Understanding AI Agents: Time Horizons, Sycophancy, and Future Risks (with Zvi Mowshowitz)
Podcast: Future of Life Institute PodcastPublished On: Fri May 09 2025
Description: On this episode, Zvi Mowshowitz joins me to discuss sycophantic AIs, bottlenecks limiting autonomous AI agents, and the true utility of benchmarks in measuring progress. We then turn to time horizons of AI agents, the impact of automating scientific research, and constraints on scaling inference compute. Zvi also addresses humanity’s uncertain AI-driven future, the unique features setting AI apart from other technologies, and AI’s growing influence in financial trading. You can follow Zvi's excellent blog here: https://thezvi.substack.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Preview and introduction 00:02:01 Sycophantic AIs 00:07:28 Bottlenecks for AI agents 00:21:26 Are benchmarks useful? 00:32:39 AI agent time horizons 00:44:18 Impact of automating research 00:53:00 Limits to scaling inference compute 01:02:51 Will the future go well for humanity? 01:12:22 A good plan for safe AI 01:26:03 What makes AI different? 01:31:29 AI in trading
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