YouSaid · the spoken record

Guillaume Verdon

lines on the record: 167
first: 2023-12-29
most recent: 2023-12-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Do a lot potentially. But between here and there, I think there's a lot to learn in the mesoscales. There's a lot of information to acquire about our world and a lot of engineering, perception, prediction, and control to be done to climb up the Cardiff scale. And to us, that's the great challenge of our times.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we seek just like an LM seeks to minimize cross-entropy between its internal model and the world. We seek to minimize The statistical divergence between our predictions and the world itself and having regimes of energy scales or physical scales in which we have no visibility, no ability to predict or perceive, that's kind of an insult to us. And we want to be able to understand the world better in order to best steer it or steer us through it. And in general, it's the capability that has evolved because the better you can predict the world, the better you can capture utility or free energy towards your own sustenance and growth. And I think quantum gravity, again, is kind of the final boss in terms of knowledge acquisition because once we've mastered that, then we can”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you get into the anthropic principle in the landscape of potential universes, right? We're in the universe that allows for life. And then why is there potentially many universes? I don't know. I don't know that part, but could we potentially engineer new universes or create pocket universes and set the hyperparameters so there is some mutual information between our existence and that universe and we'd be somewhat its parents. I think that's really, I don't know, that'd be very poetic. It's purely conjecture. But again, this is why figuring out quantum gravity would allow us to understand if we can do that.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The why well the why is thermodynamics. It's why we're here. It's what has led to the formation of life and of civilization, of evolution of technologies and growth of civilization. But why do we have thermodynamics? Why do we have our particular universe? Why do we have these particular hyperparameters, the constants of nature?”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think I'm sure there's going to be better versions of myself in the future or forks, right? Genetic forks or other believe that. I think there's a sort of evolutionary algorithm happening at every bit or not in the world is sort of adapting through this. Process that we describe in EAC, and I think maintaining this adaptation malleability is how we have constant optimization of the whole machine. And so I don't think I'm particularly an optimum that needs to stick around forever. I think there's going to be greater optima in many ways.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um, I think I have ideas and things I'd like to achieve in this world before I have to go, but I don't think I'm necessarily afraid of death.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They become not as optimal, not as high fitness in a changing, time-varying landscape, right? And so death gives space for youth and novelty to take its place. And I think it's an important part of every system in nature. So, yeah, I am for death, but I do think that longer lifespan and longer time for neuroplasticity, bigger brains, which should be something we should strive for.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that we should probably extend our lifespan because we need a longer period of training because the world is more and more complex, right? We have more and more data to really be able to predict and understand the world. And if we have a finite window of higher neuroplasticity, then we have sort of a hard cap and how much we can understand about our world. So I think I am for death because again, I think it's important if you have like a king that would never die, that would be a problem, right? The system wouldn't be constantly adapting, right? You need novelty, you need youth, you need disruption to make sure the system is always adapting and malleable. Otherwise, if things are immortal, you know, if you have, let's say, corporations that are there forever and they have the monopoly, they get calcified.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. I think fundamentally in thermodynamic dissipative adaptation, there's the word dissipation. Dissipation is important. Death is important, right? We have a saying in physics, physics progresses one funeral at a time. Think the same is true for capitalism companies, empires, people, everything. Everything must die at some point.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. And you'd be surprised once you've learned concepts in many physical scenarios how they can carry over to understanding other systems that are necessarily physics. And I guess the EAC writings, you know, the principles and tenet posts that was based on physics, that was kind of my experimentation with applying some of the thinking from out of equilberum thermodynamics to understanding the world around us. And it's led to EAC and this movement.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right, because the base of the stack doesn't change. Everything else, your knowledge might become not as relevant in a few years. Of course, there's a sort of transfer learning you can do, but then you have to always transfer learn constantly.