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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“And so I think this is sort of the way between the sort of degrowth ESG approach versus, say, Elon, right? The degrowth approach is like we're going to manage our way out of a climate crisis. And Elon is like, I'm going to build a company that is self-sustaining, profitable, and growing. And we're going to innovate our way out of this dilemma, right? And we're trying to get people to do the latter rather than the former 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
“Awesome. Well, so building technologies and building, it doesn't have to be technologies, just building in general means having agency trying to change the world by creating, let's say, a company, which is a self-sustaining organism that accomplishes a function in the broader technocapital machine. To us, that's the way to achieve change in the world that you'd like to see rather than say pressuring politicians or creating nonprofits that nonprofits once they run out of money, their function can no longer be accomplished. You're kind of deforming the market artificially compared to sort of subverting or coercing the market or dancing with the market to convince it that actually this function is important, adds value, and here it is, right?”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've managed to get some people that were in that mindset and make them realize how the techno capital machine works and how you can harness it for your own good and for the good of others. And by creating value, you capture some of the value you create for the world. And that's sort of positive sum mindset shift is so potent. And really, that's what we're trying to do by scaling EAC is sort of unlocking that higher level of agency. Like actually you're far more in control of the future than you think. You have agency to change the world. Go out and do it. Here's permission.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think a lot of people would, instead of trying to understand how the techno capital machine works and realizing they have much more agency than they think they'd rather have the sort of victim mindset, I'm just subjected to this machine. It is oppressing me. And the successful players clearly must be evil because they've been successful at this game that I'm not successful at.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of a proof of stake voting, right? If you've acquired, if you've allocated capital efficiently, you unlock more capital to allocate just because clearly you know how to allocate capital more efficiently, which is in contrast to politicians that get elected because they speak the best on TV, right? Not because they have a proven track record of allocating taxpayer capital most efficiently. And so that's why for capitalism over, say, giving all our money to the government and letting them figure out how to allocate it. So, yeah.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that companies, they tend to optimize quarter over quarter, maybe a few years out, but individuals that want to leave a legacy can think on a multi-decade or multi-century timescale. And so the fact that some individuals are such good capital allocators that they unlock the ability to allocate capitals to goals that take us much further or are much further looking. Elon's doing this with SpaceX putting all this capital towards getting us to Mars. Jeff is trying to build Blue Origin, and I think he wants to build Oneal cylinders and get industry off planet, which I think is brilliant. I think just overall, I'm four billionaires. I know this is a controversial statement sometimes, but I think that in a sense,”
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 Jeff is really great. I mean, he's built one of the most epic companies of all time. He's leveraged the techno-capital machine and techno capital acceleration to... Give us what we wanted, right? We want quick delivery, very convenient at home, low prices, right? He understood how the machine worked and how to harness it, right? Like running the company, not trying to take profits too early, putting it back, letting the system compound and keep improving and arguably, I think Amazon's invested some of the most amount of capital and robotics out there and certainly with the birth of AWS kind of enabled this sort of tech boom we've seen today that has paid the salaries of I guess myself and all of our friends to some extent. And so I think we can all be grateful to Jeff and he's one of the great entrepreneurs out there, one of the best of all time, unarguably.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vector to spread the message. And yes, we've been using sort of techniques that are optimal for today's algorithmically amplified information landscapes. But I think we're reaching the point of scale where we can have serious debates and serious conversations. And that's why we're considering doing a bunch of debates and having more serious long-form discussions because I don't think that the timeline is optimal for sort of very serious, thoughtful discussions. You get rewarded for sort of polarization, right? And so even though we started a movement that is literally trying to polarize the tech ecosystem, at the end of the day, so that we can have a conversation and find an optimum together.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that allowed us to grow pretty rapidly in the early days. But of course, essentially people get steered, their notion of the truth comes from the data they see, from the information they're fed. And the information people are fed is determined by algorithms, right? And really what we've been doing is sort of engineering what we call high memetic fitness packets of information so that they can spread effectively and carry a message. So it's kind of a”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So initially, I think what allowed us to grow under the radar was because it was camouflaged, this sort of meta-ironic, right? We would sneak in deep truths within a package of humors and memes and what are called shit posts. And I think that was purposefully a sort of camouflage against those that seek status and do not want to it's very hard to argue with a cartoon frog or a cartoon of an intergalactic Jeff Bezos. Take yourself seriously.