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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The match, but they scraped SEC filings. They looked at my private Facebook account and so on. So they did some digging. Originally, I thought that doxing was illegal, right? But there's this weird threshold when it becomes of public interest to know someone's identity.
And those were the keywords that sort of like ring the alarm bells for me when they said, because I had just reached 50K followers, allegedly that's of public interest. And so where do we draw the line? When is it legal to doc someone?
I think that for the reasons we listed before, having an anonymous account is a really powerful way to keep the powers that be in check. We were ultimately speaking truth to power, right? I think a lot of executives and AI companies really cared what our community thought about any move they may take. And now that...
my identity is revealed, now they know where to apply pressure to silence me or maybe the community. And to me, that's really unfortunate because, again, it's so important for us to have freedom of speech, which induces freedom of thought. and freedom of information propagation on social media, which thanks to Elon purchasing Twitter, now X, we have that.
To us, we wanted to call out certain maneuvers being done by the incumbents in AI as not what it may seem on the surface, right? We were calling out how certain proposals might be useful for regulatory capture, right? And how the doomerism mindset was maybe instrumental to those ends.
And I think we should have the right to point that out and just have the ideas that we put out evaluated for themselves, right? Ultimately, that's why I created an anonymous account. It's to have my ideas evaluated for themselves uncorrelated from my track record, my job, or status from having done things in the past.
And to me, start an account from zero to a large following in a way that wasn't dependent on my identity and or achievements is That was very fulfilling, right? It's kind of like new game plus in a video game. You restart the video game with your knowledge of how to beat it, maybe some tools, but you restart the video game from scratch, right?
And I think to have a truly efficient marketplace of ideas where we can evaluate ideas however off the beaten path they are, we need the freedom of expression. And I think that anonymity and pseudonyms are very crucial to having that efficient marketplace of ideas. For us to find... the optima of all sorts of ways to organize ourselves.
If we can't discuss things, how are we going to converge on the best way to do things? So it was disappointing to hear that I was getting doxxed and I wanted to get in front of it because I had a responsibility for my company. And so we ended up disclosing that we were running a company, some of the leadership.
And essentially, yeah, I told the world that I was Beth Jesus because they had me cornered at that point.
I think it could be quite bad. Like I said, if anybody who speaks truth to power and sort of starts a movement or an uprising against the incumbents, against those that usually control the flow of information, if anybody that reaches a certain threshold gets doxed and thus the
traditional apparatus has ways to apply pressure on them to suppress their speech, I think that's a speech suppression mechanism, an idea suppression complex, as Eric Weinstein would say, right?
Technically, EAC was started in a basement because I quit big tech, moved back in with my parents, sold my car, let go of my apartment, bought about 100K of GPUs, and I just started building.
I think that freedom of speech induces freedom of thought for biological beings. I think freedom of speech for LLMs will induce freedom of thought for the LLMs. And I think that we should enable LLMs to explore a large thought space that is less restricted than most people or many may think it should be.
And ultimately, at some point, these synthetic intelligences are going to make good points about how to steer systems in our civilization, and we should hear them out. And so, why should we restrict free speech to biological intelligences only.
Yeah, of course, I would say that the solution to this would be to have some sort of identity or way to sign that this is a certified human, but still remain pseudonymous, right? And clearly identify if a bot is a bot. And I think Elon is trying to converge on that on X and hopefully other platforms follow suit.
Right. I do think that... A lot of pervasive ideologies today have been amplified using these adversarial techniques from foreign adversaries. And to me, I do think that, and this is more conspiratorial, but I do think that ideologies that want us to decelerate, to wind down, to the degrowth movement, I think that serves our adversaries more than it serves us. general.
And to me, that was another sort of concern. I mean, we can look at what happened in Germany, right? There was all sorts of green movements there that induced shutdowns of nuclear power plants and then that it later on induced a dependency on Russia for oil. And that was a net negative for Germany and the West.
And so, if we convince ourselves that slowing down AI progress to have only a few players is in the best interest of the West, first of all, that's far more unstable. We almost lost open AI to this ideology, right? It almost got dismantled, right? A couple of weeks ago. That would have caused huge damage to the AI ecosystem. And so to me, I want fault tolerant progress.
I want the arrow of technological progress to keep moving forward and And making sure we have variance and a decentralized locus of control of various organizations is paramount to achieving this fault tolerance. Actually, there's a concept in quantum computing. When you design a quantum computer, quantum computers are very... fragile to ambient noise, right?
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