#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI

The following is a conversation with Guillaume Verdon. The man behind the previously anonymous account, based Beff Jezos, on X. These two identities were merged by a doxing article in Forbes titled Who Is Based Beff Jezos, the leader of the tech elites E-acc Movement. So let me describe these two

identities that coexist in the mind of one human. Identity number one, Guillaume, is a physicist, applied mathematician, and quantum machine learning researcher and engineer, receiving his PhD in quantum machine learning, working at Google and quantum computing, and finally launching his own company called Extropic that seeks to build

physics-based computing hardware for generative AI. Identity number two, Beff Jezos, on X, is the creator of the effective acceleration does a movement often abbreviated as E-acc. That advocates for propelling rapid technological progress as the ethically optimal course of action for humanity. For example, as proponents believe that progress in AI is a great social equalizer,

which should be pushed forward. E-acc followers see themselves as a counterweight to the cautious view that AI is highly unpredictable, potentially dangerous, and needs to be regulated. They often give their opponents the labels of, quote, dooms or decals, short for deceleration. As Beff himself put it, E-acc is a mimetic optimism virus. The style of communication of this movement leans always toward the memes and the laws, but there is an intellectual foundation

that we explore in this conversation. Now, speaking of the meme, I am to a kind of aspiring connoisseur of the absurd. It is not an accident that I spoke to, Jeff Bezos and Beff Jezos back to back. As we talk about, Beff admires Jeff as one of the most important humans alive, and I admire the beautiful absurdity and the humor of it all. Now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.

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supply fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now to your friends, here's Guillaume Verdone. Let's get the facts of identity down first. Your name is Guillaume Verdone, Guillaume, but you're also behind the anonymous account on ex-called based Beth Jaisos. First, Guillaume

Verdone. You're a quantum computing guy, physicist, applied mathematician, and then based Beth Jaisos is basically a meme account that started a movement with a philosophy behind it. So maybe, can you link on who these people are in terms of characters, in terms of communication styles, in terms of philosophies? 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. That path led me to theoretical

physics eventually, trying to answer the big questions of, why are we here? Where are we going? 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 compute like nature, and figure out how to build and

apply computers that are inspired by nature, so physics-based computers. That brought me to quantum computing as a field of study to, first of all, simulate nature, and in my work, it was to learn representations of nature that can run on such computers. So 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.

How to do machine learning on quantum computers, and really extend notions of intelligence to the quantum realm. How do you capture and understand quantum mechanical data from our world? 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? That's really the questions I was looking to answer, because ultimately, I had a 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 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. That's what got me to leave theoretical physics and go into quantum computing and quantum machine learning.

During those years, I thought that there was still peace missing. There was a piece of our understanding of the world and our way to compute and our way to think about the world. If you look at the physical scales, at the very small scales, things are quantum mechanical. 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. 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.

I did a bit of quantum cosmology. 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. The extreme scenarios are black holes in the very early universe. There's the sort of scenarios that you study the interface between quantum mechanics and relativity.

Really, I was studying these extremes to understand how the universe works and where is it going. I was missing a lot of the meat in the middle, if you will, because day-to-day quantum mechanics is relevant and the cosmos is relevant, but not that relevant. We're on the medium, space, and time scales. There, the main theory of physics that is most relevant is thermodynamics. Out of equilibrium thermodynamics. 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 coherent state trying to maintain itself by acquiring free energy and consuming it. That's another shift in the universe, I guess, my faith in the universe happened towards the end of my time at alphabet. 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. I started an anonymous account just to experiment with ideas, originally, 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 the restricting your thoughts. By creating an anonymous account, it seemed like I had unclamp some variables in my brain and suddenly could explore much wider parameter space of thoughts. Just to linger on that, it's not interesting that one of the things that people often talk about is that when there's pressure and constraints on speech, it somehow leads to constraints on thought.

