Adam Brown is a founder and lead of BlueShift with is cracking maths and reasoning at Google DeepMind and a theoretical physicist at Stanford.We discuss: destroying the light cone with vacuum decay, holographic principle, mining black holes, & what it would take to train LLMs that can make Einstein level conceptual breakthroughs.Stupefying, entertaining, & terrifying.Enjoy!Watch on YouTube, read the transcript, listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite platform.Sponsors- Deepmind, Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI, partner with Scale for high quality data to fuel post-training Publicly available data is running out - to keep developing smarter and smarter models, labs will need to rely on Scale’s data foundry, which combines subject matter experts with AI models to generate fresh data and break through the data wall. Learn more at scale.ai/dwarkesh.- Jane Street is looking to hire their next generation of leaders. Their deep learning team is looking for ML researchers, FPGA programmers, and CUDA programmers. Summer internships are open for just a few more weeks. If you want to stand out, take a crack at their new Kaggle competition. To learn more, go to janestreet.com/dwarkesh.- This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue.Timestamps(00:00:00) - Changing the laws of physics(00:26:05) - Why is our universe the way it is(00:37:30) - Making Einstein level AGI(01:00:31) - Physics stagnation and particle colliders(01:11:10) - Hitchhiking(01:29:00) - Nagasaki(01:36:19) - Adam’s career(01:43:25) - Mining black holes(01:59:42) - The holographic principle(02:23:25) - Philosophy of infinities(02:31:42) - Engineering constraints for future civilizations Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
Today, I'm chatting with Adam Brown, who is a founder and lead of the BlueShift team, which is cracking math and reasoning at Google DeepMind, and a theoretical physicist at Stanford. Adam, welcome. Delighted to be here. Let's do this. OK, we'll talk about AI in a second. But first, let's talk about physics. OK. First question. What is going to be the ultimate fate of the universe?
And how much confidence should we have?
The ultimate fate is a really long time in the future, so you probably shouldn't be that confident about the answer to that question. In fact, our idea of the answer to what the ultimate fate is has changed a lot in the last 100 years. About 100 years ago, we thought that the universe was just... static, wasn't growing or shrinking, was just sitting there statically.
And then in the late 20s, Hubble and friends looked up at massive telescopes in the sky and noticed that distant galaxies were moving away from us and the universe is expanding. So that's like big discovery number one. There was then a learned debate for many years about
You know, the universe is expanding, but is it expanding sufficiently slowly that it'll then re-collapse in a big crunch, like a time reverse of the Big Bang, and that'll be super bad for us? Or is it going to keep expanding forever, but just sort of ever more slowly as, you know, gravity pulls it back? but it's fast enough that it keeps expanding.
And there was a big debate around this question, and it turns out the answer to that question is neither. Neither of them is correct. In possibly the worst day in human history, sometime in the 1990s, we discovered that, in fact, not only is the universe expanding, it's expanding faster and faster and faster. It's what we call dark energy, or the cosmological constant is this...
just a word for uncertainty, is making the universe expand at an ever faster rate, accelerated expansion as the universe grows. So that's a radical change in our... Understanding of the fate of the universe. And if true, it's super duper bad news. It's really bad news because the accelerated expansion of the universe is dragging away from us lots of distant galaxies.
And we really want to use those galaxies. We have big plans to go and grab them and turn them into... vacation destinations or computronium, or in any other ways, extract utility from them. And we can't, if the cosmological constant is really constant, if this picture is correct, because anything close enough, we can go out and grab it, obviously.
But if it's further away than about a dozen billion light years, the expansion of the universe is dragging it away sufficiently rapidly that even if we send probes out at almost the speed of light, they will never make it. They will never make it there and make it back. They'll never even make it there if it's sufficiently far away.
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