David Duvenaud

cults or whatever we call them and have the people think we need to shut them down.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Well, one thing I'll say is that I think tenure is delivering exactly on the exact reason that it's supposed to be there, is to allow somebody such as myself to work on some crazy direction that most people disagree with and maybe don't even have particular expertise in.

And it's pretty explicitly encouraged in my institution and I think most institutions to use this freedom to try to do something a little bit bigger and crazy.

So I actually think I have a lot of problems.

The system works.

Yeah, the system works.

I mean, I have a lot of problems with universities and academia, but in this aspect, they're covering themselves in glory.

But then as for my actual colleagues, I mean,

There's been a selection effect where my colleagues that buy that AGI is a big deal and possible and maybe not that far away are all at labs.

My colleague Jimmy Baugh is one of the co-founders of XAI.

A bunch of my former students are at Anthropic and XAI and Google and stuff like that.

There's one of these evaporative cooling where

the people that are left that are still doing something like related to ML are the ones that, in my view, are like very head in the sand and dismissive and should know better, but are saying things like, oh, like, you know, I've been working with AI for a long time and it's harder to make these things agentic than you think.

And just like these very, just disbelieving that there's ever going to be this physical artifact or anytime soon that has all this sort of like dynamism and abilities that humans have.

Maybe.

I mean, the thing is that I also hear this from other people or other faculties like philosophy or stats or economics.

I think just in general, for some reason, most academics think like, but how could it ever do my job?