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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Appearances
Yeah, no, you wouldn't try to extrapolate the stock market with an LM trained on text from the internet, right? It's not going to be a very accurate model. It's not going to model its priors or its uncertainties about the world very accurately, right? So you need a different type of AI to complement sort of this text extrapolation AI, yeah.
I don't know if I believe in a finite time singularity as a single point in time. I think it's going to be asymptotic and sort of a diagonal sort of asymptote. Like, you know, we have the light cone, we have the limits of physics restricting our ability to grow. So obviously can't fully diverge on a finite time.
Um, I, I think my priors are that, you know, I, I think a lot of, a lot of, uh, people on the other side of the aisle, um, think that once we reach human level AI, there's going to be an inflection point and a sudden like foom, like suddenly AI is going to grok how to, you know, manipulate matter at the nanoscale. Mm-hmm. assemble nanobots.
And having worked for nearly a decade in applying AI to engineer matter, it's much harder than they think. And in reality, you need a lot of samples from either a simulation of nature that's very accurate and costly, or nature itself. And that keeps your ability to control the world around us in check. There's a sort of minimal...
Yeah. So this movement, you know, is not right-wing or left-wing fundamentally. It's more like up versus down in terms of the scale of civilization. All right.
But it seems to be like there is a sort of case of alignment of the existing political parties where those that are for more centralization of power control and more regulations are aligning themselves with the doomers because that sort of instilling fear in people is a great way for them to give up more control and give the government more power. But fundamentally, we're not left versus right.
I think we've done polls of people's alignment within IAC. I think it's pretty balanced. So it's a new fundamental issue of our time. It's not just centralization versus decentralization. It's kind of do we go, it's like tech progressivism versus techno-conservativism, right?
Right. I think people trying to do good from first principles is good.
We're both trying to do good to some extent, and we're arguing for which loss function we should use, right? Their loss function is sort of hedons, right? Units of hedonism, like how good do you feel and for how much time? right? And so, suffering would be negative hedons and they're trying to minimize that. But to us, that seems like that loss function has sort of spurious minima, right?
You can start minimizing shrimp farm pain, right? Which seems not that productive to me. Or you can end up with wireheading where you just either install a neural link or you scroll TikTok forever and you feel good on a short-term timescale because you're in neurochemistry, but on a long-term timescale, it causes decay and death because you're not being productive.
Whereas EAC measuring progress of civilization, not in terms of a subjective loss function like hedonism, but rather an objective measure, a quantity that cannot be gamed that is physical energy, it's very objective. And there's not many ways to game it. If you did it in terms of GDP or a currency, that's pinned to a certain value that's moving, right?
And so that's not a good way to measure our progress. But the thing is, we're both trying to make progress and ensure humanity flourishes and gets to grow. We just have different loss functions and different ways of going about doing it.
Yeah, so this particular loss function, it's not stiff. It's kind of an average of averages, right? It's like distributions of states in the future are going to follow a certain distribution. So it's not deterministic. We're not on stiff rails, right? It's just a statistical statement about the future. But at the end of the day, you can...
believe in gravity or not, you know, but it's not necessarily an option to obey it, right? And some people try to test that and that goes not so well. So similarly, you know, I think thermodynamics is there whether we like it or not, and we're just trying to point out
So we invite skepticism, right?
Yeah. I mean, I think it provided initially a sense of community for engineers and intellectuals and rationalists in the early days. And it seems like the community was very healthy, but then You know, they formed all sorts of organizations and started routing capital and having actual power, right? They have real power. They influence the government, they influence most AI orgs now.
I mean, they're literally controlling the board of OpenAI, right? And look over to Anthropic. I think they all have some control over that too. And so I think...
The assumption of EAC is more like capitalism, is that every agent organism and meta-organism is going to act in its own interest, and we should maintain adversarial equilibrium or adversarial competition to keep each other in check at all times, at all scales.
I think that, yeah, ultimately, it was the perfect cover to acquire tons of power and capital, and unfortunately, sometimes that corrupts people over time.
Okay, so I have a particular regimen. I would say my favorite days are... 12 p.m. to 4 a.m. And I would have meetings in the early afternoon, usually external meetings, some internal meetings. Because I'm CEO, I have to interface with the outside world, whether it's customers or investors or interviewing potential candidates. And usually I'll have ketones, exogenous ketones.
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