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatsoever, I just put out tweets and certain blog posts, and people are free to defect and fork if there's an aspect they don't like. And so that makes it so that there should be a sort of deterioratorialization in the space of ideas so that we don't end up in one cluster that's very cult-like. And so cults usually don't allow people to defect or start competing forks, whereas we encourage it, right?”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not yet, but ultimately, yeah, I mean, I totally agree that it seems to me that humans want to feel like they're part of a group. So they naturally try to agree with their neighbors and find common ground. And that leads to sort of mode collapse in the space of ideas, right? We used to have sort of one cultural island that was allowed. It was a typical subspace of thought and anything that was diverting from that subspace. Now we've created a new mode, but the whole point is that we're not trying to have very restricted space of thought. There's not just one way to think about EAC and its many forks. And the point is that there are many forks and there can be many clusters in many islands. And I shouldn't be in control of it in any way. I mean, there's no formal...”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, it's fun. It's rebellious, right? Like, you know, many. I think we lean into there's this concept of sort of meta irony of sort of being on the boundary of like we're not sure if they're serious or not and it's much more playful and much more fun. Right, like, for example, we talk about thermodynamics being our God, right? And sometimes we do cult-like things, but there's no like ceremony and roads and whatnot.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so if there's a sort of viral pessimism, decelerative movement we needed to have not only one movement, but many, many variants. So it's very hard to pinpoint and stop.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This way XYZ is to set up a process where people are always searching over subcultures and competing for Mindshare. And I think creating this malleability of culture is super important for us to converge onto the cultures and the heuristics about how to live one's life that are updated to modern times because there's really been a sort of vacuum of spirituality and culture. People don't feel like they belong to any one group and there's been parasitic ideologies that have taken up opportunity to populate this petri dish of mines, right? Elon calls it the mind virus. We call it the D cell mind virus complex, which is a decelerative that is kind of the overall pattern between all of them. There's many variants as well.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking of culture almost like code, right? Nowadays, I mean, what you prompt the LM or what you put in the Constitution of an LLM is basically its cultural framework, what it believes, right? And you can share it on GitHub nowadays. So starting trying to take inspiration from what has worked in the sort of machine of software to adapt over the space of code, could we apply that to culture? And our goal is to not”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Human civilization, yeah. It's literally the forces of constraints versus the entropic force that makes us explore, right? Systems are optimal when they're at the edge of criticality between order and chaos, between constraints, energy minimization, and entropy. Systems want to equilibriate, balance these two things. And so I thought that the balance was lacking. And so we created this movement to bring balance.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that it's trying to find a middle ground between IAC and sort of EA and AI safety. To me, having a movement that is opposite to what was the mainstream narrative that was taking over Silicon Valley was important to sort of shift the dynamic range of opinions. It's like the balance between centralization and decentralization. The real optimum is always somewhere in the middle, right? But for EAC, we're pushing for entropy, novelty, disruption, malleability, speed rather than being sort of conservative, suppressing thought, suppressing speech, adding constraints, adding. Many regulations slowing things down. And so it's kind of, we're trying to bring balance to the forefront. Systems.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We see EAC as a sort of meta heuristic, a sort of very thin cultural framework from which you can have much more opinionated forks. Fundamentally, we just say that what got us here is this. Adaptation of the whole system based on thermodynamics, and that process is good and we should keep it going. That is the core thesis. Everything else is, okay, how do we ensure that we maintain this malleability and adaptability? Well, clearly not suppressing variance and maintaining free speech, freedom of thought, freedom of information propagation, and freedom to do AI research is important for us to converge the fastest on the space of technologies, ideas, and whatnot that lead to this growth. And so ultimately, there's been quite a few forks. Some are just memes, but some are more serious, right? Vitalik, buterin recently made a Diac fork. He has his own sort of fine-tunings.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have humans, you have technology, you have capital, and then you have memes, information, right? And all of those systems are coupled with one another, right? Humans work at companies, they acquire and allocate capital, and humans communicate via memes and information propagation. And our goal was to have a sort of viral optimistic movement that is aware of how the system works fundamentally. It seeks to grow. And we simply want to lean into the natural tendencies of the system to adapt for its own growth.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The goal is for the human techno capital memetic machine to become self-aware and to hyperstitiously engineer its own growth. So let's decompress each other.