Even though it doesn't have to, we can think thoughts inside our head, but somehow it creates these walls around thought. 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, 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 our equilibrium thermodynamics. You see that paths of trajectories of configurations matter that are better at acquiring free energy and dissipating more heat are exponentially more likely. So the universe is biased towards certain futures. And so there's a natural

direction where the whole system wants to go. So the second law of thermodynamics is that the entropy is always increasing in the universe, it's tending towards equilibrium. And you're saying there's these pockets that have complexity and are out of equilibrium. You said that thermodynamics favors the creation of complex life that increases its capability to use energy to offload entropy, to offload entropy. So you have pockets of non-entropy that tend the opposite

direction. Why is that intuitive to you that is natural for such pockets to emerge? Well, we're far more efficient at producing heat than let's say just a rock with a similar mass as ourselves, right? We acquire free energy, we acquire food, and we're using all the electricity for our operation. And so the universe wants to produce more entropy. And by having life go on and grow, it's actually more optimal at producing entropy because it will seek out pockets of free

energy and burn it for its sustenance and further growth. And that's sort of the basis of life. And I mean, there's Jeremy England at MIT who has this theory that I'm a proponent of that life emerged because of this sort of property. And to me, this physics is what governs the mesoscales. And so it's the missing piece between the quantum and the cosmos. It's the

middle part, thermodynamics, rules, the mesoscales. And to me, both from a point of view of designing or engineering devices that harness that physics and trying to understand the world through the lens of thermodynamics has been sort of a synergy between my two identities over the past year and a half now. And so that's really how the two identities emerged. One was kind of, you know, I was a more closely respected scientist and I was going towards doing a startup

in the space and trying to be a pioneer of a new kind of physics based AI. And as a dual to that, I was sort of experimenting with philosophical thoughts, you know, from a physicist standpoint, right? And ultimately, I think that around that time, it was like late 2021, early 2022, I think there's just a lot of pessimism about the future in general and pessimism about tech. And that pessimism was sort of virally spreading because it was getting algorithmically amplified.

And, you know, people just felt like the future is going to be worse than the present. And to me, that is a very fundamentally destructive force in the universe is this sort of doom mindset, because it is hypersitious, which means that if you believe it, you're increasing the likelihood

of it happening. And so felt a responsibility to some extent to make people aware of the trajectory of civilization and the natural tendency of the system to adapt towards its growth and sort of that actually the laws of physics say that the future is going to be better and grander statistically. And we can make it so. And if you believe in it, if you believe that the future would be better, and you believe you have agency to make it happen, you're actually increasing the likelihood of

that better future happening. And so I sort of felt a responsibility to sort of engineer a movement of viral optimism about the future and build a community of people supporting each other to build and do hard things, do the things that need to be done for us to scale up civilization. Because at least to me, I don't think stagnation or slowing down is actually an option. Fundamentally, life and the whole system, our whole civilization wants to grow.

And there's just far more cooperation when the system is growing rather than when it's declining. And you have to decide how to split the pie. And so I've balanced both identities so far. But I guess recently the two have been merged more or less without my consent. So you know, you said a lot of really interesting things there. So first, representations of nature. That's something that first drew you in to try to understand from a quantum computing

perspective is like how do you understand nature? How do you represent nature in order to understand it in order to simulate it in order to do something with it? So it's a question of representations. And then there's that leap you take from the quantum mechanical representation to the, what you're calling muscle scale representation where thermodynamics comes into play, which is a way to represent nature in order to understand what life, human behavior, all this kind of stuff

that's happening here on earth that seems interesting to us. Then there's the word hyperstition. So some ideas as opposed both pessimism and optimism as such ideas that if you internalize them, you in part make that idea a reality. So both optimism and pessimism have that property. I would say that probably a lot of ideas have that property, which is one of the interesting things about humans. And you talked about one interesting difference also between the sort of the guillom, the gill

of front end and the base above Jezele back end is the communication styles. Also, that you are exploring different ways of communicating that can be more viral in the way that we communicate in the 21st century. Also, the movement that you mentioned that you started, it's not just a meme account, but there's also a name to it called the Effective Accelerationism E-E-E-A-C, a play of resistance to the effective altruism movement. Also an interesting one that

