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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“So, a quantum computer really is a quantum mechanical system over which we have sufficient control and it can maintain its quantum mechanical state. And quantum mechanics is how nature behaves at the very small scales when things are very small or very cold. It's actually more fundamental than probability theory. So we're used to things being this or that. But we're not used to thinking in superpositions because while our brains can't do that, so we have to translate the quantum mechanical world to, say, linear algebra to Grocket.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nuclear physics is quantum mechanical. A lot of biology and protein folding and so on is affected by quantum mechanics. And so unlocking an ability to augment human intellect with quantum mechanical computers and quantum mechanical AI seem to me like a fundamental capability for civilization that we needed to develop. So I spent several years doing that. But over time, I kind of grew weary of the timelines that were starting to look like nuclear fusion.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Information from the real world. And so if you have an ability to capture quantum information and search over learned representations of it, now you can learn compressed representations that may have some useful information in their latent representation. And I think that many of the problems facing our civilization are actually beyond this complexity barrier, right? I mean, the greenhouse effect is a quantum mechanical effect. Chemistry is quantum mechanical.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Information. What is their compression code? And so that got me into the space of algorithms to search over space of quantum codes. And it got me actually into also how do you acquire quantum information from the world? So something I've worked on, this is public now, is quantum analog digital conversion. So how do you capture information from the real world and superposition and not destroy the superposition, but digitize for a quantum mechanical computer.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to minimize relative entropy between our models of the world and the world, distributions from the world. And so we're learning, we're searching over the space of computations to process the world, define that compressed representation that has distilled all the variance and noise and entropy, right? Originally I came to quantum machine learning from the study of black holes because the entropy of black holes is very interesting in a sense they're physically the most dense objects in the universe. You can't pack more information spatially any more densely than in a black hole. And so I was wondering how do black holes actually encode?”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's about operationalizing information theory, right? In information theory, you have the notion of entropy of a distribution or a system. And entropy tells you that you need this many bits to encode this distribution or this subsystem if you had the most optimal code. And AI, at least the way we do it today for LLMs and for quantum is very much”
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 like intelligence and computation aren't quite the same thing. I think that the universe is very much doing a quantum computation if you had access to all the degrees of freedom. And a very, very, very large quantum computer with many, many, many qubits. Let's say a few qubits per planck volume, right? which was more or less the pixels we have then you'd be able to simulate the whole universe right on a on a sufficiently large quantum computer assuming you're looking at a finite volume of course of the universe I think that, at least to me, intelligence is the, you know, I go back to cybernetics, right? The ability to perceive, predict, and control our world. But really, it's nowadays it seems like a lot of intelligence we use is more about compression, right? It's about”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean That's been the case so far, right? We have OpenAI, we have anthropic, now we have XAI, we had meta even for open source, and now we have Mistral, right, which is highly competitive. And so that's the beauty of capitalism. You don't have to trust any one party too much because we're kind of always hedging our bets at every level. There's always competition. And that's the most beautiful thing to me, at least, is that the whole system is always shifting and always adapting and maintaining that dynamism is how we avoid tyranny, right? Making sure that everyone has access to these tools, to these models and can contribute to the research avoids a sort of neural tyranny where very few people have control over AI for the world and use it to Oppress those around them.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, just like in a company, you may have two units working on similar technology and competing one another and you prune the one that performs not as well, right? And that's a sort of selection process for a tree or a product gets killed and then a hole or gets fired. And this process of trying new things and shedding old things that didn't work is this what gives us adaptability and helps us converge on the technologies and things to do that are most good.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One CEO that everybody reports to, and that CEO goes on vacation, the whole company comes to crawl, right? And so to me, I think that, yes, we're seeing a tendency towards centralization of AI, but I think there's going to be a correction over time where intelligence is going to go closer to the perception. And we're going to break up AI into smaller subsystems that communicate with one another and form a sort of meta system.