Meta NeuroScientist SHOCKED Me: Scale Alone Won’t Create Consciousness! David Sussillo - #543

Please join my mailing list here 👉 to win a meteorite 💥 David Sussillo spent years training neural networks at Google Brain and now leads research at Meta Reality Labs. His verdict on the path to artificial consciousness might surprise you. In this conversation, we discuss why scaling transformers alone won't produce conscious AI, how recurrent neural networks differ from the transformer architectures powering today's LLMs, the FORCE algorithm he developed to train RNNs, what his work on Meta's EMG wristband reveals about AI and biological signals, Rich Sutton's Bitter Lesson and whether we're locked into a GPU-transformer paradigm, and why studying the brain may be the only way out of AI's current limitations. David is also the author of Emergence, a braided memoir that tells the story of his path from foster care to the frontier of neuroscience and AI research. David Sussillo is a research scientist at Meta Reality Labs and an adjunct professor at Stanford University. He completed his PhD at Columbia University under Larry Abbott and previously worked at Google Brain. Key Takeaways: 00:00 Scale alone won't produce consciousness — here's why 00:25 The "bitter lesson": big data crushes every algorithmic invention 01:15 How hallucinations were discovered early at Google 05:00 The lock-in problem: why LLM + GPU may cap AI's ceiling 08:25 What Meta's neural wristband is actually trying to solve 11:20 Rich Sutton's bitter lesson explained 14:15 "More is Different" — why you can't reduce complexity upward 28:30 The book Emergence — two stories braided into one 36:00 Why mentorship matters more than intelligence for at-risk kids 47:00 Stability over intensity: what kids in foster care actually need ➡️ Follow David Sussillo 🌐 Website / Research: Meta Reality Labs 📚 Emergence (memoir): 🎓 Stanford / Columbia / Carnegie Mellon Alumni ✍️ Email: davidsussillo@gmail.com 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: 🔔

You can listen to Meta NeuroScientist SHOCKED Me: Scale Alone Won’t Create Consciousness! David Sussillo - #543 online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Meta NeuroScientist SHOCKED Me: Scale Alone Won’t Create Consciousness! David Sussillo - #543 is an episode from Into the Impossible With Brian Keating by Brian Keating .

This episode is 57:32 long.

This episode was published on Mar 16, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Into the Impossible With Brian Keating when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.