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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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?
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.
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,
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
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
It can't just be legislated behind some wall where only a few players get to play the game.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Showing 241–260 of 342 · page 13 of 18
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