YouSaid · the spoken record

Nathan Myhrvold

lines on the record: 78
first: 2024-12-02
most recent: 2024-12-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But his idea was to code it all by hand. A bunch of people writing computer programs. And that approach didn't work for a whole variety of reasons. But a glimmer of his idea actually did work, which is that you did need this critical mass. So I think it's an enormous step forward.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is understanding language in a way that we're still trying to grapple to understand ourselves And it's also not very good in a certain sense. You and I learned language without reading every book on Earth Nope, not this one. And it's actually an old idea in AI. There's a researcher named Douglanat. And we funded him at Microsoft, or was one of the funding sources for him. He had several for many years. And Doug originally was a Stanford professor in AI, and he had this idea that you couldn't actually get reasoning unless you had a critical mass of the world's information.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But god damn it, it worked And so that's an enormous importance. Now, at the same time, scientific importance, okay, Noam Chomsky is famous because he helped figure out lots of theoretical aspects of language. This is an utterly different approach to language. It's not a human approach.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I had been on the About Prize Committee, I would have given OpenAI the Nobel Prize because the discovery that that With enough effort now, of course, people say they didn't do it alone. No Nobel Prize person ever does anything alone. The proposition, if only we spend $10 billion more, it'll work. A crazy proposition.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I hired our first researchers for Microsoft Research. We're all in natural language understanding and grammar checking. So we made a hell of a grammar checker. We made a variety of things. Other people did similar things. Still hadn't cracked the language problem. And what OpenAI did, and I really want to single them out, is that it was a combination of some very old ideas. What makes this important was the discovery that with a large enough corpus of information, a relatively straightforward language system that didn't have hard-coded any aspects of language could figure language out.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People had a variety of ideas about AI based on quite different technological bases. For example, chess programs is a very long-standing thing in AI. They've gotten insanely good. But that technology, when people first developed it, they thought, oh, this will be good for all parts of reasoning. We crack chess, we'll have it all done. Well, turns out no, that's not true. Machine learning was a different segment, a different technological base for building AI. And it was very effective at doing certain kinds of pattern recognition and signal detection. But we couldn't do language. We tried, Microsoft Word is maybe the best there is at a program that can help you organize words.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With well meaning people on the other side in government doing a kind of a knee-jerk thing they would normally do. Now that doesn't mean that the government has no role. Because government, practically speaking, does have a role And regardless of what you think about us, the fact is there are governments in the world that sponsor state sponsored hacking and cyber disruption and weapons of all varieties. So yeah, you better have... But it has to be involved in the right way. And I don't have a particular agenda here where here's my five-point plan. If I started to say that, I'd probably be going beyond. I try not to ski over the edge of my skis. You know, if I don't have a remarkably better idea than other people, what's the point of speaking up?”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't want to leave the impression I think all government is a nuisance. In the early stages of government discovering tech, there was a real danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some This isn't just a tech industry thing. This is true in all of life. There's people who love being celebrities. And it turns out that that's an attractive career path, apparently. Even if you're a billionaire tech magnate.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am surprised at how people who Have the skills and abilities to actually do something. And who got where they are by lots of careful, reasoned, logical rational thinking. Have become buffoons online, saying things primarily for its shock value entertainment value. In a way that, look, Kara, let's make a little pact here. If I ever do that, come and stop me. I will. I try.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, that's not always bad. I mean, people in your business have to be addicted to a public persona because you're out there asking questions on behalf of the world and making interesting conversations. And journalism is part of that, but it's a path to power and admiration and a whole variety of things. Now, I don't do that. So I'm only trying to explain the fact that people are addicted to status increasing things.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All communications with technology radio was telephone, telegraph. But this is expanded enormously, number one. It expanded it in a different way than before, so any individual can go out there and tweet. Broadcast in one form or another to everyone. Well, I think that's created two things. One is it's created a lot of concern and possible misuse. It's also created, there's a concept in the law of an attractive nuisance. Know if you build a swimming pool in your backyard and you don't put a fence around it and neighborhood kids drown in there, you can be responsible because damn it you should have a fence around your swim pool. Well, this is like an attractive nuisance in the sense that I think people have become addicted to. And addicted to becoming a public persona.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, and you and I believe that because we've been involved in this for a long time. Not everyone in the country does. But I think that's super important. So, of course, there's government attention. So, of course, Microsoft executives and executives from every tech company spend a lot of time in DC.