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think to me the reason I went to theoretical physics was that I had to learn the base of the stack that was going to stick around no matter How the technology changes, right? And to me, that was the foundation upon which then I later built engineering skills and other skills. And to me, the laws of physics, you know, it may seem like the landscape right now is changing so fast that it's disorienting. But certain things like fundamental mathematics and physics aren't going to change. And if you have that knowledge and knowledge about complex systems and adaptive systems, I think that's going to carry you very far. And so not everybody has to study mathematics, but I think it's really a huge cognitive unlock to learn math and some physics and engineering.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's fun. It's like writing an essay and taking a position, right? It's like you do this in debate. It's like you can have experimental thoughts And by having the stakes being so low because you're an an on account with, I don't know, 20 followers or something, you can experiment with your thoughts in a low-stakes environment. And I feel like we've lost that in the era of everything being under your main name, everything being attributable to you. People just are afraid to speak, explore ideas that aren't fully formed, right? And I feel like we've lost something there. So I hope, you know, platforms like X and others really help support people trying to stay pseudonymous or anonymous because it's really important for people to share thoughts that aren't fully formed and converge onto maybe hidden truths that were hard to converge upon if it was just through open conversation with real names.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was interesting in the early days. I think in the early days, I thought it was truly compartmentalized, like, oh, yeah, this is a character. You know, I'm Guillaume. Buff is just the character. I like take my thoughts and then I extrapolate them to a bit more extreme. Over time, it's kind of like both identities were starting to merge mentally and people were like, no, you are, I met you, you are Beth. You are not just Guillaume. And I was like, wait, am I? And now it's like fully merged. But it was already before the docs was already starting mentally that, you know, I am this character. It's part of me.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lifting. If you're going to get under 500 pounds and it could crush you, if you don't have that switch to be wired in, you might die. So that'll wake you right up. And that sort of skill I've carried over to like research when it's go time, when the stakes are high, somehow I just reach another level of neural performance.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, just hype, but I'm like hyping myself up, but then I just tweet about it. And it's just when I'm trying to get really hyped up and like an altered state of consciousness where I'm like ultra focused in the flow wired, trying to invent something that's never existed, I need to get to like unreal levels of like excitement. But your brain has these levels of Cognition that you can unlock with higher levels of adrenaline and whatnot. And I mean, I've learned that in powerlifting, that actually you can engineer a mental switch to increase your strength, right? Like if you can engineer a switch, maybe you have a prompt, like a certain song or some music where suddenly you're fully primed, then you're at maximum strength, right? And I've engineered that switch through years of”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you follow your curiosity, you're always going to be interested. And so I advise people to follow their curiosity and don't respect the boundaries of certain fields or what you've been allocated in terms of lane of what you're working on. Just go out and explore and follow your nose and try to acquire and compress as much information as you can into your brain, anything that you find interesting.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You really care, if you convince yourself to care a lot about what you're learning and you have some sort of assistance, let's say caffeine or some cholinergic supplement to increase neuroplasticity, I should chat with Andrew Huberman at some point. He's the expert. Yeah, at least to me, it's like, you know, you can try to input more tokens into your brain, if you will, and you can try to increase the learning rate so that you can learn much faster on a shorter time scale. So I've learned. Lot of things I've followed my curiosity”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I used to play American football. I've done all sorts of sports growing up. And then I was into powerlifting for a while. So when I was studying mathematics in grad school, I would just do math and lift, take caffeine. And that was my day. It was very pure, the purest of monk modes. But it's really interesting how in powerlifting you're trying to cause neural adaptation by having certain driving signals and you're trying to engineer neuroplasticity through all sorts of supplements. And you have all sorts of, you know, brain-derived neurotrophic factors that get secreted when you lift. So it's funny to me how I was trying to engineer neural adaptation in my nervous system more broadly, not just my brain while learning mathematics. I think you can learn much faster.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, that's the perfect time. The emails, the things that are on fire stop trickling in. You can focus, and then you have your second wind. And I think Demisabes has a similar work data to some extent. So I think that's definitely inspired my workday. But yeah, I started this workday when I was at Google and had to manage a bit of the product during the day and have meetings and then do technical work at night.