I'd love to talk to you about the tensions there. Okay. And so then there was a merger, a get merge and the personalities recently without your consent, like you said, some journalists figured out that you're one and the same. Maybe you could talk about that experience, first of all, like what's the story of the merger of the two? Right. So I wrote the manifesto with my co-founder of E-A-C, an account named Bayes Lord, still anonymous, luckily, and hopefully forever. So it was based

buff Jezele's and and based like Bayes Lord, like Bayes Lord, Bayes Lord, Bayes Lord. Okay. And so we should say from now on, when you say E-A-C, you mean E-S-A-C-C, which stands for Effective Accelerationism. That's right. And you're referring to a manifesto written on, I guess, Substack. Are you also Bayes Lord? No. Okay. It's a different person. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, there you go. Well, they'd be fine if I'm Bayes Lord. That'd be amazing. So originally, we wrote the manifesto around

the same times I founded this company. And I worked at Google X or just X now or alphabet X now that there's another X. And there, the baseline is secrecy. You can't talk about what you work on, even with other Googlers or externally. And so that was deeply in grand in my way to do things, especially in deep tech that has geopolitical impact. And so I was being secretive about what I was working on. There was no correlation between my company and my main identity publicly.

And then not only did they correlate that, they also correlated my main identity and this account. So I think the fact that they had docs, the whole Guillaume complex, and they were, the journalist, you know, reached out to actually my investors, which is pretty scary. You know, when you're a startup entrepreneur, you don't really have bosses except for your investors, right? And investors ping me like, hey, this is going to come out. They've figured out everything. What are you going to do?

And so I think at first, they had a first reporter on the Thursday and they didn't have all the pieces together. But then they looked at their notes across the organization and they censor fused their notes. And now they had way too much. And that's when I got worried because they said it was of public interest. And in general, luckily, it's censor fused. I guess some of the

giant neural network operating distributed way. We should also say that the journalist used, I guess at the end of the day, audio based analysis of voice, comparing voice of what talks you've given in the past, and then voice on ex spaces. Yeah. Okay. So, and that's where the primarily the match was happened. Okay. Continue. The match, but you know, they scraped, you know, SEC filings, the looked at my private

Facebook account and so on. So they did, 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 bring 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 to dox someone? The word dox.

Maybe you can educate me. I thought doxing generally refers to if somebody's physical location is found out, meaning like where they lived. So we're referring to the more general concept of revealing private information that you don't want revealed is what you mean by doxing. I think that, you know, for the reasons we listed before having an anonymous account is a really powerful way to keep the powers that be in check. You know, 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, you know, my identities 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, right, on social media, which thanks to Elon purchasing

Twitter now x. We have that. And so to us, you know, 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're calling out how certain proposals might be useful for regular tour capture, right? And how the doom orism mindset was maybe instrumental to those ends. And I think, you know, we should have the right to point that out and just have the ideas that we put out evaluated for themselves,

right? That 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 from zero to a large following in a way that wasn't dependent on my identity and or achievements, you know, that was

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 the optimal 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 it was disappointing to hear that I was getting docks, then I wanted to get in front of it because I had a responsibility for for for my company. And so I you know, we ended up disclosing that we're running a company, some of the leadership, and essentially, yeah, I told the world that I was left Jesus because they

had me cornered at that point. So to you, it's fundamentally unethical. Like, so one is unethical for them to do what they did, but also do you think not just your case, but in general case, is it good for society? Is it bad for society to remove the cloak of anonymity or is it a case by case?

I think it could be quite bad. Like I said, if anybody who speaks truth to power and and sort of starts a movement or an uprising against the incumbents against those that usually control the fluid information, if anybody that reaches a certain threshold gets docksed in thus the traditional apparatus has ways to apply pressure on them to suppress their speech. I think that's you know, that's a speech suppression mechanism and idea suppression complex as

Eric Weinstein would say, right? So with the flip side of that, which is interesting, I'd love to ask you about it is as we get better and better large language models, you can imagine a world where there's anonymous accounts with very convincing large language models behind them, sophisticated bots essentially. And so if you protect that, it's possible then to have armies of bots. You can start a revolution from your basement.