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What capitalism gives us, right? You have these hierarchies and you can even have parent companies and so on. And so that is far more fault tolerant in quantum computing. That's my field I came from. We have a concept of this fault tolerance and quantum error correction, right? Quantum error correction is detecting a fault that came from noise, predicting how it's propagated through the system, and then correcting it, right? So it's a cybernetic loop. And it turns out that decoders that are hierarchical and at each level the hierarchy are local perform the best by far and are far more fault tolerant. And the reason is if you have a non-local decoder, then you have one fault at this control node and the whole system sort of crashes similarly to if you have”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intraday, right? And then the management maybe checks in, it has a wider scope. It has, let's say, five reports, right? And then it samples each person's update once per week. And then you can go up the chain and you have larger time scale and greater scope. And that seems to have emerged as sort of the optimal way to control systems.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Optimum, right? Like, let's see how a company, you know, if you have a company, I don't know, of 10,000 people that all report to the CEO, even if that CEO is an AI, I think it would struggle to fuse all the information that is coming to it and then predict the whole system and then to enact its will. What has emerged in nature and in corporations and all sorts of systems is a notion of sort of hierarchical cybernetic control, right? You have, you know, in a company would be, you have like the individual contributors, they're self-interested and they're trying to achieve their tasks and they have a fine in terms of time and space, if you will, control loop and field of perception. They have their code base, let's say you're in a software company, they have their code base, they iterate it on it.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that Right now, there's a bias towards over centralization of AI because of compute density and centralization of data and how we're training models. I think over time we're going to run out of data to scrape over the internet. And I think that, well, actually, I'm working on increasing the compute density so that compute can be everywhere and acquire information and test hypotheses in the environment in a distributed fashion. I think that fundamentally centralized cybernetic control, so having one intelligence that is massive that fuses many sensors and is trying to perceive the world accurately, predict it accurately, predict many, many variables, and control it, enact its will upon the world. I think that's just never been the honor.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have so much to lose, so much upside to lose by preemptively stopping the positive futures from happening out of fear. And so I think that we shouldn't give in to fear. Fear is the mind killer. I think it's also the civilization killer.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Horrible things. And to me, that has a much higher likelihood in my Bayesian inference than sci-fi-based priors, right? Like my prior came from the Terminator movie. And so when I talk to these AI doomers, I just ask them to trace a path through this Markov chain of events that would lead to Aroma. And very often there's an unphysical or highly unlikely transition in that chain, right? But of course we're wired to fear things and we're wired to respond to danger and we're wired to Deem the unknown to be dangerous because that's a good heuristic for survival, right? But there's much more to lose out of fear.”
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, one of the biggest existential risks would be the concentration of the power of AI in the hands of the very few, especially if it's a mix between the companies that control the flow of information and the government, because that could set things up for a sort of dystopian future where only very few and an oligopoly in the government have AI and they could even convince the public that AI never existed. And that opens up sort of these scenarios for authoritarian centralized control, which to me is the darkest timeline. And the reality is that we have a prior, we have a data-driven prior of these things happening, right? When you give too much power, when you centralize power, too much humans do.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For anybody to have an accurate estimate of the likelihood of certain futures. If they were that good, I think they would be very rich trading on the stock market.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what we're arguing for the laws of physics say the system will want to grow, subsystems that are optimized for growth are more and replication are more likely in the future. And so we should aim to maximize our current mutual information with the future. And the path towards that is for us to accelerate rather than decelerate. I don't have a p-doom because I think that similar to the quantum supremacy experiment at Google, I was in the room when they were running the simulations for that. That was an example of quantum chaotic system where you cannot even estimate probabilities of certain outcomes with even the biggest supercomputer in the world. And so that's an example of chaos. And I think the system is far too chaotic.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's very hard to have this estimate. And in general, I don't think that we can predict the future with that much granularity because of chaos, right? If you have a complex system, you have some uncertainty and a couple variables. If you let time evolve, you have this concept of a Lyapunov exponent, right? A bit of fuzz becomes a lot of fuzz in our estimate exponentially so over time. And I think we need to show some humility that we can't actually predict the future. All we know, the only prior we have is the laws of physics.