YouSaid · the spoken record

Guillaume Verdon

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167
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2023-12-29
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2023-12-29
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  1. “I think it could be quite bad. Like I said, if anybody who speaks truth to power and sort of starts a movement or an uprising against the incumbents, against those that usually control the Florida information, if anybody that reaches a certain threshold gets doxxed and thus the traditional apparatus has ways to apply pressure on them to suppress their speech. I think that's a speech suppression mechanism, an idea suppression complex, as Eric Weinstein would say, right?”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And I think to have a truly efficient marketplace of ideas where we can evaluate ideas however off the beaten path they are, we need the freedom of expression. And I think that anonymity and pseudonyms are very crucial to having that efficient marketplace of ideas for us to find The optima of all sorts of ways to organize ourselves if we can't discuss things, how are we going to converge on the best way to do things? So it was disappointing to hear that I was getting doxed and I wanted to get in front of it because I had a responsibility for my company. And so we ended up disclosing. That we're running a company, some of the leadership, and Essentially, yeah, I told the world that I was Beth Jesos because they had me cornered at that point.”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Not what it may seem on the surface, right? We're calling out how certain proposals might be useful for regulatory capture, right? And how the doomerism mindset was maybe instrumental to those ends. And I think we should have the right to point that out and just have the ideas that we put out evaluated for themselves. That ultimately that's why I created an anonymous account is to have my ideas evaluated for themselves uncorrelated from my track record, my job or status from having done things in the past. And to me, start an account from zero to a large following in a way that wasn't dependent on my identity and or achievements. That was very fulfilling, right? It's kind of like new game plus in a video game. You restart the video game with your knowledge of how to beat it. Maybe some tools, but you restart the video game from scratch, right?”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Think that, you know, for the reasons we listed before having an anonymous account is a really powerful way to keep the powers that be in check. We were ultimately speaking truth to power, right? I think a lot of executives and AI companies really cared what our community thought about any move they may take. And now that my identity is revealed, Now they know where to apply pressure to silence me or maybe the community. And to me, that's really unfortunate because, again, it's so important for us to have freedom of speech, which induces freedom of thought and freedom of information, propagation, on social media, which thanks to Eel. Purchasing Twitter now X, we have that. And so to us, you know, we wanted to call out certain maneuvers being done by the incumbents in AI as”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Match, but you know, the Scraped SEC filings. They looked at my private Facebook account and so on. So they did some digging. Originally, I thought that doxing was illegal, right? But there's this weird threshold when it becomes of public interest to know someone's identity. And those were the keywords that sort of like ring the alarm bells for me when they said, because I had just reached 50k followers. Allegedly, that's of public interest. And so where do we draw the line? When is it legal to dock someone?”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So I think the fact that they had docked the whole Guillaume complex and they were, the journalists reached out to actually my investors, which is pretty scary. When you're a startup entrepreneur, you don't really have bosses except for your investors. And investors ping me like, hey, this is going to come out. They've figured out everything. What are you going to do? At first, they had a first reporter on the Thursday and they didn't have all the pieces together. But then they looked at their notes across the organization and they sensor fused their notes. And now they had way too much. And that's when I got worried because they said it was of public interest. And in general,”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “That'd be amazing So originally, wrote the manifesto around the same times I founded this company and I worked at Google X or just X now or Alphabet X now that there's another X. And the baseline is sort of secrecy. You can't talk about what you work on even with other Googlers or externally. And so that was kind of deeply ingrained in my way to do things, especially in deep tech that, you know, has geopolitical impact, right? And so I was being secretive about what I was working on. There was no correlation between my company and my main identity publicly. And then not only did they correlate that, they also correlated My main identity and this account.”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So I wrote The Manifesto with my co founder of EAC, an account named Bayes Lord, still anonymous, luckily, and hopefully forever.”