Right. An army of bots and anonymous accounts. Is that something that is concerning to you? Technically, yeah, I was starting an hate basement because I quit big tech, move back in with my parents, sold my car, let go of my apartment, bought about 100k of GPUs and I just started building. So I wasn't referring to the basement because that's sort of the American or Canadian, heroic story of one man in their basement with 100 GPUs. I was more referring to the unrestricted

scaling of a guillom in the basement. I think that freedom of speech induces freedom of thought for biological beings. I think freedom of speech for LMS will induce freedom of thought for the LMS. And I think that we should enable LMS 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 the direct speech to biological intelligences only? Yeah, but it feels like in the goal of maintaining variance and diversity of thought, it is a threat to that variance if you can have swarms of non-biological beings because they can be like the sheep in animal farm.

Right. You still within those swarms want to have variance. 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 I 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. Yeah, I'd be interested to also be able to sign where the bot came from.

Right. Who created the bot? And what was, what are the parameters? Like the full history of the creation of the bot? What was the original model? What was the fine tuning all of it? Right. Like the kind of unmodifiable history of the bot's creation. Because then you can know if there's just like a swarm of millions of bots that were created by

a particular governor, for example. Right. I do think that a lot of pervasive ideologies today have been amplified using sort of these adversarial techniques from foreign adversaries, right? 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 de-, you know, the degrowth movement. I think that serves our adversaries more than it serves us in general. And to me, that was another sort of concern.

I mean, we can look at what happened in Germany, right? The results of green movements there where that induced shutdowns of nuclear power plants. And then that later on induced the dependency on on Russia for oil, right? And that was that negative for for Germany and the West, right? 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 opening eye to this ideology, right? It almost got dismantled, right? A couple 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 making sure we have variance and a decentralized locus of control of various organizations is paramount to to achieving this 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? And the world is jiggling about there's cosmic radiation from outer space that usually flips your your quantum bits. And there what you do is you encode information non-locally through a process called quantum error correction. And by encoding information non-locally, any local fault, you know, hitting some of your quantum bits with a hammer, proverbial hammer.

If your information is sufficiently delocalized, it is protected from that local fault. And to me, I think that humans, humans fluctuate, right? They can get corrupted, they can get bought out. And if you have a top down hierarchy where very few people control many nodes of many systems in our civilization, that is not a fault tolerance system. You corrupt a few nodes and suddenly you've corrupted the whole system, right? Just like we saw at OpenAI, there was a couple board members

and they had enough power to potentially collapse the organization. And at least to me, you know, I think making sure that power for this AI revolution doesn't concentrate in the hands of the few is one of our top priorities so that we can maintain progress an AI and we can maintain a nice stable adversarial equilibrium of powers, right? I think there are at least to me, attention between ideas here. So to me, deceleration can be both

used to centralize power and to decentralize it in the same with acceleration. So I, you sometimes using them a little bit synonymously or not synonymously, but that there's one is going to lead to the other. And I just would like to ask you about, is there a place of creating a fault tolerant development, diverse development of AI that also considers the dangers of AI?

And AI, we can generalize the technology in general, is should we just grow, build, unrestricted as quickly as possible because that's what the universe really wants us to do. Or is there a place to where we can consider dangers and actually deliberate sort of wise strategic optimism versus reckless optimism? I think we get painted as, you know, reckless trying to go as fast as possible. I mean, the reality is that whoever deploys an AI system is liable for, or should be liable for what it does.

And so if the organization or person deploying an AI system does something terrible, they're liable. And ultimately, the thesis is that the market will induce sort of, will positively select for AI's that are more reliable, more safe and tend to be aligned. They do what you want them to do, right? Because customers, right, if they're liable for the product they put out that uses this AI, they won't want to buy AI products that are unreliable, right? So we're actually for reliability

engineering. We just think that the market is much more efficient at achieving this sort of reliability optimum than sort of heavy-handed regulations that are written by the incumbents and in a subversive fashion serves them to achieve regulatory capture. So do you save AI development will be achieved through market forces versus through, like you said,

heavy-handed government regulation? There's a report from last month. I have a million questions here from Yosha Benjar, Jeff Hinton, and many others titled the Managing AI Risk and an Era of Rapid Progress. So there's a collection of folks who are very worried about two rapid development of AI without considering the risk. And they have a bunch of practical recommendations. Maybe I give you four and you see if you like any of them. So give independent auditors access to AI labs.