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And then some people have some crazy type four and five, but I don't know if I believe in those. To me, it seems like from the first principles of thermodynamics that, again, there's this concept of thermodynamic, driven, dissipative adaptation where life evolved on Earth because we have this sort of energetic drive from the sun, right? We have incident energy and life evolved on Earth to capture. Figure out ways to best capture that free energy to maintain itself and grow. And I think that principle, it's not special to our Earth-Sun system. We can extend life well beyond. And we kind of have a responsibility to do so because that's the process that brought us here. So we don't even know what it has in store for us in the future. It could be something of beauty we can't even imagine today, right?”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Carter Shuffle is a measure of our energy production and consumption and really it's a logarithmic scale and Kartishev type 1 is a milestone where we are producing the equivalent wattage to all the energy that is incident on Earth from the Sun. Kartoshev type 2 would be harnessing all the energy that is output by the Sun. And I think type 3 is like the whole galaxy equivalent”
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, that's a great question. We have to answer. What black holes are? Are we punching a hole through space-time and creating a pocket universe? It's possible, right? Then That would mean that if we ascend the Kardash scale to beyond Kardashv type three, we could engineer black holes with specific hyperparameters to transmit information to new universes we create and so we can have progeny, right? That are new universes. And so even though our universe may reach a heat death, we may have a way to have a legacy, right? Don't know yet. We need to ascend the Cardish of scale to answer these questions, to peer into that regime of higher energy physics.”
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. I just want to set up shop near it to fast forward, meet. Meet a future civilization, right? Like if we have a limited lifetime, if you can go orbit a black hole and emerge.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the near horizon. And at some point, it gets so close to the horizon. The proximity or the scale in which quantum effects and quantum fluctuations matter. And that and falling matter could interfere with sort of the traditional pictures, that it could interfere with the creation and annihilation of particles and antiparticles in the vacuum. And through this interference, one of the particles gets entangled with the infalling information and one of them is now free and escapes. And that's how there's sort of mutual information between the outgoing radiation and the infalling matter. But getting that calculation right, I think we're only just starting to put the pieces together.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Black holes are really fascinating objects. They're at the interface between quantum mechanics and gravity, and so they help us test all sorts of ideas. I think that, you know, for Many decades now, there's been sort of this black hole information paradox that things that fall into the black hole seem to, we've seemed to have lost their information. Now I think there's this firewall paradox that has been allegedly resolved in recent years by former peer of mine who's now a professor at Berkeley. It seems like there is as information falls into a black hole, there's sort of a sedimentation as you get closer and closer to the horizon from the point of view of the observer on the outside, the object slows down infinitely as it gets closer and closer. And so everything that is falling to a black hole from our perspective gets sort of sedimented and tacked on.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think The journey to understand something called ADS CFT. So the journey to understand quantum gravity through this picture where a hologram of lesser dimension is actually dual or exactly corresponding to a bulk theory of quantum gravity of an extra dimension. And the fact that this sort of duality comes from trying to learn Deep learning like representations of the boundary. And so at least part of my journey someday on my bucket list is to apply quantum machine learning to these sorts of systems, these CFDs or they're called SYK models, and learn an emergent geometry from the boundary theory. And so we can have a form of machine learning helps us to help us understand quantum gravity, which is still a holy grail that I would like to hit before I leave this earth.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, frankly, when I had the idea for the type of computer I'm building now, I think it was eight years ago now, it really felt like it was being beamed from space. It's just, I was in bed just shaking, just thinking it through. And I don't know. But do I believe that legitimately? I don't think so. I think that alien life could take many forms. And I think the notion of intelligence and the notion of life needs to be expanded much more broadly to be less anthropocentric or biocentric.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Statistically speaking, right, if we observed some sort of alien life, it would most likely be some sort of virally self-replicating von Neumann-like probe system, right? And it's possible that there are such systems that, I don't know what they're doing at the bottom of the ocean, allegedly, but maybe they're collecting minerals from the bottom of the ocean. But that wouldn't violate any of my priors. But am I certain that these systems are here? And it'd be difficult for me to say so, right? I only have secondhand information about there being data.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Foreign intelligence from a different planet, like either way, like increasing our capabilities and becoming formidable formidable as humans, I think that's really important so that we're robust against whatever the universe throws at us.”
