Perhaps you remember, but not too long after ChatGPT was first released to the public, I asked the large language model to do my job. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time toying with GPT, and, as of this spring, Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered Bing search engine.
I’ve been asking the same questions everyone else has: Whose jobs might get replaced? How can I use A.I. to be more efficient, or get better at what I do? I think I’m generally more excited about what A.I. models are quickly becoming capable of than many of my peers. But it’s also extraordinarily frightening: An A.I.-generated picture of the Pope went viral. A German magazine published an irresponsible, fake interview of Formula 1 world champion driver Michael Schumacher. A new song, seemingly from Drake but fabricated out of thin air, is raising all sorts of questions about the rights we have to our own voices.
But underneath the surface of all of this, I have found myself questioning an assumption I’ve made my whole life: that only humans can be creative. Many of us are asking ourselves questions we may not have asked for a while, or perhaps have never bothered to ask ourselves at all: What does it really mean to be human? What does it mean to be intelligent?
These kinds of questions—ones more likely to be found in a philosophy classroom or religious sermon than the workplace—are bubbling up all the way to the C-suite. Evernote cofounder Phil Libin was spot on when we told me over coffee last winter: 2023 will be the year “college philosophy majors will become employable.”
I sat down with one of the leading voices in A.I.—Microsoft’s chief scientific officer, Eric Horvitz—to ask him about intelligence and humanity. And we touched on so much more: The open letter asking companies like Microsoft to take a six-month pause on A.I. development, deep fakes, and whether large language models will be the building blocks for artificial general intelligence, or "AGI," for example.
Putting the full interview in this newsletter would have broken your inbox, so if you want to read our full conversation, you can do so here. Meanwhile, a small excerpt:
Term Sheet: These A.I. models are so powerful that they’re making us ask ourselves some really important underlying questions about what it means to be human, and what distinguishes us from machines as they get more and more capable. You’ve spoken before about music, and one of my colleagues pointed out to me a paper that you wrote about captions for New Yorker cartoons a few years ago. Throughout all of the research and time you’ve spent digging into artificial intelligence and the impact it could have on society, have you come to any personal realizations of what it is that distinctly makes us human, and what things could never be replaced by a machine?
Horvitz: My reaction is that almost everything about humanity won’t be replaced by machines. I mean, the way we feel and think, our consciousness, our need for one another—the need for human touch, and the presence of people in our lives. I think, to date, these systems are very good at synthesizing and taking what they’ve learned from humanity. They learn and they have become bright because they’re learning from human achievements. And while they could do amazing things, I haven’t seen incredible bursts of true genius that come from humanity.
I just think that the way to look at these systems is as ways to understand ourselves better. In some ways, we look at these systems and we think: Okay, what about my intellect and its evolution on the planet that makes me who I am—what might we learn from these systems to tell us more about some aspects of our own minds? They can light up our celebration of the more magical intellects that we are in some ways by seeing these systems huff and puff to do things that are sparking creativity once in a while.
Think about this: These models are trained for many months, with many machines, and using all of the digitized content they can get their hands on. And we watch a baby learning about the world, learning to walk, and learning to talk without all that machinery, without all that training data. And we know that there’s something very deeply mysterious about human minds. And I think we’re way off from understanding that. Thank goodness. I think we will be very distinct and different forever than the systems we create—as smart as they might become.
Read my full interview with Horvitz here.
Breaking bank news…Early this morning, JPMorgan Chase swooped in as the winning bidder in the FDIC's auction for troubled First Republic Bank and said it will acquire a "substantial majority" of First Republic's assets and assume all of its deposits. First Republic was closed this morning by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation and the FDIC has become receiver, making First Republic the third major bank to collapse since March, following in the footsteps of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature. Last week, First Republic disclosed in earnings that depositors had withdrawn $100 billion in assets since the collapse of SVB, and the FDIC worked over the weekend to run an auction before banks opened this morning.
Today, First Republic's 84 branches—32 of which are in San Francisco—will open as JPMorgan branches, and the FDIC said it has entered into a loss-share transaction with JPMorgan on the single-family, residential, and commercial loans JPMorgan has purchased from First Republic. JPMorgan disclosed this morning in an investor presentation that it is paying the FDIC $10.6 billion, but First Republic's failure is expected to cost the FDIC around $13 billion, the regulator said this morning.
And now for this month’s cartoon from Ian Foley…
A brief programming update…I am stepping away from Term Sheet for a few weeks to report out a feature story I’ve been working on. Don’t worry—I’ll be coming back once I finish it. In the meantime, I am leaving you in the more-than-capable hands of Anne Sraders, Lucy Brewster, and Jackson Fordyce. You’ll probably also see Luisa Beltran pop in here every once and a while, as you’ll be hard-pressed to find someone better suited for a rundown on what’s happening in the world of private equity. I could get all sentimental, but I’ll be back before you even notice I’m gone!
Until then,
Jessica Mathews
Twitter: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
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