Michio Kaku Says AIs Like ChatGPT Are "Glorified Tape Recorders"

"This isn’t intelligence."

Tape Fear

Famed theoretical physicist Michio Kaku isn't buying all the doomsaying surrounding the purported dangers of AI.

In an interview with CNN, Kaku dismissed chatbots as "glorified tape recorders," arguing we're vastly overestimating their capabilities.

"It takes snippets of what’s on the web created by a human, splices them together and passes it off as if it created these things," he said. "And people are saying, 'Oh my God, it’s a human, it’s humanlike.'"

Kaku also took aim at chatbots' inability to tell truth from fiction, saying that small detail "has to be put in by a human."

It's not the first time he's made these kinds of comments.

"This isn’t intelligence," he told NBC back in May. "This is basically a sort of warped mirror of what’s on the internet for the last 20 years…designed to spit out things that seem plausible."

Doom and Gloom

It's a refreshing counternarrative to raging hype surrounding AI and its purported strengths and risks. For months, other experts have been ringing the alarm bells, some even saying that AI is coming for us all.

"I think we're not ready, I think we don't know what we're doing, and I think we're all going to die," said controversial AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky on an episode of the Bloomberg series "AI IRL" last month.

British computer scientist and "godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton also opined earlier this year that it's "not inconceivable" that AI could eventually wipe out humanity.

Yoshua Bengio, a famed computer scientist also known as a godfather of AI, told the BBC that "bad actors" could abuse AI earlier this year to do terrible harm.

Both Hinton and Bengio signed an open letter warning of the "risk of extinction" that AI poses.

AI Distraction

But to Kaku, these are simply misguided viewpoints that distract from an entirely different future, which is determined by quantum computing, not AI.

Humanity moved from the analog stage — "when we computed with sticks, stones, levers, gears, pulleys, string," he told CNN — to using microchips and electricity-powered transistors.

And a third stage in the quantum realm is on the horizon.

"Mother Nature would laugh at us because Mother Nature does not use zeros and ones," Kaku told CNN. "Mother Nature computes on electrons, electron waves, waves that create molecules. And that’s why we’re now entering stage three."

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