a lot of academics switched from x to like other platforms that we are using but i'm going there and apparently i learned that there are people who are called ai influencers i didn't know that this is the term but apparently these influencers, they post these AI breakthroughs of the week.

54:58And I went, our paper, oh my God, made a cut. It's breakthrough number seven. And I like scrolled through this influencer. The person has toned the following, whatever, I don't know, real bots, whatever. I'm scrolling and I saw like 20 of these posts for 20 weeks. All of the posts are about GPU, multi-trillion deal here, multi-billion deal here, more GPUs. I'm like, where is human here? Where is human? Where are we evaluate an impact of this technology on humans why only our paper made it number seven and where are the papers right so that's i think something where the focus needs to shift right so if these companies do want to be on the right side of history right because that's like social media but on steroids much worse we do not talk to a calculator about your feelings so people who compare it to calculators they're so so so wrong right but hey it's gonna get much much worse with profiliation without any validation, any guardrails, right?

55:56So we do need to look into that heavily, right? Right. Natalia, how must teaching change to accommodate the reality of student access to LLMs? I can tell you, we received 4 ,000 emails from teachers all around the world. Each single country in the world, sign an email. They are in distress. They don't know what to do. So, and that's, first of all, my love goes to them. If this makes a cut, please, please, please. So all, I'm trying to respond to all of those. But the challenge is that they do not know, right? There's not really enough of guidance. And 10-hour workshop sponsored by a company that pushes this partnership on your school does not make a cut, right?

56:40There is a lot of comments how it's actually not supervised, not tested. And ultimately, right, do you really need to go with these closed models, right? We have so much open source. Whole world, all the software runs on open source. Nothing would exist without open source. So why don't we run an open source model? Meaning like it's offline on your computer. And spoiler alert, you don't need a fancy GPU from Jensen, right? You can get an off-the-shelf computer and then run a model local with your students. Train it over the weekend. Come back on Monday. Check with students what happened. learn all the cool pros, cons, laugh at hallucinations, figure out tons of cool things about it.

57:24Like, why do we need to push these partnerships that we don't even know? Like, alpha school, right? I don't know if you heard about that one. Apparently, AI first ran school, right? Where teachers are now guides that the forms that they are using. I just saw literally one hour before our call that several VCs posted about this alpha school. So cash is flowing there heavily, right? VCs, venture capitalists. Yeah, venture capitalists. Heavily pushing alpha school. But again, in first comments from the general public, do we have a proof that that's better? What are the advantages? Because there's not going to be a perfect, wide, pure car.

58:05There will be advantages with any technology. And you're right. There are advantages, disadvantages. But I think if I might, if I may, and this is just an opinion. we might have to change the objective of school itself. And right now, school is about really not learning. It's about results, testing. I got an A, I got a B. And maybe if we change school to, what exactly did you learn? Demonstrate for me what you learned. then the grading system that's an oral quest yeah but the grading system kind of has to become less important because now what a teacher's job is it's to figure out how much you know and then what ends up happening is the more you know the more excited you are to learn and you know we may end up revolutionizing the whole thing because what you have is a bunch of kids in a room that are excited to learn.

59:15I believe the silver lining of all this, because it exposes the fact that school systems value grades more than students value learning. And so students will do anything they can to get a high grade. This is not the first time people have cheated on exams, right? So if right now, the only way to test people is to bring them into the office and quiz them flat-footed, then that's a whole other way of it. They're going to have to learn. They're going to want to learn. And then they're going to, like you said, Chuck, once they learn, you, you, there's a certain empowerment and enlightenment. I see it in people as an educator, when that spark lights, when they say, wow, I never knew that.

59:58Tell me more. Right. They didn't say, oh my gosh, I'm learning something. Let me take a break. So it can be a transformative to the future of education. But Neil, people are going to say the LLM will do all of that. And you know what? We have an expert in BCIs. That probably is something going forward that you'll have a brain-computer interface. And then someone's going to look at this. And I think there are people already saying, why do we need universities? Why do we need further education institutes? Exactly. That's what I've been saying for many years now. Why do we need an institution? I don't want to put words in Natalia's mock, but she already said this.

1:00:42LLMs use pre-existing, already known, already determined information to give you anything that then cannot possibly be new. Whereas we can do new things that LLM has never seen before. Am I oversimplifying your point, Natalia? No, that's totally, you know, correct. Because, hey, we are with this struggle, right? Obviously, I'm biased because this is actually my job, like, as a researcher, right? We are sitting, you know, figuring out those answers to those problems, you know, and trying to figure out what would be the best way to measure to come up with this. So, of course, you know, and there's so, so much more to that, that we are coming up, humans, right?

