Adam Brown

There's like the good kind where they sort of maybe should drop the bomb according to their orders and refuse to.

And then there's the other kind.

Oh, I don't impose narratives on it like that.

It's certainly a big...

Very big contrast between doing physics and writing retail papers, as it were.

Retail?

You know, doing one by one, writing physics papers, and then doing AI, which moves just tremendously faster, and doing, you know, trying to contribute to the wholesale production of knowledge in that way.

Yeah, and they had very different...

impacts in terms of counterfactual impact.

Physics, like you write some papers and you're like, had I not written that paper?

No one would have written that paper for years or ever, perhaps.

Computer science doesn't feel like that.

It feels like if you didn't do it, someone else would do it pretty soon thereafter.

On the other hand, the impact, you know, even a few days of impact in computer science, these things are going to change the world dramatically.

hopefully for the better, to such a large degree that that's much bigger than potentially all the physics papers you ever wrote.

Well, partly there's just so many more people working on the problems in computer science than there are in physics.

Just the number of people is part of what makes the counterfactual impact.

AI research around the world?

There's, you know, I don't know how many people are in the works, but it's like thousands and thousands and thousands.

Whereas in physics, it's 100, 200, 300.