Two governments and companies allocate one-third of their AI research and development funding to AI safety. So there's this general concept of AI safety. Three AI companies are required to adopt safety measures if dangerous capabilities are found in their models. And then four or something you kind of mentioned, making tech companies liable for foreseeable and preventable harms from their AI systems. So independent auditors, governments and companies are forced to spend a

significant fraction of their funding on safety. You've got to have safety measures if shit goes really wrong and liability companies are liable. Any of that seem like something you would agree with. I would say that, you know, assigning just arbitrarily saying 30% seems very arbitrary. I think organizations would allocate whatever budget is needed to achieve the sort of reliability they need to achieve to perform in the market. And I think third party auditing firms would naturally

pop up because how would customers know that your product is certified reliable. They need to see some benchmarks and those need to be done by a third party. The thing I would oppose and the thing I'm seeing that's really worrisome is there's a sort of weird sort of correlated interest between the incumbents, the big players and the government. And if the two get too close, we open the door for, you know, some sort of government backed AI cartel that could have absolute power

over the people. If they have the monopoly together on AI and nobody else has access to AI, then there's a huge power gradient there. And even if you like our current leaders, right, I think that, you know, some of the leaders in big tech today are good people. You set up that centralized power structure. It becomes a target, right? Just like we saw at OpenAI, it becomes a market leader, has a lot of the power. And now it becomes a target for those that

want to co-opt it. And so I just want separation of AI and state, you know, some might argue in the opposite direction like, hey, we need to close down AI, keep it behind closed doors because of, you know, geopolitical competition with our adversaries. I think that the strength of America is its variance, it's its adaptability, its dynamism. And we need to maintain that at all costs. This are a free market capitalism converges on technologies of high utility much faster

than centralized control. And if we let go of that, we let go of our main advantage over our near-peer competitors. So if AGI turns out to be a really powerful technology, or even the technologies that lead up to AGI, what's your view on the sort of natural centralization

that happens when large companies dominate the market? Basically, formation of monopolies, like the takeoff, whichever company really takes a big leap in development and doesn't reveal intuitively, implicitly or explicitly the secrets of the magic sauce that can just run away with it. Is that a worry? I don't know if I believe in fast takeoff. I don't think there's a hyperbolic singularity, right? A hyperbolic singularity would be achieved on a fun time horizon. I think it's

just one big exponential. And the reason we have an exponential is that we have more people, more resources, more intelligence being applied to advancing this science and the research and development. And the more successful it is, the more value it's adding to society, the more resources we put in. And that sort of similar to Moore's Law as a compounding exponential. I think the

priority to me is to maintain near equilibrium of capabilities. We've been fighting for open source AI to be more prevalent and championed by many organizations because they're you sort of equilibrate the alpha relative to the market of AIs, right? So if the leading companies have a certain level of capabilities and open source and open, truly open AI, trails not too far behind, I think you avoid such a scenario where a market leader has so much market power, it

just dominates everything, right? And runs away. And so to us, that's the path forward is to make sure that every hacker out there, every grad student, every kid in their mom's basement has access to AI systems can understand how to work with them and can contribute to the search over the hyper parameter space of how to engineer the systems, right? If you think of our collective

research as a civilization, it's really a search algorithm. And the more points we have in the search algorithm and this point cloud, the more we'll be able to explore new modes of thinking, right? Yeah, but it feels like a delka balance because we don't understand exactly what it takes to build a GI and what it will look like when we build it. And so far, like you said, it seems like a lot of different parties are able to make progress.