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's useful to think about because we got to ensure we're anti-fragile and we're trying to increase our capabilities as fast as possible because we could get disrupted. There's no laws of physics against their being life elsewhere that could evolve and become an advanced civilization and eventually come to us. Do I think they're here now? I'm not sure. I mean, I've read what most people have read on the topic. I think it's interesting to consider. And to me, it's a useful thought experiment to instill a sense of urgency in developing technologies and increasing our capabilities to make sure Don't get disrupted, right? Whether it's Form of AI that disrupts us or”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's allowable by the laws of physics. The reality, though, is that the correlations decay with distance. You're going to have to pay the price not too far away from where you extract it.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The vacuum or the canvas of space-time itself is really a canvas made out of quantum entanglement. And I was studying how decreasing energy of the vacuum locally increases quantum entanglement, which is very funky. And so the thing there is that if you're into weird theories about UAPs and whatnot, you could try to imagine that they're around and how would they propel themselves, right? How would they go faster than the speed of light? You would need a sort of negative energy density. And to me, Gave it the old college trying to hack the energy, the vacuum, and hit the limits allowable by the laws of physics. But there's all sorts of caveats there where you can't Extract more than you've put in, obviously.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The energy. But just like the stock market, if you have a stock that's correlated over time, the vacuums actually correlated. So if you measured the vacuum at one point, you acquired information. If you communicated that information to another point, you can infer what configuration the vacuum is in to some precision and statistically extract on average some energy there. So you've quote-unquote teleported energy. To me, that was interesting because you could create pockets of negative energy density, which is energy density that is below the vacuum. Is very weird because we don't understand how the vacuum gravitates. And there are theories where”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Multidimensional, right? So it's like, well, can you have a notion of like an integer floating point that is quantum mechanical? That's something I've had to think about. I think that research was a precursor to later work on quantum analog digital conversion. There was interesting because during my master's, I was trying to understand the energy and entanglement of the vacuum of emptiness. Emptiness has energy. Is very weird to say. And our equations of cosmology. Don't match our calculations for the amount of quantum energy there is in the fluctuations. And so I was trying to hack the energy of the vacuum. And the reality is that you can't just directly hack it. It's not technically free energy. Your lack of knowledge of the fluctuations means you can't extract.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are crossing, you know, they're achieving milestones. It's just, in general, the media always gets ahead of where the technology is. There's a bit too much hype. It's good for fundraising, but sometimes. It causes winters, right? It's the hype cycle. I'm bullish on quantum computing on a 10, 15 year timescale personally, but I think there's other quests that can be done in the meantime. I think it's in good hands right now.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quantum mechanical program. It's very difficult because in order to scale up your quantum computer, you need each component to be of sufficient quality for it to be worth it. Because if you try to do this error correction, this quantum error correction process in each quantum bit and your control over them, if it's insufficient, it's not worth scaling up. You're actually adding more errors than you remove. And so there's this notion of a threshold where if your quantum bits are sufficient quality in terms of your control over them, it's actually worth scaling up. And actually, in recent years, people have been crossing the threshold and it's starting to be worth it. And so it's just a very long slog of engineering, but ultimately it's really crazy to me how much exquisite level of control we have over these systems. It's actually quite crazy.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extra topic. That's right. And we do physics base the eye, primarily based on thermodynamics rather than quantum mechanics. But essentially, a quantum computer is very difficult to build because you have to induce this sort of zero temperature subspace of information. And the way to do that is by encoding information. You encode a code within a code within a code, within a code. And so there's a lot of redundancy needed to do this error correction. But ultimately, it's a sort of algorithmic refrigerator, really. It's just pumping out entropy out of the subsystem that is virtual and delocalized that represents your quote unquote logical qubits, aka the payload quantum bits in which you actually want to run your”
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 an overall theme of my company is that we have folks that are, you know, there's a sort of exodus from quantum computing and we're going to broader physics-based AI that is not quantum. So that gives you a hint.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Putting together teams that are very cross disciplinary and figuring out how to communicate and share knowledge is really the key to doing this sort of interdisciplinary engineering work. I mean, there is a big difference in mathematics. You can explore mathematics for mathematics sake. In physics, you're applying mathematics to understand the world around us. And in engineering, you're trying to hack the world, right? You're trying to find how to apply the physics that I know, my knowledge of the world to do things.”