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Front load them. Yeah, yeah. Like right now I'm on ketones and And Red Bull And it just gives you a clarity of thought that is really next level because then when you eat, you're actually allocating some of your energy that could be going to neural energy to your digestion. After I eat, maybe I take a break an hour or so and a half and then usually it's like ideally one meal a day, steak and eggs and vegetables, animal-based primarily, so fruit and meat. And then I do a second wind, usually that's deep work, right? Because I am a CEO, but I'm still technical. I'm contributing to most patents. And there, I'll just stay up late into the night and work with engineers on very technical problems.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Done keto before for football and whatnot, but I like to have a meal after sort of part of my day is done. And so I can just have extreme focus.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I have a particular regimen. I would say my favorite days are 12 p.m. to 4 a.m. And I would have meetings in the early afternoon, usually external meetings, some internal meetings because I'm CEO, I have to interface with the outside world, whether it's customers or investors or interviewing potential candidates. And usually I'll have ketones, exogenous ketones.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that, yeah, ultimately, it was the perfect cover to acquire tons of power and capital. And unfortunately, sometimes that corrupts people over time.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think it provided initially a sense of community for engineers and intellectuals and rationalists in the early days. And it seems like the community was very healthy. But then they formed all sorts of organizations and started routing capital and having actual power. They have real power. They influence the government. They influence most AI orgs now. I mean, they're literally controlling the board of open AI, right? And look over to Anthropic. I think they all have some control over that too. And so I think the assumption of EAC is more like capitalism is that every agent, organism, and meta organism is going to act in its own interests. And we should maintain sort of adversarial equilibrium or adversarial competition to keep each other in check at all times, at all scales.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this particular loss function, it's not stiff. It's kind of an average of averages, right? It's like, Distributions of states in the future are going to follow a certain distribution. So it's not deterministic. It's not like we're not on like stiff rails, right? It's just a statistical statement about the future. But at the end of the day, you can believe in gravity or not, but it's not necessarily an option to obey it, right? And some people try to test that. And that goes not so well. So similarly, I think thermodynamics is there whether we like it or not. And we're just trying to point out what is and try to orient ourselves and chart a path forward given this fundamental truth.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“EAC measuring progress of civilization, not in terms of a subjective loss function like Henanism, but rather an objective measure, a quantity that cannot be gained that is physical energy, it's very objective, right? And there's not many ways to game it. If you did it in terms of like GDP or a currency, that's pinned to certain value that's moving, right? And so that's not a good way to measure our progress. And so, but the thing is we're both trying to make progress and ensure humanity flourishes and gets to grow. We just have different loss functions and different ways of going about doing it.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're both trying to do good to some extent, and we're both trying, we're arguing for which loss function we should use, right? Yes. Loss function is sort of heat ons, right? Units of hedonism, like how good do you feel for how much time? And so suffering would be negative heat-ons. And they're trying to minimize that. But to us, that seems like that loss function has sort of spurious minima, right? You can start minimizing shrimp farm pain, right, which seems not that productive to me. Or you can end up with wireheading where you just either install a neural link or you scroll TikTok forever and you feel good on the short-term timescale because your neurochemistry, but on long-term time scale, it causes decay and death, right? Because you're not being productive. Whereas sort of”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Civilization, right? But it seems to be like there is a sort of case of alignment of the existing political parties where Those that are four more centralization of power, control, and more regulations are aligning with sort of aligning themselves with the doomers because that sort of instilling fear in people is a great way for them to give up more control and give the government more power. But fundamentally, we're not left versus right. I think we've done polls of people's alignment with INIAC. I think it's pretty balanced. So it's a new fundamental issue of our time. It's not just centralization versus decentralization. It's kind of, do we go, it's like tech progressivism versus technoconservativism, right?”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my priors are that a lot of people on the other side of the aisle think that once we reach human level AI, there's going to be an inflection point and a suddenly AI is going to grok how to manipulate matter at the nanoscale and assemble nanobots. And having worked for nearly a decade in applying AI to engineer matter, it's much harder than they think. And in reality, you need a lot of samples from either a simulation of nature that's very accurate and costly, or nature itself. And that keeps your ability to control the world around us in check. There's sort of minimal cost computationally and thermodynamically to acquiring information about the world in order to be able to predict and control it. And that keeps things in check.