Guillaume Verdon
speaker
342 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Dec 2023
Guillaume Verdon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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