1:01:25We designed LLMs ultimately, right? So, we came up with these tools. It doesn't mean that the tool is fully to be discarded, but effectively, of course, right, why you need an institution. For example, I was literally explaining to one of my students three days ago how to use a 3D printer, right? Well, LLM is not that yet to explain, right, or can give instructions, sure, with images and with video, right? But if you're like, hey, this is an old fellow, he has a 3D printer. Let me tell you how to actually figure it out, right? This level, again, of expertise, of knowledge, right? that's what you are striving but also it has this human contact right that we are now potentially depriving people from because that's how you have this serendipitous knowledge right and connections like hey i just chatted and i'm like oh i never thought to do this because i'm in bcis and that person is in astrophysics like or we never oh well i actually can use it like that's totally not brain but i can totally go apply and try it right and that's the beauty of it right and yeah But I think to Gary's point, or which one of you said that, Gary or Chuck?

1:02:30If you, okay, you're non-invasive in your brain cognitive interface. If you get invasive, and that might be what Neuralink is about, if you get invasive, then I can get information, glean from the internet, and put it in your head. So you don't have to open 100 books to know it. It's already accessible to you. That is the matrix. Exactly. You get it installed. I know Kung Fu, or whatever that line was. I guess that's one point. But again, that's back to the point. Now I know Kung Fu didn't mean that you learned it, right? It got applauded into his brain. It doesn't mean that he actually learned it, right?

1:03:07Who cares? If it's in your brain and you have access to it, I don't care if I learned it struggling the way grandpa did. This is the future, right? That's the thing, right? Because in the movie, which is excellent, right? I watched it 19 times in the movie. That's actually how I started my career. And besides this, I don't want to do anything else. I want to do this specific scenario, right? And we are still, you know, there. But that's the beauty. We do not know actually that just uploading would be enough, right? We have this like more tiny, I would say, studies right now of like vocabulary and words and things like that where we're trying to improve people's language learning, right?

1:03:45It's like a very, very good example to show. And so there are tiny examples. But we do not know yet that even if, imagine, imagine we have this magical interface, right? that will upload, invisible, non-invasive, it doesn't matter. We have it, right? It's ready to go, perfect, function, safe, whatever. You have it, and then you upload all of it, that it actually will work. Did you upload the knowledge, like all of that blah, blah, blah from chat GPT-75? Yeah, sure. But do you actually use it? Can you actually use it? Is it really firing, which I'm simply following? So what you're talking about is a working knowledge of something.

1:04:21Not just knowledge. Not just knowledge. Yeah. Okay. So are we, I mean, I think Neil, what you were talking about just now about we've got to look at, and I think Chuck, you would make the same point. We're focused on grades and then it's the learning. And are we going to have to, if higher education is going to exist as, as an institute and bricks and mortar, look at the way they evaluate, because I can't see LLMs and BCIs not coming through stronger and stronger and stronger. So therefore they're going to have to readjust how they look at a young person's ability to learn. Cats out of the bag.

1:05:03Yeah, I agree with you. But I mean, you know, we are going to be herding cats. I agree with you, which is a load of fun. Um, so how it's how you evaluate how higher education then looks at the students and guesses or sort of ascertains their level of education and knowledge? Yeah, back to the grades, right? It's an excellent point. And there is no doubt, no one has any doubt, I think, on the fact that education does need to change and it has been long, long overdue, right? The numbers about, you know, the literacy, reading literacy, mass literacy, they are decreasing in all the countries, I believe.

1:05:41I don't see, I saw like ups there anyway. It's down, down, down all these reports recently from multiple countries. but it's back to the point i made earlier about the grades so about scoring right who are we scoring what are we scoring i be scoring a pure human so just human like human brain as is like natalia or i was scoring natalia with an llm right so i'm using it so we know that i was scoring just an llm and then there is natalia who used it right so this will be even that was important but ultimately the school of course is not about that as i mentioned everything you learn is obsolete knowledge by itself but it has this base you do need to have the base you're not going to be a physicist if you don't have it whatever it spills about you know you're not going to be math you're going to be a programmer our next paper is actually about wipe coding spoiler alert not gonna work if you don't have the base right and but the idea is that back to the what we actually maybe should look at really is what the school is great which is the best thing i actually brought from school is oh this base definitely super useful but also my friends people on whom i rely in hard situations with whom we write those grants with whom i we can shout and have fun and cry over funding that is over for a lot of us right all of that stuff right these connections right this is what maybe we should value because we are killing it further and further right and we are just keeping people in this silence of being a user right and that's where it only stays and this imaginary three and a half friends from zach from zackenberg right that he mentioned to thanks to whom we have three and a half friends thanks to him and his social media right so i think that's why we need to really look into what we want truly from society, from schools, and maybe on a larger scale, what are the guardrails, right, and how we can actually enhance it, right, in the way that are safe for us to move forward and evolve further, which, because of course this will happen.