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And so I sort of felt a responsibility to sort of engineer a movement of viral optimism about the future and build a community of people supporting each other to build and do hard things, do the things that need to be done for us to scale up civilization because at least to me, I don't think stagnation or slowing down is actually an option. Fundamentally, life and the whole system, our whole civilization, wants to grow. And there's just far more cooperation when the system is growing rather than when it's declining. And you have to decide how to split the pie. And so I've balanced both identities so far, but I guess recently the two have been merged more or less without my consent.”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And to me, that is a very fundamentally destructive force in the universe is this sort of doom mindset because it is hyperstitious, which means that if you believe it, you're increasing the likelihood of it happening. And so felt a responsibility to some extent to make people aware of the trajectory of civilization and the natural tendency of the system to adapt towards its growth and sort of that actually the laws of physics say that the future is going to be better and grander statistically. And we can make it so. And if you believe in it, if you believe that the future would be better and you believe you have agency to make it happen, you're actually increasing the likelihood of that better future happening.”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Around that time, it was like late 2021, early 2022, I think there's just a lot of pessimism about the future in general. And pessimism about tech. And that pessimism was sort of virally spreading because it was getting algorithmically amplified and people just felt like the future is going to be worse than the present.”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Both from a point of view of designing or engineering devices that harness that physics and trying to understand the world through the lens of thermodynamics has been sort of a synergy between my two identities over the past year and a half now. And so that's really how Really, how the two identities emerged. One was kind of, you know, I must decently respected scientist. I was going towards doing a startup in the space and trying to be a pioneer of a new kind of physics-based AI. And as a duel to that, I was sort of experimenting with philosophical thoughts from a physicist standpoint. And ultimately, I think that”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “We're far more efficient at producing heat than, let's say, just a rock with a similar mass as ourselves, right? We acquire free energy. We acquire food and we're using all this electricity for our operation. And so the universe wants to produce more entropy. And by having life go on and grow, it's actually more optimal at producing entropy because it will seek out pockets of free energy and burn it for its sustenance and further growth. And, you know, that's sort of the basis of Life, and I mean, there's Jeremy England at MIT, who has this theory that I'm a proponent of, that life emerged because of this sort of property. And to me, this physics is what governs the mesoscales. And so it's the missing piece between the quantum and the cosmos. It's the middle part, thermodynamics rules the mesoscales. And to me,”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Realization that life is a sort of fire that seeks out free energy in the universe and seeks to grow, right? And that growth is fundamental to life. And you see this in the equations, actually, of our equilibrium thermodynamics. You see that paths of trajectories of configurations of matter that are better at acquiring free energy and dissipating more heat are exponentially more likely, right? So the universe is biased towards certain futures. And so there's a natural direction where the whole system wants to go.”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “That's sort of the basis of our movement is we were seeing a tendency towards constraint, reduction or suppression of variance in every aspect of life, whether it's thought, how to run a company, how to organize humans, how to do AI research. In general, we believe that maintaining variance ensures that the system is adaptive, right? Maintaining healthy competition in marketplaces of ideas, of companies, of products, of cultures, of governments, of currencies is the way forward because the system always adapts to assign resources to the configurations that lead to its growth. The fundamental basis for the movement is this sort of”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And by creating anonymous account, it seemed like I had unclamped some variables in my brain and suddenly could explore a much wider parameter space of thoughts.”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And that's sort of. Guess another shift, and I guess my faith in the universe happened towards the end of my time at Alphabet. And I knew I wanted to build, well, first of all, a computing paradigm based on this type of physics. But ultimately, just by trying to experiment with these ideas applied to society and economies and much of what we see around us, I started an anonymous account just to relieve the pressure that comes from having an account that you're accountable for everything you say on. And I started an anonymous account just to experiment with ideas originally, right? I didn't realize. How much I was restricting my space of thoughts until I sort of had the opportunity to let go in a sense. Restricting your speech back propagates through restricting your thoughts, right?”

    2023-12-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source