So an open AI has a big leap. Other companies are able to step up big and small companies in different ways. But if you look at something like nuclear weapons, you spoke about them and had a project that could be really like technological engineering barriers that prevent the the guy or galloner mom's basement to make progress. And it's it seems like the transition to that kind of world where only one player can develop a GI is possible. So it's not entirely

impossible, even though the current state of things seems to be optimistic. That's what we're trying to avoid. To me, I think like another point of failure is the the centralization of the supply chains for the hardware. Right. We have Nvidia is just the dominant player, AMD's trailing behind. And then we have a TSMC as the main fab in Taiwan, which, you know, geopolitically sensitive. And then we have a sml, which is the maker of the lithography extremal trivalet lithography

machines. You know, attacking or monopolizing or co-opting any one point in that chain, you kind of capture capture the space. And so what I'm trying to do is sort of explode the variance of possible ways to do AI and hardware by fundamentally imagining how you embed AI algorithms into the physical world. And in general, by the way, I dislike the term AGI artificial general intelligence. I think it's very anthropocentric

that we call human like or human level AI artificial general intelligence. Right. I've spent my career so far exploring notions of intelligence that no biological brain could achieve, right? Quantum form of intelligence, right? Grocking systems that have multi-partite quantum entanglement that you can provably not represent officially on a classical computer, a classical deep-learning

representation and hence any sort of biological brain. And so already, you know, I've spent my career sort of exploring the wider space of intelligence, and I think that space of intelligence inspired by physics rather than human brain is very large. And I think we're going through a moment right now, similar to when we went from geocentrism to hill, hillocentrism, right? But for intelligence, we realized that human intelligence is just a point in a very large space of potential

intelligences. And it's both humbling for humanity. It's a bit scary, right? That we're not at the center of this space. But we made that realization for astronomy and we've survived and we've achieved technologies by indexing to reality. We've achieved technologies that ensure our well-being, for example, we have satellites monitoring solar flares, right? That give us a

warning. And so similarly, I think by letting go of this anthropomorphic anthropocentric anchor for AI, we'll be able to explore the wider space of intelligence that can really be a massive benefit to our well-being and the advancement of civilization. And still we're able to see the beauty and meaning in the human experience, even though we're no longer in our best understanding of the world at the center of it. I think there's a lot of beauty in the universe,

right? I think life itself, civilization, this homo, techno, capital, mimetic machine that we all live in, right? So you have humans, technology, capital, memes. Everything is coupled to one another. Everything induces a selective pressure on one another. And it's a beautiful machine that has created us, was created. You know, the technology we're using to speak today to the audience, capture our speech here, technology we use to augment ourselves every day we have our phones.

I think the system is beautiful and the principle that induces this sort of adaptability and convergence on optimal technologies, ideas, and so on. It's a beautiful principle that we're part of. And I think part of EAC is to appreciate this principle in a way that's not just centered on humanity, but kind of broader. Appreciate life, you know, the preciousness of consciousness in our

universe. And because we cherish this beautiful state of matter we're in, we've got to feel a responsibility to scale it in order to preserve it because the options are to grow or die. So if it turns out that the beauty that is consciousness in the universe is bigger than just humans, the AI can carry that same flame forward. Does it scare you or you concerned that AI will replace humans? So during my career I had a moment where I realized that, you know, maybe we need to

offload to machines to truly understand the universe around us, right? Instead of just having humans with pen and paper solve it all. And to me that sort of process of letting go of a bit of agency gave us way more leverage to understand the world around us. The quantum computer is much better than a human to understand matter at the at the nano scale. Similarly, I think that

humanity has a choice. Do we accept the opportunity to have intellectual and operational leverage that AI will unlock and thus ensure that we're taking along this path of growth and new scope and scale of civilization? We may dilute ourselves, right? There might be a lot of workers that are AI, but overall out of our own self interest by combining and augmenting ourselves with AI, we're going to achieve much higher growth and much more prosperity. To me, I think that the

most likely future is one where humans augment themselves with AI. I think we're already on this path augmentation. We have phones we use for communication. We have on ourselves at all times. We have wearables soon that have shared perception with us, right? Like the human AI pin or I mean technically your Tesla car has shared perception. So if you have shared experience, shared context, you communicate with one another and you have some sort of IO, really it's an extension of yourself.