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, but it's very hard for tech not to be involved in government because government's involved in tech. And it has to be involved in tech for a variety of reasons. Look at the competitiveness of our nation in an economic standpoint or in a defense standpoint or technology or almost any sphere you look at. Depends on the fact that we have a vital tech industry.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But not for want of trying on the government's part at the time. For reasons that seem quite quaint. Right. I mean, well, they particularly seem quaint in the five years after that big event when all of the focus was on a whole new set of Titans taking over everything.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think most people who are successful in the technology industry love innovation and rolling out new products and solving problems for their customers. Over time, of course, it's been hard to ignore Washington as a tech company because when an industry becomes big enough and important enough, it attracts attention from the government. That can be positive attention, or that can be negative attention. Mostly what government attention to a new area is uninformed attention. And as a result, there was a point where the tech industry didn't pay any attention to politics. And then there was a point where it's like, oh shit, if we don't pay attention to it. Gonna get screwed”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no great idea that I have today or tomorrow or ever that will fix the political quagmire that we're currently in.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can choose to what to do with the technology. Do I make lots of tiny chips to put intelligence everywhere? Do I make these really big AI chips that are maybe this big to make large language models? It's all based on a technological idea that's Depending on how you look at it 40 or 50 years old. And it's getting to a stage where we really need to revitalize it. So we've got a bunch of ideas about that.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moore's law is the idea that we can continue to make more and more powerful semiconductors or chips at lower and lower cost. And it's been fantastic. I mean, we've had multiple factors of a million improvement in price performance.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, but in order for it to go from beyond right now, we really need, in the short term, I'm sure there'll be competition and there'll be more supply and there'll be a variety of things. But in the medium to long term, you need to make fundamentally new lithography tools. And that's really hard. The very latest lithography tools are made by a company called ASML. They do an amazing job. One of their products must contain half a dozen or maybe a dozen miracles just. Things that are beyond all rational belief that you could make work. That whole line of stuff is at maybe not at its very end, but it needs some new technology injection, or Moore's Law is not going to continue And some people say it's already stalled out.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We still have some of our patent funds, but they're getting very late in life. Most of what we do now is focused on commercializing our most radical ideas, like this room temperature superconductivity. We have a bunch of ideas for how to improve chip lithography. As you know, there's sort of a worldwide bottleneck on making big high-performance chips. That's part of what makes the NVIDIA chips so insanely valuable. Well, because they're very hard to make.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Earth could only produce a tiny number of doses per year. Just ridiculously tiny. Not even enough for doing research, much less for treatment. So at Terra Power, although our main focus is building power reactors, Some of the engineers said, hey, we have this idea. We could make this stuff. And so we think we'll be able to make at least 300,000 doses a year in a couple of weeks.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what happened? So you're probably familiar with people who use radiation therapy as a way of killing cancer cells. But radiation therapy is very crude. It produces irradiates large parts of your body. It gives you terrible side effects. And you can't use it for extensive metamastis. You can't use it with cancers all over your body already. It's only good for a focus spot. Somebody had the idea if we take a very weak radioactive substance. So it's something called an alpha emitter. Attach it to a molecule that will hone and stick onto a cancer cell. This very weak radioactivity will only kill the cancer cell and won't hurt anything in the outside. So the very, very best material that people have identified is something called actinium-225.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that has when people have worked on this particular line of inquiry for cancer treatment for a very long time, it's called targeted alpha therapy. The problem is that it involves using a radioactive material. And that radioactive material is very, very difficult to make. obtain. So Earth didn't have enough doses to ever bring it out in a large scale before. But people still worked on it, thank God. In the cases where they have tried it, it has been an almost miraculous cure for late stage metacetic cancer.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Along the way, we figured out how to use weirdly a kind of nuclear waste. For a radical new cancer treatment. And it took multiple years for us to get this developed up to a stage, but it actually was given to patients in clinical trials just a few weeks ago”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question because there's two classes of answers you could give. You could give a class of answer towards the super ambitious thing that might take many years, but we should start on the path today. Or you can jump on the things which are much closer to fruition. Something that mixes those two is I'm a vice chairman of a company called Terra Power, which is a nuclear power company. That I started with Bill Gates and some other folks. We're making great progress there, but”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting it shots, getting a license is really hard. I've loved science since I was a little boy. And lots, millions and millions of little boys and girls love dinosaurs. Paleontologists are people who love dinosaurs as a child who never grew out of it, basically”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today we have top tier apex predators like a lion or a tiger, a polar bear They're puny compared to the apex. Dinosaur was step on the”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT