Guillaume Verdon
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
suddenly you're like fully primed, then you're at maximum strength, right? And I've engineered that switch through years of lifting. If you're going to get under 500 pounds and it could crush you, if you don't have that switch to be wired in, you might die. So, that'll wake you right up. And that sort of skill I've carried over to like research when it's go time, when the stakes are high.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And by creating an anonymous account, it seemed like I had unclamped some variables in my brain and suddenly could explore a much wider parameter space of thoughts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Somehow I just reach another level of neural performance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think it was interesting in the early days. I think in the early days, I thought it was truly compartmentalized. Like, oh yeah, this is a character. You know, I'm Guillaume. Beth is just the character. I like take my thoughts and then I extrapolate them to a bit more extreme.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But, you know, over time, it's kind of like both identities were starting to merge mentally and people were like, no, you are, I met you. You are Beth. You are not just Guillaume. And I was like, wait, am I? And now it's like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
fully merged but it was already before the docs was already starting mentally that you know i'm at i am this character um it's part of me would you recommend people sort of have an alt absolutely
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
It's fun. It's like writing an essay and taking a position, right? It's like you do this in debate. It's like you can have experimental thoughts. And by the stakes being so low, because you're an anon account with, I don't know, 20 followers or something, you can experiment with your thoughts in a low stakes environment. And I feel like we've lost that in the era of everything...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
being under your main name, everything being attributable to you. People just are afraid to speak, explore ideas that aren't fully formed, right? And I feel like we've lost something there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So, I hope, you know, platforms like X and others like really help support people trying to stay pseudonymous or anonymous because it's really important for people to share thoughts that aren't fully formed and converge onto maybe hidden truths that were hard to converge upon. If it was just through open conversation with real names.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think to me, the reason I went to theoretical physics was that I had to learn the base of the stack that was going to stick around no matter how the technology changes, right? And to me, that was the foundation upon which then I later built engineering skills and other skills. And to me, the laws of physics, it may seem like the landscape right now is changing so fast, it's disorienting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But certain things like fundamental mathematics and physics aren't going to change. And if you have that knowledge and knowledge about complex systems and adaptive systems, I think that's going to carry you very far. And so not everybody has to study mathematics, but I think it's really a huge cognitive unlock to learn math and some physics and engineering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Get as close to the base of the stack as possible. Yeah, that's right, because the base of the stack doesn't change. Everything else, your knowledge might become not as relevant in a few years. Of course, there's a sort of transfer learning you can do, but then you have to always transfer learn constantly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Right, right. And you'd be surprised, once you've learned concepts in many... physical scenarios, how they can carry over to understanding other systems that aren't necessarily physics. And I guess like the IAC writings, you know, the principles and tenet posts that was based on physics, that was kind of my experimentation with
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
applying some of the thinking from out of equilibrium thermodynamics to understanding the world around us. And it's led to, to EAC and this, this movement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
No. I think fundamentally in thermodynamic dissipative adaptation, there's the word dissipation. Dissipation is important. Death is important, right? We have a saying in physics, physics progresses one funeral at a time. Yeah. I think the same is true for capitalism, companies, empires, people, everything. Everything must die at some point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think that we should probably extend our lifespan because we need a longer period of training because the world is more and more complex. We have more and more data to really be able to predict and understand the world. And if we have a finite window of higher neuroplasticity, then we have sort of a hard cap in how much we can understand about our world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So I think I am for death because, again, I think it's important if you have a king that would never die, that would be a problem, right? The system wouldn't be constantly adapting, right? You need novelty, you need youth, you need disruption to make sure the system's always adapting and malleable. Otherwise, if things...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
are immortal, you know, if you have, let's say, corporations that are there forever and they have the monopoly, they get calcified, they become not as optimal, not as high fitness in a changing, time-varying landscape, right? And so, death gives space for youth and novelty to take its place, and I think it's an important part of every system in nature. So, yeah, I am for death.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But I do think that longer lifespan and longer time for neuroplasticity, bigger brains should be something we should strive for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think I have ideas and things I'd like to achieve in this world before I have to go, but I don't think I'm necessarily afraid of death. So you're not attached to this particular body and mind that you got? No, I think I'm sure there's going to be better versions of myself in the future. Forks. Forks, right? Genetic forks or other, right? I truly believe that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think there's a sort of evolutionary-like algorithm happening at every bit or nap in the world. It's sort of adapting through this... process that we described in EAC. And I think maintaining this adaptation malleability is how we have constant optimization of the whole machine. And so I don't think I'm particularly, you know, an optimum that needs to stick around forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think there's going to be greater optima. What do you think is the meaning of it all?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The why? Well, the why is thermodynamics. It's why we're here. It's what has led to the formation of life and of civilization, of evolution of technologies and growth of civilization. But why do we have thermodynamics? Why do we have our particular universe? Why do we have these particular hyperparameters, the constants of nature? Well, then you get into the anthropic principle, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
In the landscape of potential universes, right? We're in the universe that allows for life. And then why is there potentially many universes? I don't know. I don't know that part. But could we potentially engineer new universes or create pocket universes and set the hyperparameters so there is some mutual information between our existence and that universe and we'd be somewhat its parents?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think that'd be very poetic. It's purely conjecture. But again, this is why figuring out quantum gravity would allow us to Understand if we can do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think we seek, just like an LLM seeks to minimize cross-entropy between its internal model and the world, we seek to minimize the statistical divergence between our predictions in the world and the world itself, and having regimes of energy scales or physical scales in which we have no visibility, no ability to predict or perceive. that's kind of an insult to us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And we want to be able to understand the world better in order to best steer it or steer us through it. And in general, it's a capability that has evolved because the better you can predict the world, the better you can capture utility or free energy towards your own sustenance and growth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And I think quantum gravity, again, is kind of the final boss in terms of knowledge acquisition because once we've mastered that, then we can do a lot potentially. But between here and there, I think there's a lot to learn in the mesoscales.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
There's a lot of information to acquire about our world and a lot of engineering, perception, prediction, and control to be done to climb up the Kardashev scale. And to us, that's the great challenge of our times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And the fundamental basis for the movement is this sort of realization that life is a sort of fire that seeks out free energy in the universe and seeks to grow. And that growth is fundamental to life. And you see this in the equations, actually, of out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Well, 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 that's sort of the basis of life. And 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, right? Thermodynamics rules the mesoscales. And to me,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 the two identities emerged. One was kind of, you know, I'm a decently respected scientist and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 dual to that, I was sort of experimenting with philosophical thoughts from a physicist's standpoint. And ultimately, I think that Around that time, it was like late 2021, early 2022, I think there was just a lot of pessimism about the future in general and pessimism about tech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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. And so I sort of felt a responsibility to sort of engineer a movement of viral optimism about the future
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, so. You said a lot of really interesting things there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Right. So I wrote the manifesto with my co-founder of EAC, an account named Bazelord, still anonymous, luckily, and hopefully forever. So it's Bazet, Buff, Jezzos, and Bazet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Like Bayes Lord.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
That's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
That'd be amazing. So, originally wrote the manifesto around the same time as I founded this company, and I worked at Google X or just X now or Alphabet X now that there's another X. And there, you know, the baseline is sort of secrecy, right? 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
in deep tech that, you know, has geopolitical impact. Right. Um, and so I was being secretive about what I was working on. There was no correlation between my company and my main identity publicly, um, And then not only did they correlate that, they also correlated my main identity and this account.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So I think the fact that they had doxed the whole Guillaume complex and the journalists reached out to actually my investors. which is pretty scary. You know, when you're a startup entrepreneur, you don't really have bosses except for your investors, right? And my investors ping me like, hey, this is going to come out. They've figured out everything. What are you going to do, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So I think 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 censor fused. 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... I like how you said sensor fused.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The match, but they 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 doc someone?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think that 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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 Elon purchasing Twitter, now X, we have that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
To us, we wanted to call out certain maneuvers being done by the incumbents in AI as not what it may seem on the surface, right? We were calling out how certain proposals might be useful for regulatory capture, right? And how the doomerism mindset was maybe instrumental to those ends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And I think we should have the right to point that out and just have the ideas that we put out evaluated for themselves, right? Ultimately, that's why I created an anonymous account. It's to have my ideas evaluated for themselves uncorrelated from my track record, my job, or status from having done things in the past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 is 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 doxxed 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 were running a company, some of the leadership.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And essentially, yeah, I told the world that I was Beth Jesus because they had me cornered at that point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 flow of information, if anybody that reaches a certain threshold gets doxed and thus the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Technically, EAC 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 LLMs to explore a large thought space that is less restricted than most people or many may think it should be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Right. I do think that... A lot of pervasive ideologies today have been amplified using these adversarial techniques from foreign adversaries. 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 our adversaries more than it serves us. general.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And to me, that was another sort of concern. I mean, we can look at what happened in Germany, right? There was all sorts of green movements there that induced shutdowns of nuclear power plants and then that it later on induced a dependency on Russia for oil. And that was a net negative for Germany and the West.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, right? It almost got dismantled, right? A couple of weeks ago. That would have caused huge damage to the AI ecosystem. And so to me, I want fault tolerant progress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I want the arrow of technological progress to keep moving forward and And making sure we have variance and 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, quantum computers are very... fragile to ambient noise, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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. Just like we saw at OpenAI, it was a couple board members and they had enough power to potentially collapse the organization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And at least to me, you know, 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 economy. adversarial equilibrium of powers, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And ultimately, the thesis is that the market will induce sort of, will positively select for AIs that are more reliable, more safe, and more tend to be aligned. They do what you want them to do, right? Because customers, right, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So we're actually, for reliability engineering, we just think that the market is much more efficient at achieving this sort of reliability optimum than sort of heavy-handed regulations that are written by the incumbents and in a subversive fashion, serves them to achieve regulatory capture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And if the two get too close, we open the door for 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, you know, some of the leaders in big tech today are good people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You set up that centralized power structure. It becomes a target, right? 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 our adversaries. I think that the strength of America is its variance, is its adaptability, its dynamism, and we need to maintain that at all costs. It's our free market.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 capitalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 open source and truly open AI trails not too far behind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think you avoid such a scenario where a market leader has so much market power, it just dominates everything 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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
kid in their mom's basement has access to, uh, you know, AI systems can understand how to, uh, uh, work with them and can contribute to the search over the hyper parameter space of how to engineer the systems, right? If you, if you think of, you know, our collective research as, as, as a civilization, it's really a search algorithm. And the more, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
points we have in the search algorithm, in this point cloud, the more we'll be able to explore new modes of thinking, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 is trailing behind. And then we have 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You know, attacking or monopolizing or co-opting any one point in that chain, 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 and 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
quantum form of intelligence right grokking systems that have multi-partite quantum entanglement that you can provably not represent efficiently on a classical computer a classical deep learning 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And I think that space of intelligence inspired by physics rather than the human brain is very large. And I think we're going through a moment right now similar to 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
It's a bit scary that we're not at the center of the space, but we 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 that give us a warning. And so similarly, I think by
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
letting go of this anthropomorphic, anthropocentric anchor for AI, we'll 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think there's a lot of beauty in the universe, right? I think life itself, civilization, this homo, techno, capital, mimetic 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 us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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've got to feel a responsibility to scale it in order to preserve it because the options are to grow or die.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So during my career, I had a moment where I realized that 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
A quantum computer is much better than a human to understand matter at the nanoscale. 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, right? 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We have on ourselves at all times. We have wearables soon that have shared perception with us, right? Like the human AI pin or, I mean, technically your Tesla car has shared perception. And so if you have shared experience, shared context, you communicate with one another better. and you have some sort of IO, really, it's an extension of yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And to me, I think that humanity augmenting itself with AI and having AI that is not anchored to anything biological. Both will coexist. And the way to align the parties, we already have a sort of mechanism to align super intelligences that are made of humans and technology, right? Companies are sort of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 physical principles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I do think that we're actually inducing an evolutionary process on the space of AIs through the market, right? 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So similar to how we domesticated wolves and turned them into dogs that are very clear in their expression, they're very aligned, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yes. Right? By augmenting ourselves with AI is unimaginable right now. The opportunity cost... We're at a fork in the road, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Whether we take the path of creating these technologies, augment ourselves, and get to climb up the Kardashev scale, become multi-planetary 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, right? And to me...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Out of responsibility to the future humans we could carry with higher carrying capacity by scaling up civilization. Out of responsibility to those humans, I think we have to make the greater, grander future happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I'm not a fan of that calculation. I think people just throw numbers out there. It's a very sloppy calculation, right? To calculate a probability, 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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
the futures that your brain naturally steers towards, right? I think that the estimators of PDU are biased because of our biology, right? We've evolved to... have biased sampling towards negative futures that are scary because that was an evolutionary optimum, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, like, they're not normalizing for the space of all possibilities and the space of all possibilities is like super exponentially large. And it's very hard to have this estimate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 of 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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. And that's what we're arguing for. The laws of physics say the system will want to grow. And subsystems that are optimized for growth and replication are more likely in the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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. So I don't have a PDoom 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
That was an example of a 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 for anybody to have an accurate estimate of the likelihood of certain futures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
If they were that good, I think they would be very rich trading on the stock market.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
set things up for a sort of dystopian future where only a 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 horrible things, right? 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, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 our doom, right? And to actually give me a good probability for each transition. And very often... there's a unphysical or highly unlikely transition in that chain, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, right? We have so much to lose, so much upside to lose by preemptively stopping the positive futures from happening out of fear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 possible. been the optimum, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Like, let's say you have 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
is a notion of sort of hierarchical cybernetic control, right? You have, you know, in a company it 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, right? They have their code base.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Let's say you're in a software company, they have their code base, they iterate it on it intraday, right? And then the management may be 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 timescale and greater scope.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And that seems to have emerged as sort of the optimal way to control systems. And really... That's what capitalism gives us, right? You have these hierarchies and you can even have like 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
then you have one fault at this control node and the whole system sort of crashes. Similarly to if you have, you know, one CEO that everybody reports to and that CEO goes on vacation, the whole company comes to their crawl.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
centralized locus of control, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, just like, you know, in a company, you may have, like, two units working on similar technology and competing with 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, right? And then a whole org gets...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And that's this process of trying new things and shedding old things that didn't work is what gives us adaptability and helps us converge on the technologies and things to do that are most good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I would say 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,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
which is more or less the pixels we have, then you'd be able to simulate the whole universe 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... I go back to cybernetics, the ability to perceive, predict, and control our world. But really, it's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Nowadays, it seems like a lot of intelligence we use is more about compression. It's about operationalizing information theory. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And AI, at least the way we do it today for LLMs and for quantum, is very much trying to minimize relative entropy between are 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 to find that compressed representation that has distilled all the variance and noise and entropy, right? And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 a black hole. And so I was wondering, how do black holes actually encode information? What is their compression code?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, right? So something I've worked on, this is public now, is quantum analog digital conversion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So how do you capture information from the real world in superposition and not destroy the superposition but digitize for a quantum mechanical computer? information from the real world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, right? And I think that many of the problems facing our civilization are actually beyond this complexity barrier. I mean, the greenhouse effect is a quantum mechanical effect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Chemistry is quantum mechanical. You know, 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 seemed to me like a fundamental capability for civilization that we needed to develop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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. And it's actually more fundamental than probability theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So we're used to things being this or that, but we're not used to thinking in superpositions because, well, our brains can't do that. So we have to translate the quantum mechanical world to, say, linear algebra to grok it. Unfortunately, that translation is exponentially inefficient on average. You have to represent things with very large matrices.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But really, you can make a quantum computer out of many things, right? And we've seen all sorts of players, you know, from neutral atoms, trapped ions, superconducting, metal, photons at different frequencies, I think you can make a quantum computer out of many things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So this bidirectionality of embedding the physical world into AI, AI into the physical world, the symbiosis between physics and AI, really that's the sort of core of... 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 to orbit and back. It doesn't make sense. Just use a delivery truck, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
correlations that are very quantum but 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. If you have a network of quantum sensors, they've captured a quantum mechanical image of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
and how to post-process that that becomes a sort of quantum form of machine perception. For example, Fermilab has a project exploring detecting dark matter with these quantum sensors. 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We can have very large networks of quantum sensors that help us peer into the earliest parts of the universe. For example, the LIGO is a quantum sensor. It's just a very large one. So yeah, I would say quantum machine perception simulations, grokking quantum simulations, similar to AlphaFold. AlphaFold understood the probability distribution over configurations of proteins. You can understand
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
quantum distributions over configurations of electrons more efficiently with quantum machine learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 100-page paper. Have fun. Essentially, quantum computing is usually... you embed reversible operations into a quantum computation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 the 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, You start with a superposition over parameters, right? Which is pretty funky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Now you're not just... You don't have just a point for parameters. You have a superposition over many potential parameters, right? And our goal is to... Is using phase kicks somehow? Right. To adjust parameters? Because phase kicks emulate... having the parameter space be like a particle in n dimensions and you're trying to get the Schrodinger equation
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Schrodinger dynamics in the loss landscape of the neural network, right? And so, you do an algorithm to induce this phase kick, which involves a feedforward, a kick, and then when you uncompute the feedforward, then all the errors in these phase kicks and these forces backpropagate and hit each one of the parameters throughout the layers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But again, this is 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 to run.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, I mean, some of the original team for the TensorFlow Quantum Project, which we started in school at the University of Waterloo, there was myself. Initially, I was a physicist, a mathematician. We had a computer scientist. We had a mechanical engineer, and then we had a physicist that was experimental primarily. And so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Right. 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. So we should say the name of your company is Extropic. Extropic, that's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And we do physics-based AI 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 quantum mechanical program.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And so there's this notion of a threshold where if your quantum bits are of 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But ultimately, it's really crazy to me how much exquisite level of control we have over these systems. It's actually... Quite crazy. And people are crossing, you know, they're achieving milestones. It's just, you know, in general, the media always gets ahead, right, of where the technology is. There's a bit too much hype. It's good for fundraising, but sometimes...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
you know, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, it's a D-state qubit. It's a multidimensional. Multidimensional. Multidimensional. So it's like, can you have a notion of 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I mean, with my main identity, I guess, ever since I was a kid, I wanted to figure out a theory of everything to understand the universe. And that path led me to theoretical physics eventually, right? Trying to answer the big questions of why are we here? Where are we going?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, which 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, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 the energy. But just like the stock market, if you have a stock that's correlated over time, the vacuum's actually correlated. So if you measured the vacuum at one point, You acquired information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, which is very weird because...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We don't understand how the vacuum gravitates. And there are theories where 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, I gave it the old college try, trying to hack the energy of the vacuum and hit the limits allowable by the laws of physics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But there's all sorts of caveats there where you can't extract more than you've put in, obviously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, I mean, it's allowable by the laws of physics. The reality, though, is that the correlations decay with distance. And so you're going to have to pay the price not too far away from where you extract it. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And that led me to study information theory and try to understand physics from the lens of information theory, understand the universe as one big computation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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... Like there's no laws of physics against there 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 we don't get disrupted, right? Whether it's a form of AI that disrupts us or a foreign intelligence from a different planet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Either way, increasing our capabilities and becoming formidable as humans, I think that's really important so that we're robust against whatever the universe throws at us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Well that's why we work on quantum sensors, right? They can sense gravity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And essentially, after reaching a certain level, studying black hole physics, I realized that I wanted to not only understand how the universe computes but sort of compute like nature and figure out how to build and apply computers that are inspired by nature, so physics-based computers. That sort of brought me to quantum computing as a field of study to, first of all, simulate nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Statistically speaking, right, if we observe 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. Yeah. But...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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. About the bottom of the ocean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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. 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. But, you know...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 to help us understand quantum gravity, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Which is, you know, still a holy grail that I would like to hit before I leave this earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 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 seem to have lost their information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Now, I think there's this firewall paradox that has been allegedly resolved in recent years by... You know, a former peer of mine, who's now a professor at Berkeley. And there, it seems like there is, as information falls into a black hole, it's sort of sort of a sedimentation, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 to the near horizon. And at some point, it gets so close to the horizon, it's in
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
the proximity or the scale in which quantum effects and quantum fluctuations matter. And that infalling matter could interfere with the traditional pictures, that it could interfere with the creation and annihilation of particles and antiparticles in the vacuum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
In my work, it was to learn representations of nature that can run on such computers. If you have AI representations that think like nature, then they'll be able to more accurately represent it. At least that was the thesis that brought me to be an early player in the field called quantum machine learning, so how to do machine learning on quantum computers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I don't know. I just want to, you know, set up shop near it to fast forward, you know, meet a future civilization, right? Like if we have a limited lifetime, if you can go orbit a black hole and emerge...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
To orbit and obviously not fall into it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 Kardashev scale to beyond Kardashev Type 3, we could engineer black holes with specific hyperparameters to transmit information to new universes we create.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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? And so... We don't know yet. We need to ascend the Kardashev scale to answer these questions, right? To peer into that regime of higher energy physics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The Kardashev scale is a measure of our energy production and consumption. And really, it's a logarithmic scale. And Kardashev type 1 is a milestone where we are producing the equivalent wattage to all the energy that is incident on Earth from the Sun. Kardashev type two would be harnessing all the energy that is output by the sun. And I think type three is like the whole galaxy. I think flow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah. Yeah. And then some people have some crazy type four and five, but I don't know if I believe in those, but to me, it seems like from the first principles of thermodynamics that again, this there's this concept of thermodynamic energy, driven, dissipative adaptation where life evolved on Earth because we have this sort of energetic drive from the sun, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We have incident energy and life evolved on Earth to capture energy. figure out ways to best capture that free energy to maintain itself and grow. And I think that 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The goal is for the human techno capital memetic machine to become self-aware and to hyperstitiously engineer its own growth. So let's, let's define each of those words. So you have humans, you have technology, you have capital, and then you have, you have memes information, right? And all of those systems are coupled with one another, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And really sort of extend notions of intelligence to the quantum realm. So how do you capture and understand quantum mechanical data from our world? And how do you learn quantum mechanical representations of our world? On what kind of computer? do you run these representations and train them? How do you do so?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We see Iyak as a sort of meta-heuristic, a sort of very thin cultural framework from which you can have much more opinionated forks, right? 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 of IAC.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I would say that it's trying to find a middle ground between EAC and sort of EA and EA safety. To me, like 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. True. It's like the balance between centralization and decentralization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The real optimum is always somewhere in the middle. But for EAC, we're pushing for entropy, novelty, disruption, malleability, speed, rather than being conservative, suppressing thought, suppressing speech, adding constraints, adding... too many regulations slowing things down. We're trying to bring balance to the force, right? The systems... Balance to the force of human civilization, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, right? Between constraints, energy minimization and entropy, right? Systems want to equilibrate, balance these two things. And so I thought that the balance was lacking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And so we created this movement to bring balance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
thinking of culture almost like code, right? Nowadays, I mean, what you prompt the LLM 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 this sort of machine of to adapt over the space of code, could we apply that to culture?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And so that's really sort of the questions I was looking to answer because ultimately I had a sort of crisis of faith. Originally I wanted to figure out, as every physicist does at the beginning of their career, a few equations that describe the whole universe and sort of be the hero of the story there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And our goal is to not say you should live your life this way, X, Y, Z. It's 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 minds, right? Elon calls it the mind virus. We call it the D-cell mind virus complex, which is the decelerative that is kind of the overall pattern between all of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
There's many variants as well. And so, You know, if there's a sort of viral pessimism, decelerative movement, we needed to have not only one movement, but, you know, many, many variants. So it's very hard to pinpoint and stop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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, right? 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. Mm-hmm. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And sometimes we do cult like things, but there's no like ceremony and robes and whatnot. Not yet. Not yet. But ultimately, yeah, I mean, I totally agree that. It seems to me that humans wanna 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 of thought was suppressed or you were canceled, right? Now we've created a new mode, but the whole point is that we're not trying to have a very restricted space of thought. There's not just one way to think about EAC and its many forks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But eventually, I realized that actually augmenting ourselves with machines, augmenting our ability to perceive, predict, and control our world with machines is the path forward. And that's what got me to leave theoretical physics and go into quantum computing and quantum machine learning. And during those years, I thought that there was still a piece missing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And the point is that there are many forks and there can be many clusters and many islands and I shouldn't be in control of it. in any way. I mean, there's no formal org 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
a sort of deterritorialization in the space of ideas so that we don't end up in one cluster that's very cult-like. And so cults usually, they don't allow people to defect or start competing forks, whereas we encourage it, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah. So initially, I think what allowed us to grow under the radar was because it was camouflaged as sort of meta-ironic, right? We would sneak in deep truths within a package of humor and memes and what are called shitposts, right? And I think that was purposefully a sort of camouflage against those that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 and take yourself seriously. And so, that allowed us to grow pretty rapidly in the early days. But of course, that's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
you know, 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 mimetic fitness packets of information so that they can spread effectively and carry a message, right? So it's kind of a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
a vector to spread the message. And yes, we've been using 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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
the timeline is optimal for very serious, thoughtful discussions. You get rewarded for polarization. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
There was a piece of our understanding of the world and our way to compute and our way to think about the world. And if you look at the physical scales, right? At the very small scales, things are quantum mechanical. And at the very large scales, things are deterministic. Things have averaged out. I'm definitely here in this seat. I'm not in a superposition over here and there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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. We want quick delivery, very convenient at home, low prices.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
He understood how the machine worked and how to harness it, 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 in robotics out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And certainly, with the birth of AWS, kind of enabled the 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You know, 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 O'Neill cylinders and get industry off planet, which I think is brilliant. I think, you know, Just overall, I'm for billionaires.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I know this is a controversial statement sometimes, but I think that in a sense, it's kind of a proof of stake voting, right? 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
because they speak the best on TV, not because they have a proven track record of allocating taxpayer capital most efficiently. That's why I'm for capitalism over, say, giving all our money to the government and letting them figure out how to allocate it. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah. I think a lot of people would, instead of trying to understand how the technical capital machine works and realizing they have much more agency than they think, they'd rather have this 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. But
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And 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 sort of positive sum mindset shift is so potent. And really, that's what...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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. Each individual has agency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
At the very small scales, things are in superposition. They can exhibit interference effects. But at the mesoscales, the scales that matter for day-to-day life, the scales of proteins, of biology, of gases, liquids, and so on, things are actually thermodynamical. They're fluctuating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Awesome. Well, so, so building technologies and building, it doesn't have to be technologies, just building in general means, you know, having agency trying to change the world by creating, let's say a company, which is a self-sustaining organism that, that, accomplishes a function in the broader techno-capital machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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 non-profits that you know, nonprofits, once they run out of money, their function can no longer be accomplished.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You're kind of deforming the market artificially compared to sort of subverting or coursing the market or dancing with the market to convince it that actually this function is important, adds value, and here it is, right? And so I think, you know, this is sort of the way between this sort of degrowth, like ESG approach versus say Elon, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
It is somewhat because he's very much against regulation in many aspects, but for AI, he's definitely... a proponent of regulations. I think overall, he saw the dangers of say,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
opening eye, cornering the market, and then getting to have the monopoly over the cultural priors that you can embed in these LLMs that then, as LLMs now become the source of truth for people, then you can shape the culture of the people. And so you can control people by controlling LLMs. And he saw that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Just like it was the case for social media, if you shape the function of information propagation, you can shape people's opinions. He sought to make a competitor. So at least I think we're very aligned there that the way to a good future is to maintain sort of adversarial equilibria between the various AI players. I'd love to talk to him to understand sort of his thinking about how to make...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
you know, how to advance AI going forwards. I mean, he's also hedging his bets, I would say, you know, with Neuralink, right? I think if he can't stop the progress of AI, you know, he's building the technology to merge. So, you know, look at the actions, not just the words, but.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think that anxiety is good. I think, like I said, I want the free market to create aligned AIs that are reliable. And I think that's what he's trying to do with XAI. So I'm all for it. What I am against is sort of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And after, I guess, about eight years in quantum computing and quantum machine learning, I had a realization that I was looking for answers about our universe by studying the very big and the very small, right? I did a bit of quantum cosmology, so that's studying the cosmos, where it's going, where it came from. You study black hole physics. You study the extremes in quantum gravity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Stopping, let's say, the open source ecosystem from thriving by, let's say, in the executive order, claiming that open source LMs are dual use technologies and should be government controlled. then everybody needs to register their GPU and their big matrices with the government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think that extra friction will dissuade a lot of hackers from contributing, hackers that could later become the researchers that make key discoveries that push us forward, including discoveries for AI safety. And so I think I just want to maintain ubiquity of opportunity to contribute to AI and to own a piece of the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
It can't just be legislated behind some wall where only a few players get to play the game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think, again, I think if there was no one working on it, I think I would be a proponent of it. I think, again, our goal is to sort of bring balance. And obviously, a sense of urgency is a useful tool to make progress. It hacks our dopaminergic systems and gives us energy to work late into the night. I think also... having a higher purpose you're contributing to, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
At the end of the day, it's like, what am I contributing to? I'm contributing to the growth of this beautiful machine so that we can seek to the stars. That's really inspiring. That's also a sort of neuro hack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, I just think we have to be careful because, you know, safety is just the perfect cover for sort of centralization of power and covering up eventually corruption. I'm not saying it's corrupted now, but it could be down the line. And really... you let the argument run, there's no amount of sort of centralization of control that will be enough to ensure your safety.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
There's always more 999s of P safety that you can gain, you know, 999.9999% safe. Maybe you want another 9, oh, please give us full access to everything you do, full surveillance. And frankly, those that Our proponents of AI safety have proposed like having a global panopticon, right? Where you have centralized perception of everything going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And to me, that just opens up the door wide open for a sort of big brother 1984-like scenario. And that's not a future I want to live in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, I mean, you know, originally we weren't going to announce last week, but I think with the doxing and disclosure, we got our hand forced. So we had to disclose roughly what we were doing, but... Really, Xtropic was born from my dissatisfaction and that of my colleagues with the quantum computing roadmap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Quantum computing was sort of the first path to physics-based computing that was trying to commercially scale. And I was working on physics-based AI that runs on these physics-based computers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You study where the energy density is sufficient for both quantum mechanics and gravity to be relevant, right? And the sort of extreme scenarios are black holes in the very early universe. So there's the sort of scenarios that you study the interface between quantum mechanics and relativity. And really, I was studying these extremes to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But ultimately, our greatest enemy was this noise, this pervasive problem of noise that, you know, as I mentioned, you have to constantly pump out the noise out of the system to maintain this pristine environment where quantum mechanics can take effect. And that constraint was just too much. It's too costly to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We were wondering, as generative AI is eating the world, more and more of the world's computational workloads are focused on generative AI, how could we use physics to engineer the ultimate physical substrate for generative AI? From first principles of physics, of information theory, of computation, and ultimately of thermodynamics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And so what we're seeking to build is a physics-based computing system and physics-based AI algorithms that are inspired by out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics or harness it directly to do machine learning as a physical process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yes, it is full stack. And so we're folks that have built differentiable programming into the quantum computing ecosystem with TensorFlow Quantum. One of my co-founders of TensorFlow Quantum is the CTO, Trevor McCourt. We have some of the best quantum computer architects, those that have designed IBM's and AWS's systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
They've left quantum computing to help us build what we call actually a thermodynamic computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Right. I mean, that was a challenge to build, to invent, to build, and then to get to run on the real devices. Can you actually speak to what it is? Yeah. So TensorFlow Quantum was an attempt at, well, I mean, I guess we succeeded at combining deep learning or differentiable classical programming with quantum computing and turn quantum computing into...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
or have types of programs that are differentiable in quantum computing. And Andrej Karpathy calls differentiable programming software 2.0. It's like gradient descent is a better programmer than you. The idea was that in the early days of quantum computing, you can only run short quantum programs. Which quantum programs should you run? Well, just let gradient descent find those programs instead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We built the first infrastructure uh, to not only run differentiable quantum programs, but combine them as part of broader deep learning, uh, graphs, uh, incorporating deep neural networks, you know, the ones you know and love with what are called quantum neural networks. Um, and, uh, Ultimately, it was a very cross-disciplinary effort.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We had to invent all sorts of ways to differentiate, to back-propagate through the hybrid graph. But ultimately, it taught me that the way to program matter and to program physics is by differentiating through control parameters. If you have parameters that affect the physics of the system, and you can evaluate some loss function, you can optimize...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
the system to accomplish a task, whatever that task may be. And that's a very sort of universal meta framework for how to program physics-based computers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think working across disciplinary boundaries is always a challenge, and you have to be extremely patient in teaching one another. I learned a lot of software engineering through the process. My colleagues learned a lot of quantum physics, and some learned machine learning through the process of building this system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
understand how the universe works and where is it going, but I was missing a lot of the meat in the middle, if you will, right? Because day-to-day quantum mechanics is relevant and the cosmos is relevant, but not that relevant, actually. We're on sort of the medium space and time scales. And there, the main theory of physics that is most relevant is thermodynamics, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
If you get some smart people that are passionate and trust each other in a room and you have a small team and you teach each other your specialties, suddenly you're kind of forming this sort of model soup of expertise and something special comes out of that, right? It's like combining genes, but for... your knowledge bases and sometimes special products come out of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And so I think like, even though it's very high friction initially to work in an interdisciplinary team, I think the product at the end of the day is worth it. And so learned a lot trying to bridge the gap there. And I mean, it's still a challenge to this day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You know, we hire folks that have an AI background, folks that have a pure physics background, and somehow we have to make them talk to one another, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, it's really hard to pinpoint that je ne sais quoi, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, I'm actually French-Canadian. Oh, you are legitimately French-Canadian. I thought you were just doing that for the cred. No, no, I'm truly French-Canadian from Montreal. But yeah, essentially we look for people with very high fluid intelligence that aren't over-specialized because they're going to have to get out of their comfort zone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
They're going to have to incorporate concepts that they've never seen before and very quickly get comfortable with them, right? Or learn to work in a team. And so that's sort of what we look for when we hire. We can't hire people that are just like, you know, optimizing this subsystem for the past three or four years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We need like really general sort of broader, uh, intelligence and specialty, uh, and people that are, that are open-minded really. Cause if you're pioneering a new approach from scratch, there, there is no textbook. There's no reference. It's just us and, and people that are hungry to learn. So we have to teach each other. We have to learn the literature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We have to share knowledge bases, collaborate, uh, in order to push the boundary of knowledge further together. And so people that are used to just getting prescribed what to do at this stage, when you're at the pioneering stage, that's not necessarily who you want to hire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think our goal is to both run human-like AI or anthropomorphic AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I know it's triggering for you. We think that the future is actually physics-based AI combined with anthropomorphic. So you can imagine I have a sort of world modeling engine through physics-based AI. Physics-based AI is better at representing the world at all scales because it can be quantum mechanical, thermodynamic, deterministic, etc.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
hybrid representations of the world, just like our world at different scales has different regimes of physics. If you inspire yourself from that in the ways you learn representations of nature, you can have much more accurate representations of nature. So you can have very accurate world models at all scales, right? And so you have the world modeling engine
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And then you have the sort of anthropomorphic AI that is human-like. So you can have the science, the playground to test your ideas, and you can have a synthetic scientist. And to us, that joint system of a physics-based AI and an anthropomorphic AI is the closest thing to a fully general artificially intelligent system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics. Because life is a process that is thermodynamical, and it's out-of-equilibrium. We're not just a soup of particles at equilibrium with nature. We're a sort of coherent state trying to maintain itself by acquiring free energy and consuming it. And that's sort of, I guess, another shift in my faith in the universe happened towards the end of my time at Alphabet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, no, you wouldn't try to extrapolate the stock market with an LM trained on text from the internet, right? It's not going to be a very accurate model. It's not going to model its priors or its uncertainties about the world very accurately, right? So you need a different type of AI to complement sort of this text extrapolation AI, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I don't know if I believe in a finite time singularity as a single point in time. I think it's going to be asymptotic and sort of a diagonal sort of asymptote. Like, you know, we have the light cone, we have the limits of physics restricting our ability to grow. So obviously can't fully diverge on a finite time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Um, I, I think my priors are that, you know, I, I think a lot of, a lot of, uh, people on the other side of the aisle, um, think that once we reach human level AI, there's going to be an inflection point and a sudden like foom, like suddenly AI is going to grok how to, you know, manipulate matter at the nanoscale. Mm-hmm. assemble nanobots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And having worked for nearly a decade in applying AI to engineer matter, it's much harder than they think. And in reality, you need a lot of samples from either a simulation of nature that's very accurate and costly, or nature itself. And that keeps your ability to control the world around us in check. There's a sort of minimal...