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I believe in a finite time singularity as a single point in time. I think it's going to be asymptotic and sort of diagonal. Like, you know, we have the ly cone, we have the limits of physics restricting our ability to grow. So obviously you can't fully diverge on a finite time.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, you wouldn't try to extrapolate the stock market with an LM trained on text from the internet, right? It's not going to be a very accurate model. It's not going to model its priors or its uncertainties about the world very accurately, right? So you need a different type of AI to complement sort of this. Text extrapolation AI.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you have the world modeling engine, and then you have the sort of anthropomorphic AI that is human-like. So you can have the science, the playground to test your ideas and you can have the synthetic scientist. And to us, that joint system of a physics-based AI and an anthropomorphic AI is the closest thing to a fully general artificially intelligent system.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think that the future is actually physics based AI combined with anthropomorphic AI. So you can imagine I have a sort of world modeling engine through physics-based AI, physics-based AI is better at representing the world at all scales because it can be quantum mechanical, thermodynamic, deterministic, hybrid representations of the world, just like our world at different scales has different regimes of physics. If you inspire yourself from that in the ways you learn representation, Very accurate world models at all scales.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learn the literature, we have to share knowledge base, these collaborate in order to push the boundary of knowledge further together, right? And so people that are used to just getting prescribed what to do at this stage when you're at the pioneering stage, that's not necessarily who you want to hire.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, I'm truly French Canadian from Montreal. But yeah, essentially we look for people with very high fluid intelligence that aren't over-specialized because they're going to have to get out of their comfort zone. They're going to have to incorporate concepts that they've never seen before and very quickly get comfortable with them, right? Or learn to work in a team. And so that's sort of what we look for when we hire. We can't hire people that are just like, you know, optimizing this subsystem for the past three or four years. We need really general sort of broader intelligence and specialty. And people that are open-minded, really, because if you're pioneering a new approach from scratch, there is no textbook. There's no reference. It's just us. And people that are hungry to learn. So we have to teach each other.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like combining genes, but for your knowledge bases. And sometimes special products come out of that. And so I think even though it's very high friction initially to work in an interdisciplinary team, I think the product at the end of the day is worth it. And so learned a lot trying to bridge the gap there. And I mean, it's still a challenge to this day. We hire folks that are have an AI background, folks that have a pure physics background. And somehow we have to make them talk to one another, right?”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think like working across disciplinary boundaries is always a challenge and you have to be extremely patient in teaching one another. I learned a lot of software engineering through the process. My colleagues learned a lot of quantum physics and some learned machine learning through the process of building this system. And I think You get some smart people that are passionate and trust each other in a room and you have a small team and you teach each other your specialties, suddenly you're kind of forming this sort of model soup of expertise and something special comes out of that.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we built sort of the first infrastructure to not only run differentiable quantum programs, but combine them as part of broader deep learning graphs incorporating deep neural networks, the ones you know and love with what are called quantum neural networks Ultimately, it was a very cross disciplinary effort. We had to invent all sorts of ways to differentiate, to backpropagate through the graph, the hybrid graph. But ultimately it taught me that the way to program matter and to program physics is. By differentiating through control parameters. If you have parameters that affects the physics of the system, you can evaluate some loss function. You can optimize. System to accomplish a task, whatever that task may be. And that's a very sort of universal meta framework for how to program physics-based computers.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so TensorFlow Quantum was an attempt at, well, I mean, I guess we succeeded at combining deep learning or differentiable classical programming with quantum computing and turn quantum computing into or have types of programs that are differentiable in quantum computing. Andrei Karpath calls differentiable programming software 2.0, right? It's like gradient descent is a better programmer than you. And the idea was that in the early days of quantum computing, you can only run short quantum programs. And so which quantum programs should you run? Well, just let gradient descent find those programs instead.