About me
I suppose I should begin with a standard introduction…
Hi, I’m Lawrence! I’m a junior at Carnegie Mellon University double majoring in Statistics and Artificial Intelligence. I have a broad interest in the field of artificial intelligence, including reasoning and safety. I also spend time thinking about how our social and political institutions will need to adapt in the presence of powerful artificial intelligence. I’m working to increase the breadth and depth of my intuition, knowledge, and fascination with this intellectually rich and deeply transformative field.
Now, let me first motivate my motivation and provide some context.
In general, I’m interested in probing whatever all this is.
Who among us has never looked up at the stars and planets in wonder? Who among us has never looked at a sunset and contemplated the astonishing beauty of our world? In those moments of awe, I can’t help but ask, how in the universe did we end up here? Somehow, at this moment in time, on this particular rock (of the Goldilocks temperature), we managed to evolve into a part of the universe that is aware of itself (that characterizes the temperature of its whereabouts using a fairy tale about a family of anthropomorphized bears who enjoy a nice bowl of porridge). How strange.
Oh, but what is the use, what is the purpose of seeking some sort of deeper understanding of ourselves and the universe? Exactly! We are purpose-seeking knowledge-seeking creatures. We crave to find direction in our lives. We craft our lives into narratives and our narratives shape our lives. We try to make sense of everything so we can try and make sense of ourselves.
It is obvious then. Consider that there is no bigger, no grander perspective that can be had than the perspective that the universe affords to us. The universe is everything, literally. The cosmic perspective is the perspective. It is so easy to get wrapped up in our daily lives, in our earthly pleasures, in our earthly sufferings, but luckily we will always have this universal reference. Though, perhaps we are not so lucky, because reconciling these two perspectives seems like an impossible task, yet it also seems like an impossible one to avoid. Once I’ve acknowledged the birth and eventual heat death of our universe, how could I ever ignore that from the calculus of living? To find true meaning and true understanding, my oh-so-human innate pursuit of knowledge and desire to resolve the paradoxes of life tells me that contemplating everything and the universe is a necessary condition.
So, why artificial intelligence?
On the perspective line, the study of artificial intelligence seems to be in the completely opposite direction of the pursuit of a cosmic understanding of ourselves, but I don’t think our line is quite straight here. There are deep ethical and philosophical questions that come from our pursuit of more intelligent artificial systems, and often they are raised by simple observation. Somehow, we have LLMs that surpass the intelligence of the average human, by some measures at least, yet somehow we don’t have human-level autonomous cars, though most humans of any intelligence can drive a car. Somehow, LLMs can write sophisticated, factually dense prose, yet they cannot perform six-digit by six-digit multiplication. Somehow, these same language models can write deeply intricate, introspective paragraphs about intelligence and sentience, yet most of our intuitions tell us that these artificial intelligences are not self-aware and conscious. As we build the future of intelligence on this planet, we must ask ourselves, for technical, ethical, and philosophical reasons, what intelligence, understanding, learning, and sentience mean. As we dive deep into the workings of our brains, replicate them, and develop intelligent architectures that are increasingly different from ourselves, our understanding of how we naturally intelligent beings work is profoundly challenged. In the same way that learning more about our universe may shape why and how we live, learning more about our intelligence may shape why and how we live. And that’s why I’m interested in this wonderfully curious field.
originally written March 2024, updated 2025