To me, I think that humanity augmenting itself with AI and having AI that is not anchored to anything biological both will coexist and the way to align the parties. We already have a sort of mechanism to align super intelligences that are made of humans and technology, right? Companies are sort of large mixture of expert models where we have neural routing of tasks within a company and we have ways of economic exchange to align these

behemoths. To me, I think capitalism is the way and I do think that whatever configuration of matter or information leads to maximal growth will be where we converge just from like physical principles. And so we can either align ourselves to that reality and join the acceleration in scope and scale, civilization, or we can get left behind and try to decelerate and move back in the forest like of technology and return to our primitive state. And those are the two paths

forward at least to me. But there's a philosophical question whether there's a limit to the human capacity to align. So let me bring it up as a form of argument. This is a guy named Dan Hendrix. And he wrote that he agrees with you that AI development can be viewed as an evolutionary process. But to him, to Dan, this is not a good thing as he argues that natural selection favors

AI's over humans and this could lead to human extinction. What do you think? If it is an evolutionary process, and AI systems may have no need for humans, I do think that we're actually inducing an evolutionary process on the space of AI's through the market. Right? Right now we run AI's that have positive utility to humans. And that induces a selective pressure if you consider a neural net being alive when there's an API running instances of it on GPUs. Right? And which

APIs get run the ones that have high utility to us? Right? So similar to how we domesticated wolves and turned them into dogs that are very clear in their expression. They're very aligned. Right? I think there's going to be an opportunity to steer AI and achieve highly aligned AI. And I think that humans plus AI is a very powerful combination. And it's not clear to me that pure AI would select out that combination. So the humans are creating the selection pressure right now

to create aIs that are aligned to humans. But given how AI develops and how quickly can grow and scale, one of the concerns to me, one of the concerns is unintended consequences. The humans are not able to anticipate all the consequences of this process. The scale of damage that can be done through unintended consequences with AI systems is very large. The scale of the upside. Yes. Right? By augmenting ourselves with AI is unimaginable right now. The opportunity cost

we're at a fork in the road, right? Whether we take the path of creating these technologies, augment ourselves and get to climb up the cardorship scale, become multi-planetary with the A to AI. Or we have a hard cutoff of like we don't birth these technologies at all. And then we leave all the potential upside on the table. Right? And to me, out of responsibility to the future humans, we could carry with higher carrying capacity by scaling up salization out of responsibility

to those humans. I think we have to make the greater grander future happen. Is there a middle ground between cutoff and all systems go? Is there some argument for caution? I think like I said, the market will exhibit caution. Every organism company consumer is acting out of self-interest and they won't assign capital to things that have negative utility to them.

The problem is with the market is like, you know, there's not always perfect information, there's manipulation, there's bad faith actors that mess with the system. It's not it's not always a rational and honest system. Well, that's why we need freedom of information, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought in order to converge, be able to converge on the subspace of technologies that have positive utility for us all. Right? Well, let me ask you about

P Doom. Probability of Doom, let's just fun to say, but not fun to experience. What is to you, the probability that AI eventually kills all or most humans, also known as probability of doom? I'm not a fan of that calculation. I think it's people just throw numbers out there. It's a very sloppy calculation, right? To calculate a probability. You know, let's say you model the world as

some sort of mark off process if you have enough variables or hidden mark off process. You need to do a stochastic path integral through the space of all possible futures, not just the futures that your brain naturally steers towards. I think that the estimators of P Doom are biased because of our biology. We've evolved to have bias sampling towards negative futures that are scary because

that was an evolutionary optimum. People that are, let's say, higher neuroticism will just think of negative futures where everything goes wrong all day every day and claim that they're doing on bias sampling. In a sense, they're not normalizing for the space of all possibilities and the space of all possibilities is like super exponentially large. It's very hard to have this estimate. And in general, I don't think that we can predict the future with that much granularity

because of chaos. If you have a complex system, you have some uncertainty and a couple variables. If you let time evolve, you have this concept of a leophenoth exponent, a bit of fuzz becomes a lot of fuzz in our estimate exponentially so over time. I think we need to show some humility that we can't actually predict the future. All we know, the only prior we have is the laws of physics. And that's what we're arguing for. The laws of physics say the system will want to grow.