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, some of the original team for the TensorFlow Quantum Project, which we started in school at University of Waterloo, there was myself, initially I was a physicist, a climatician, mathematician. We had a computer scientist. We had mechanical engineer, and then we had a physicist that was experimental primarily.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because face kicks emulate having the parameter space be like a particle in n dimensions. And you're trying to get the Schr ⁇ dinger equation in the lost landscape of the neural network. And so you do an algorithm to induce the space kick, which involves a feed forward, a kick, and then when you uncompute the feed forward, then all the errors in these phase kicks and these forces back propagate and hit each one of the parameters throughout the layers. And if you alternate this with an emulation of kinetic energy, then it's kind of like a particle moving in n dimensions, a quantum particle. And the advantage in principle would be that it can tunnel through the landscape and find new optima that would have been difficult for stochastic optimizers. But again, this kind of a theoretical thing and in practice with at least the current architectures for quantum computers that we have planned, such algorithms would be extremely expensive.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You start with the superpositions over a superposition over parameters, which is pretty funky. Now you're not just, you don't have just a point for parameters, you have a superposition over many potential parameters, right?”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that was a funky paper. That was one of my first papers in quantum deep learning. Everybody was saying, oh, I think deep learning is going to be sped up by quantum computers. And I was like, well, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. So here's a hundred-page paper. Have fun. Essentially, quantum computing is usually you embed reversible operations into a quantum computation. And so the trick there was to do a feed forward operation and do what we call a phase kick, but really it's just a force kick. You just kick the system. With a certain force that is proportional to your loss function, that you wish to optimize. And then by performing uncomputation”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fermilab has a project exploring detecting dark matter with these quantum sensors. And to me, that's in alignment with my quest to understand the universe ever since I was a child. And so someday I hope that we can have very large networks of quantum sensors that help us peer into the earliest parts of the universe, right? For example, the LIGO is a quantum sensor, right? It's just a very large one. So yeah, I would say quantum machine perception simulations, grocking quantum simulations, so similar to alpha fold, right? Alpha fold understood the probability distribution over configurations of proteins. You can understand Quantum distributions over configurations of electrons more efficiently with quantum machine learning.”
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's a great question. I mean, fundamentally, it's any system that has sufficient quantum mechanical correlations that are very hard to capture for classical representations, then there should be an advantage for a quantum mechanical representation over a purely classical one. The question is which systems have sufficient correlations that are very quantum, but is also which systems are still relevant to industry, that's a big question. People are leaning towards chemistry, nuclear physics. I've worked on actually processing inputs from quantum sensors, right? If you have a network of quantum sensors, they've captured a quantum mechanical image of the world and how to post-process that that becomes a sort of quantum form of machine perception. And so, for example,”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's learning quantum mechanical representations that would be quantum deep learning. Alternatively, you can try to do classical machine learning on a quantum computer. I wouldn't advise it because you may have some speedups, but very often the speedups come with huge costs using a quantum computer is very expensive. Why is that? Because you assume the computer is operating at zero temperature, which no physical system in the universe can achieve that temperature. So what you have to do is what I've been mentioning, this quantum error correction process, which is really an algorithmic fridge, right? It's trying to pump entropy out of the system, trying to get it closer to zero temperature. And when you do the calculations of how many resources it would take to, say, do deep learning on a quantum computer, classical deep learning, there's just such a huge overhead. It's not worth it. It's like thinking about shipping something across a city using a rocket and going.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My quest, really, even to this day after quantum computing, it's still in this sort of journey to merge really physics and AI fundamentally.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unfortunately, that translation is exponentially inefficient on average. You have to represent things with very large matrices. But really, you can make a quantum computer out of many things, right? And we've seen all sorts of players from neutral atoms, trapped ions, superconducting, metal, photons at different frequencies. I think you can make a quantum computer out of many things. But to me, the thing that was really interesting was both quantum machine learning was about understanding the quantum mechanical world with quantum computers, so embedding the physical world into AI representations. And quantum computer engineering was embedding AI algorithms. Into the physical world, so this bidirectionality of embedding the physical world into AI, AI into the physical world, this symbiosis between physics and AI, really.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source