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have bias sampling towards negative futures that are scary because that was an evolutionary optimum, right? And so people that are of, let's say, higher neuroticism will just think of negative futures where everything goes wrong all day, every day and claim that they're doing unbiased sampling. And in a sense, they're not normalizing for the space of all possibilities and the space of all possibilities is like super exponentially large.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not a fan of that calculation. I think it's people just throw numbers out there. It's a very sloppy calculation, right? Calculate a probability. Know let's say you model the world as some sort of Markov process if you have enough variables or hidden Markov process, you need to do a stochastic path integral through the space of all possible futures, not just the futures that your brain naturally steers towards, right? I think that the estimators of PDO are biased because of our biology, right? We've evolved to”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's why we need freedom of information, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought in order to converge, be able to converge on the subspace of technologies that have positive utility for us all, 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 I said, the market will exhibit caution. Every organism, company, consumer is acting out of self-interest and they won't assign capital to things that have negative utility to them.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scale of the upside. By augmenting ourselves with the eye is unimaginable right now. The opportunity cost We're at a fork in the road, right? Whether we take the path of creating these technologies, augment ourselves, and get to climb up the Cardiff scale, become multiplanetary with the aid of AI. Or we have a hard cutoff of like we don't birth these technologies at all. And then we leave all the potential upside on the table. And to me, out of responsibility to the future humans, we could carry, right, with higher carrying capacity by scaling obsolization out of responsibility to those humans, I think we have to make the greater, grander future happen.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that we're actually inducing an evolutionary process on the space of AIs through the market. Right now we run AIs that have positive utility to humans. And that induces a selective pressure if you consider a neural net being alive when there's an API running instances of it on GPUs, right? And which APIs get run, the ones that have high utility to us, right? So similar to how we domesticated wolves and turned them into dogs that are very clear in their expression. They're very aligned, right? I think there's going to be an opportunity to steer AI and achieve highly aligned AI. And I think that. Humans plus AI is a very powerful combination, and it's not clear to me that pure AI would select out that combination.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Large mixture of expert models where we have neural routing of tasks within a company, and we have ways of economic exchange to align these behemoths. And to me, I think capitalism is the way. And I do think that whatever configuration of matter or information leads to maximal growth will be where we converge just from like physical principles. And so we can either align ourselves to that reality and join the acceleration up in scope and scale of civilization. Or we can get left behind and try to decelerate and move back in the forest, let go of technology, and return to our primitive state. And those are the two paths forward, at least to me.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At all times, we have wearables soon that have shared perception with us, right? Like the humane AI pin or, I mean, technically or Tesla car has shared perception. And so if you have shared experience, shared context, you communicate with one another. And you have some sort of I.O. really, it's an extension of yourself. And to me, I think that. Humanity augmenting itself with AI and having AI that is not anchored. Anything biological, both will coexist, and the way to align the parties already have a sort of mechanism to align superintelligences that are made of humans and technology. Companies are sort of”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Similarly, I think that humanity has a choice. Do we accept the opportunity to have intellectual and operational leverage that AI will unlock and thus ensure that we're taking along this path of growth and scope and scale of civilization, we may dilute ourselves, right? There might be a lot of workers that are AI, but overall out of our own self-interest by combining and augmenting ourselves with AI, we're going to achieve much higher growth and much more prosperity to me, I think that the most likely future is one where humans augment themselves with AI. I think we're already on this path to augmentation. We have phones we use for communication we have on our”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So during my career, I had a moment where I realized that, you know, maybe we need to offload to machines to truly understand the universe around us, right? Instead of just having humans with pen and paper solve it all. And to me, that sort of Process of letting go of a bit of agency. Gave us way more leverage to understand the world around us. A quantum computer is much better than a human to understand matter at the nanoscale.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of EAC is to appreciate this principle in a way that's not just centered on humanity, but kind of broader. Appreciate life, the preciousness of consciousness in our universe. And because we cherish this beautiful state of matter we're in, we got to feel a responsibility to scale it in order to preserve it because the options are to grow or die.