Dwarkesh Patel

Instead, Jane Streeters use an internal currency called hive bucks to bid for compute in real-time auctions.

Everybody can spend as many hive bucks as they want, but your hive buck bid is meant to represent the real dollar value of the experiment that you want to run.

Now, notably during the auction, anybody can change anybody else's bid.

And after the auction, people can even kill each other's jobs.

People just trust each other to do this in a way that benefits the whole firm.

As a result, Janestreet's allocations reflect a near real-time consensus on the highest priority uses of compute.

As Axel, one of their ML engineers, put it, I think Janestreet is like pretty bottom up in terms of we have lots of different researchers who are all training their own models, sequence models, all sorts of other weird and wonderful things.

By the way, with their new compute deal, they've just added a $6 billion HiveBuck stimulus to their internal economy.

Jane Street is hiring researchers, engineers, and interns.

Go to janestreet.com slash thorkash to learn more.

Okay, so stepping back, I want to understand, I think there's this question about, what does this tell us about what actually changed in our environments over the last 18,000 years?

And we talked a little about what happened after the Bronze Age.

I want to understand, it's surprising to me, we're talking about this during the collective intelligence part of the conversation, but it's surprising to me that things like

intelligence or lack of schizophrenia or so forth, things just seem kind of robustly good.

We're not maxed out before the Bronze Age.

And in fact, there was so much, the diversity among different populations was so big that you have the European hunter-gatherers having three standard deviations, less predicted value for what they would score on the intelligence test if it existed.

But, you know, they were existing in the real world in a place where intelligence matters.

And so how can it be that this was not a... You just look at the human body or any animal, it's just like evolution has been acting on it so strongly to make it functional to the things it needs to do.

And this one thing, which seems like so relevant, especially to what human hunter-gatherers needed to do,

doesn't seem to have been under that strong selection in the Mesolithic or Paleolithic or those eras?