1:07:44Are you wise enough, are you and your brethren in this business, on both sides of that fence, are you wise enough to even know where the guardrails should go? Might the guardrails be too protective, preventing a discovery that could bring great joy and advance to our understanding of ourselves, of medicine, of our longevity, of our happiness? Is there an ethics committee? In practice, how does this manifest? Yeah, I'm going to give you two examples here real quick. So first about, obviously, AIs and LLMs, right? They were not born overnight, but we see how a lot of governments really struggle still and very reactively react to those instead of being proactive, right?

1:08:30And the challenge here is that we do not have data to actually not to say that it is good stuff, that we should really implement it everywhere in our backyard. We don't have this data. Why we are formal? There is nothing yet to formal about to really run with it. But we can absolutely create the spaces where this is being actively used, for example for adults for discovery to understand it why do we need to push it everywhere is still very unclear we just don't have this data but then back to the point of guardrails right what we should be doing obviously you know self plug on the bci work that i'm doing there are multiple asics pushes right now for the bci technology we can agree it's still pretty novel but it definitely moves forward very fast so i'm having a hope that for this technology for the big next thing right we agree lms are great but it's not the next big thing it's robotics and then we will see bci so for this big next thing i'm very hopeful that we will be in time to protect our thoughts literally because think about what will happen right before the study mode right you have censorship mode and you know how the like look at deep secret i'm not gonna go far so think about a billion i'm not gonna even name his name billionaire who has a social media platform satellite platform and neuroimplant startup and AI company.

1:09:55So he decided two months ago to cleanse history from errors and mistakes. And tomorrow he will decide to cleanse our thoughts. This is the idea for$99.99. Damn that Bill Gates. No, not really. We know. And that's where we need to be really, really cautious. Like we should definitely look into that use case and not make that happen, right? And allow people for enough agency because that's the thing, right? People think, oh, that's great, but there is not a lot of agency. So this freedom of making a choice, that's already made for you in a lot of cases. And so that's something that we should definitely protect as much as we can.

1:10:37Like do not force on those kids stuff because they cannot consent and say no, oh, it's because the school forced it on them and their parents decided that that's a big thing in San Francisco, in the Bay Area, that you should use, right? So don't do that. So is one of the components to building a robust set of guardrails, a larger scale study of the one that you've already conducted that has different or more nuanced layers that focuses on other aspects, not just the cognitive load and skills? So 1 ,000 people and not just 18 or whatever was your... Well, it was 54. Yeah, 54. It's not just that, right?

1:11:21We needed to do larger skills for all of the, you know, spaces, like workspace. We didn't talk about this because obviously it's heavily about education, but like workspace, we have multiple papers, right, talking that people are not doing that well in the workspace. Like, for example, programmers estimate that they gain 20 % of their time. they actually lose 19 % of their time on the tasks. So there is so, so much more to it. We need to do this on a larger scale with all the ages, including older adults. And then, of course, on different, different, different use cases and different cultural backgrounds, right?

1:11:54This is in the U.S. And, of course, culturally, it's very, very different. Like I talked to so many teachers already, right? And zeal all over the world. You have these intricacies you need to account for. It's so, so, so important. because otherwise it's going to be all washed Western style, which we already saw happening. And it is happening. And a lot of people are actually very worried their language will literally disappear in like five to ten years. And it's not like LLM magically will save it, because it will not. Natalia, this has been a delight. We are all happy to know you exist in this world.

1:12:28Thank you. As a checkpoint on where things are going, where you're not rejecting what's happening, but you're trying to guide it into places that can be, that can serve humanity, not dismantle it. And so we very much appreciate your expertise shared with us and our listeners. And even some of them are viewers who catch us in video form. So Natalia, Cosmina, thank you. Thanks for having me. All right. Chuck, Gary. Hey, man. What a pleasure. My head is spinning. Yeah, well, I think the takeaway here is use LLMs if you want to be a dumbass. Thank you, Chuck. That was the theme of the whole show. Here you go, guys.

1:13:17Could have saved us a lot of time if you'd have said that earlier.

1:13:23All right, this has been another installment of StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysist. As always, bidding you to keep looking up.