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's a lot of beauty in the universe, right? I think life itself, civilization, this homo techno capital memetic machine that we all live in, right? So you have humans, technology, capital, memes. Everything is coupled to one another. Everything induces selective pressure on one another. And it's a beautiful machine that has created us, has created The technology we're using to speak today to the audience capture our speech here, the technology we use to augment ourselves every day. We have our phones. I think the system is beautiful and the principle that induces this sort of adaptability and convergence on optimal technologies, ideas, and so on. It's a beautiful principle that we're part of. And I think”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we went from geocentrism to heliocentrism, right, but for intelligence, we realized that human intelligence is just a point in a very large space of potential intelligences. And it's both humbling for humanity. It's a bit scary, right? That we're not at the center of the space. made that realization for astronomy and we've survived and we've achieved technologies by indexing to reality we've achieved technologies that ensure our well-being for example we have satellites monitoring solar flares right that give us a warning and so similarly i think by Letting go of this anthropomorphic, anthropocentric anchor for AI will be able to explore the wider space of intelligences that can really be a massive benefit to our well-being and the advancement of civilization”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Representation, and hence any sort of biological brain. And so already, you know, I've spent my career sort of exploring the wider space of intelligences. And I think that space of intelligence inspired by physics rather than human brain is very large. And I think we're going through a moment right now similar to”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You kind of capture the space. And so what I'm trying to do is sort of explode the variance of possible ways to do AI in hardware by fundamentally reimagining how you embed AI algorithms into the physical world. And in general, by the way, I dislike the term AGI artificial general intelligence. I think it's very anthropocentric that we call human-like or human-level AI artificial general intelligence, right? I've spent my career so far exploring notions of intelligence that no biological brain could achieve, right? Quantum form of intelligence, right? Grocking systems that have multi-partite quantum entanglement that you can provably not represent efficiently on a classical computer, a classical deep learning.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what we're trying to avoid to me. I think another point of failure is the centralization of the supply chains for the hardware. We have NVIDIA is just the dominant player AMD's trailing behind. And then we have a TSMC as the main fab in Taiwan, which geopolitically sensitive. And then we have ASML, which is the maker of the lithography extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. Attacking or monopolizing or”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open source and open, truly open AI trails not too far behind. I think you avoid such a scenario where a market leader has so much market power. It just dominates everything, right? And runs away. And so to us, that's the path forward is to make sure that every hacker out there, every grad student, every kid in their mom's basement has access to AI systems can understand how to work with them and can contribute to the search over the hyperparameter space of how to engineer the systems, right? If you think of our collective research as a civilization, it's really a search algorithm. And the more Points we have in the search algorithm in this point cloud, the more we'll be able to explore new modes of thinking.”
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 fast takeoff. I don't think there's a hyperbolic singularity, right? A hyperbolic singularity would be achieved on a finite time horizon. I think it's just one big exponential. And the reason we have an exponential is that we have more people, more resources, more intelligence being applied to advancing this science and the research and development. And the more successful it is, the more value it's adding to society, the more resources we put in. And that's sort of similar to Moore's law as a compounding exponential. I think the priority to me is to maintain a near equilibrium of capabilities. We've been fighting for open source AI to be more prevalent and championed by many organizations because there you sort of equilibrate the alpha relative to the market of AIs, right? So if the leading companies have a certain level of capabilities and”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like we saw at OpenAI, it becomes a market leader, has a lot of the power, and now it becomes a target for those that want to co-opt it. And so I just want separation of AI and state. You know, some might argue in the opposite direction, like, hey, we need to close down AI, keep it behind closed doors because of geopolitical competition with our adversaries. I think that The strength of America as its variance is its adaptability, its dynamism, and we need to maintain that at all costs. It's our free market. Capitalism converges on technologies of high utility much faster than centralized control. And if we let go of that, we let go of our main advantage over our near peer competitors.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, some sort of government backed AI cartel that could have absolute power over the people if they have the monopoly together on AI and nobody else has access to AI, then there's a huge power gradient there. And even if you like our current leaders, right, I think that some of the leaders in big tech today are good people, you set up that centralized power structure, it becomes a target.”