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it is full stack. And so for folks that have built differentiable programming into the quantum computing ecosystem with TensorFlow Quantum, one of my co-founders of TensorFlow Quantum is the CTO, Trevor McCourt. We have some of the best quantum computer architects, those that have designed IBMs and AWS's systems. They've left quantum computing to help us build what we call actually a thermodynamic computer.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we were wondering, as General VIII is sort of eating the world more and more of the world's computational workloads are focused on generative AI, how could we use physics to engineer the ultimate physical substrate for generative AI from first principles of physics, of information theory, of computation, and ultimately of thermodynamics, right? What we're seeking to build is a physics-based computing system and physics-based AI algorithms that are inspired by out of equilibrium thermodynamics or harness it directly to do machine learning as a physical process.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you know, originally we weren't going to announce last week, but I think with the doxing and disclosure, we got our hand forced. So we have to disclose roughly what we're doing. But Really Extropic was born from my dissatisfaction and that of my colleagues with the quantum computing roadmap. Quantum computing was sort of the first path to physics-based computing that was trying to commercially scale. And I was working on physics-based AI that runs on these physics-based computers. But ultimately, our greatest enemy was this noise, this pervasive problem of noise that, as I mentioned, you have to constantly pump out the noise out of the system to maintain this pristine environment where quantum mechanics can take effect. And that constraint was just too much. It's too costly to do that.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you let the argument run, there's no amount of sort of centralization of control that will be enough to ensure your safety. There's always more nine nines of peace safety that you can gain, you know, 999.99999999999999999999999999999999% safe. Maybe you want another nine. Oh, please give us full access to everything you do, full surveillance. And frankly, those that are proponents of AI safety have proposed having a global panopticon, right? Where you have centralized perception of everything going on. And to me, that just opens up the door wide open for a sort of big brother 1984-like scenario. And that's not a future I want to live in.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just think we have to be careful because safety is just the perfect cover for sort of centralization of power and covering up eventually corruption. I'm not saying it's corrupted now, but it could be down the line. And really,”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think again, I think if there was no one working on it, I think I would be a proponent It, I think, again, our goal is to sort of bring balance and obviously a sense of urgency is a useful tool to make progress. It hacks our dopaminergic systems and gives us energy to work late into the night. I think also having higher purpose you're contributing to, right? At the end of the day, it's like, what am I contributing to? I'm contributing to the growth of this beautiful machine so that we can seek to the stars. That's really inspiring. That's also a sort of neuro hack.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stopping, let's say, the open source ecosystem from thriving, right, by, let's say, in the executive order claiming that open source LMs or dual use technologies then should be government controlled, then everybody needs to register their GPU and their big matrices with the government. And I think that extra friction will dissuade a lot of hackers from contributing hackers that could later become the researchers that make key discoveries that push us forward, right? Including discoveries for AI safety. And so I think I just want to maintain ubiquity of opportunity to contribute to AI and to own a piece of the future, right? It can't just be legislated behind some wall where only a few players get to play the game.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that anxiety is good. I think, like I said, I want the free market to create aligned AIs that are reliable. And I think that's what he's trying to do with XAI. So I'm all for it. What I am against is sort of.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, with Neuralink, right? I think if he can't stop the progress of AI, he's building the technology to merge. So, you know, look at the actions, not just the words, but.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is somewhat because he's very much against regulation in many aspects, but for AI, he's definitely a proponent of regulations. I think overall, he saw the dangers of, say, OpenAI cornering the market and then getting to have the monopoly over the cultural priors that you can embed in these LMs that then as LMs now become the source of truth for people, then you can shape the culture of the people. And so you can control people by controlling LMs. And he saw that just like it was the case for social media, if you shape the function of information propagation, you can shape people's opinions, he sought to make a competitor. So at least I think we're very aligned there that the way to a good future is to maintain sort of adversarial equilibria between the various AI players. I love to talk to him to understand sort of his thinking about how to make AI going forward. I mean, he's also hedging his bets, I would say.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source