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah. So this movement, you know, is not right-wing or left-wing fundamentally. It's more like up versus down in terms of the scale of civilization. All right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But it seems to be like there is a sort of case of alignment of the existing political parties where those that are for more centralization of power control and more regulations are aligning themselves with the doomers because that sort of instilling fear in people is a great way for them to give up more control and give the government more power. But fundamentally, we're not left versus right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think we've done polls of people's alignment within IAC. I think it's pretty balanced. So it's a new fundamental issue of our time. It's not just centralization versus decentralization. It's kind of do we go, it's like tech progressivism versus techno-conservativism, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Right. I think people trying to do good from first principles is good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We're both trying to do good to some extent, and we're arguing for which loss function we should use, right? Their loss function is sort of hedons, right? Units of hedonism, like how good do you feel and for how much time? right? And so, suffering would be negative hedons and they're trying to minimize that. But to us, that seems like that loss function has sort of spurious minima, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You can start minimizing shrimp farm pain, right? Which seems not that productive to me. Or you can end up with wireheading where you just either install a neural link or you scroll TikTok forever and you feel good on a short-term timescale because you're in neurochemistry, but on a long-term timescale, it causes decay and death because you're not being productive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Whereas EAC measuring progress of civilization, not in terms of a subjective loss function like hedonism, but rather an objective measure, a quantity that cannot be gamed that is physical energy, it's very objective. And there's not many ways to game it. If you did it in terms of GDP or a currency, that's pinned to a certain value that's moving, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And so that's not a good way to measure our progress. But the thing is, we're both trying to make progress and ensure humanity flourishes and gets to grow. We just have different loss functions and different ways of going about doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, so this particular loss function, it's not stiff. It's kind of an average of averages, right? It's like distributions of states in the future are going to follow a certain distribution. So it's not deterministic. We're not on stiff rails, right? It's just a statistical statement about the future. But at the end of the day, you can...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
believe in gravity or not, you know, but it's not necessarily an option to obey it, right? And some people try to test that and that goes not so well. So similarly, you know, I think thermodynamics is there whether we like it or not, and we're just trying to point out
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So we invite skepticism, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah. I mean, I think it provided initially a sense of community for engineers and intellectuals and rationalists in the early days. And it seems like the community was very healthy, but then You know, they formed all sorts of organizations and started routing capital and having actual power, right? They have real power. They influence the government, they influence most AI orgs now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I mean, they're literally controlling the board of OpenAI, right? And look over to Anthropic. I think they all have some control over that too. And so I think...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The assumption of EAC is more like capitalism, is that every agent organism and meta-organism is going to act in its own interest, and we should maintain adversarial equilibrium or adversarial competition to keep each other in check at all times, at all scales.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think that, yeah, ultimately, it was the perfect cover to acquire tons of power and capital, and unfortunately, sometimes that corrupts people over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Okay, so I have a particular regimen. I would say my favorite days are... 12 p.m. to 4 a.m. And I would have meetings in the early afternoon, usually external meetings, some internal meetings. Because I'm CEO, I have to interface with the outside world, whether it's customers or investors or interviewing potential candidates. And usually I'll have ketones, exogenous ketones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So you're on a keto diet? I've done keto before for football and whatnot. But I like to... have a meal after sort of part of my day is done. And so I can just have extreme focus. You do the social interactions earlier in the day. Right. Without food. Front load them. Yeah. Yeah. Like right now I'm on ketones and Red Bull. Yeah. And it just gives you a clarity of thought that is really next level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Because then when you eat, you're actually allocating some of your energy that could be going to nutrition. neural energy to your digestion. After I eat, maybe I take a break an hour or so, an hour and a half, and then usually it's like ideally one meal a day like steak and eggs and vegetables, animal-based primarily, so fruit and meat. And then I do a second wind usually, that's deep work. And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Because I am a CEO, but I'm still technical. I'm contributing to most patents. And there, I'll just stay up late into the night and work with engineers on very technical problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And I started an anonymous account just to experiment with ideas originally, right? Because 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 to restricting your thoughts, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah. Yeah, that's the perfect time. The emails, the things that are on fire stop trickling in. You can focus, and then you have your second wind. And, you know, I think Demis Hassabis has a similar workday to some extent. So I think that that's definitely inspired my workday.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But yeah, I started this workday when I was at Google and had to manage a bit of the product during the day and have meetings and then do technical work at night. Exercise, sleep, those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, I used to play American football. I've done all sorts of sports growing up. And then I was into powerlifting for a while. So when I was studying mathematics in grad school, I would just do math and lift, take caffeine. And that was my day. It was very pure, the purest of monk modes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Um, but it's really interesting how in powerlifting you're trying to cause neural adaptation by having certain driving signals and you're trying to engineer neuroplasticity through all sorts of supplements. Um, and you know, you have all sorts of, you know, brain derived neurotrophic factors that get secreted when you, when you lift.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So it's funny to me how I was trying to engineer, uh, um, um, neural adaptation in my, uh, nervous system more broadly, not just my brain, while learning mathematics. I think you can learn much faster if you convince yourself to care a lot about what you're learning and you have some sort of assistance, let's say caffeine or some cholinergic supplement to increase neuroplasticity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I should chat with Andrew Huberman at some point. He's the expert. But yeah, at least to me, it's like you know, you can try to input more tokens into your brain, if you will, and you can try to increase the learning rate so that you can learn much faster on a shorter timescale. So I've learned a lot of things. I followed my curiosity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You're naturally, if you're passionate about what you're doing, you're going to learn faster. You're going to become smarter faster. And if you follow your curiosity, you're always going to be interested. And so I advise people to follow their curiosity and don't respect the boundaries of certain fields or what you've been allocated in terms of lane of what you're working on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Just go out and explore. and follow your nose and try to acquire and compress as much information as you can into your brain. Anything that you find interesting. And caring about a thing. And like you said, which is interesting, it does, it works for me really well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Right. And so at least part of my character as Beth Jesus is kind of like... Yeah, the hype man. Yeah, but I'm like hyping myself up, but then I just tweet about it. And it's just when I'm trying to get really hyped up and like an altered state of consciousness where I'm like... ultra-focused, in the flow, wired, trying to invent something that's never existed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I need to get to unreal levels of excitement. But your brain has these levels of That you can unlock with like higher levels of adrenaline and whatnot. And I mean, I've learned that in powerlifting that actually you can engineer a mental switch to like increase your strength, right? Like if you can engineer a switch, maybe you have a prompt, like a certain song or some music where...