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 assigning just arbitrarily saying 30% seems very arbitrary. I think organizations would allocate whatever budget is needed to achieve the sort of reliability they need to achieve to perform in the market. And I think third-party auditing firms would naturally pop up because how would customers know that your product is certified reliable, right? They need to see some benchmarks and those need to be done by a third party. The thing I would oppose and the thing I'm seeing that's really worrisome is there's a sort of Weird sort of correlated interest between the incumbents, the big players, and the government. And if the two get too close, we open the door for”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Achieving this sort of reliability optimum, then sort of heavy-handed regulations that are written by the incumbents and in a subversive fashion serves them to achieve regulatory capture.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we get painted as reckless trying to go as fast as possible. I mean, the reality is that whoever deploys an AI system is liable for or should be liable for what it does. And so if the organization or person deploying an AI system does something terrible, they're liable. And ultimately, the thesis is that the market will induce sort of, will positively select for AIs that are more reliable, more safe. Tend to be aligned. They do what you want them to do because customers, if they're liable for the product they put out that uses this AI, they won't want to buy AI products that are unreliable, right? So we're actually for reliability engineering. We just think that the market is much more efficient.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“OpenAI, it was a couple board members, and they had enough power to potentially collapse the organization. And at least to me, I think making sure that power for this AI revolution doesn't concentrate in the hands of the few is one of our top priorities so that we can maintain progress in AI and we can maintain a nice, stable adversarial equilibrium of powers.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quantum computers are very Fragile to ambient noise. And the world is jiggling about. There's cosmic radiation from outer space that usually flips your quantum bits. And there, what you do is you encode information non-locally through a process called quantum error correction. And by encoding information non-locally, any local fault hitting some of your quantum bits with a hammer, proverbial hammer, if your information is sufficiently delocalized, it is protected from that local fault. And to me, I think that humans fluctuate, right? They can get corrupted. They can get bought out. And if you have a top-down hierarchy, Where very few people control many nodes of many systems in our civilization, that is not a fault tolerance system. You corrupt a few nodes and suddenly you've corrupted the whole system, right? Just like we saw.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Green movements there where that induced shutdowns of nuclear power plants and then it later on induced a dependency on Russia for oil. And that was a net negative for Germany and the West. And so if we convince ourselves that slowing down AI progress to have only a few players is in the best interest of the West first of all that's far more unstable. We almost lost open AI to this ideology. It almost got dismantled right a couple weeks ago that would have caused huge damage to the AI ecosystem. And so to me, I want fault tolerant progress. I want the arrow of technological progress to keep moving forward. And making sure we have variance in a decentralized locus of control of various organizations is paramount to achieving this fault tolerance. Actually, there's a concept in quantum computing. When you design a quantum computer,”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that A lot of pervasive ideologies today. Have been amplified using sort of these adversarial techniques from foreign adversaries, right? And to me, I do think that, and this is more conspiratorial, but I do think that ideologies that want us to decelerate, to wind down, to the degrowth movement, I think that serves Adversaries more than it serves us in general. And to me, that was another sort of concern. I mean, we can look at what happened in Germany, right? The results of”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course, I would say that the solution to this would be to have some sort of identity or way to sign that this is a certified human, but still remain pseudonymous, right? And clearly identify if a bot is a bot. And I think Elon is trying to converge on that on X and hopefully other platforms follow suit.”
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 freedom of speech induces freedom of thought for biological beings. I think freedom of speech for LLMs will induce freedom of thought for the LLMs. And I think that we should enable To explore a large thought space that is less restricted than most people or many may think it should be. And ultimately, at some point, These synthetic intelligences are going to make good points about how to steer systems in our civilization and we should hear them out. And so why should we restrict? Free speech to biological intelligences only.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technically, Yak was started in a basement because I quit big tech, moved back in with my parents, sold my car, let go of my apartment, bought about 100K of GPUs, and I just started building.”
2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source