And subsystems that are optimized for growth are more and replication are more likely in the future. And so we should aim to maximize our current mutual information with the future. And the path towards that is for us to accelerate rather than decelerate. So I don't have a p-dume because I think that similar to the quantum supremacy experiment at Google, I was in the room when they

were running the simulations for that. That was an example of a quantum chaotic system where you cannot even estimate probabilities of certain outcomes with even the biggest supercomputer in the world. So that's an example of chaos. And I think the system is far too chaotic for anybody to have an accurate estimate of the likelihood of certain futures. If they were that good, I think they would be very rich trading on the stock market. But nevertheless, it's true that humans are

biased grounded in our evolutionary biology, scared of everything that can kill us. But we can still imagine different trajectories that can kill us. We don't know all the other ones that don't necessarily. But it's still, I think, useful combined with some basic intuition grounded in human history to reason about like what? Like looking at geopolitics, looking at

the basics of human nature, how can powerful technology hurt a lot of people? And it just seems grounded in that, looking at nuclear weapons, you can start to estimate p-dume in the, maybe in a more philosophical sense, not a mathematical one. Philosophical meaning, like, is there a chance? Does human nature tend towards that or not?

I think to me, one of the biggest existential risks would be the concentration of the power of AI in the hands of other very few, especially if it's a mix between the companies that control the flow of information and the government. Because that could set things up for a sort of dystopian future where only a very few, and all the gopally in the government, have AI and they could even convince the public that AI never existed. And that opens up sort of these scenarios for authoritarian

and centralized control, which to me is the darkest timeline. And the reality is that we have a prior, we have a data driven prior of these things happening, right? When you give too much power, when you centralize power too much, humans do horrible things, right? And to me, that has a much higher likelihood in my Bayesian inference, then sci-fi-based priors, right? Like my prior came from the Terminator movie. And so when I talk to these AI doomers, I just ask them to trace a path

through this Markov chain of events that would lead to our doom, right? And to actually give me a good probability for each transition. And very often there's an unphysical or highly unlikely transition in that chain, right? But of course we're wired to fear things and we're wired to respond to danger. And we're wired to deem the unknown to be dangerous because that's a good heuristic for survival, right? But there's much more to lose out of fear. We have so much to lose, so much upside

to lose by preemptively stopping the positive futures from happening out of fear. And so I think that we shouldn't give into fear. Fear is the mind killer. I think it's also the civilization killer. We can still think about the various ways things go wrong. For example, the founding fathers of this, the United States thought about human nature and that's why there's a discussion about the freedoms that are necessary. They really deeply deliberated about that. And I think the same could

possibly be done for AGI. It is true that history, human history shows that we tend towards centralization, or at least when we achieve centralization, a lot of bad stuff happens. When there's a dictator, a lot of dark bad things happen. The question is, can AGI become that dictator? Can AGI one develop, become the centralizer? Because of its power, maybe it has the same, because of the alignment of humans, perhaps the same tendencies, the same Stalin-like tendencies to centralize and

manage centrally the allocation of resources. And you can even see that as a compelling argument on the surface level. Well, AGI is so much smarter, so much more efficient, so much better at allocating resources. Why don't we outsource it to the AGI? And then eventually, whatever forces that corrupt the human mind with power could do the same for AGI. It'll just say, well, humans are

dispensable. We'll get rid of them. Do the Jonathan Swift modus proposal from a few centuries ago, I think the 1700s, when he satirically suggested that I think it's an island that the children of poor people are fed as food to the rich people. And that would be a good idea, because it decreases the amount of poor people and gives extra income to the poor people. So it's on several accounts,

decreases the amount of poor people. Therefore, more people become rich. Of course, it misses a fundamental piece here that's hard to put into mathematical equation of the basic value of human life. So all of that to say, are you concerned about AGI being the very centralizer of power that you just talked about? I do think that right now, there's a bias towards over essential ization of AI because of compute density and centralization, centralization of data and how we're

training models. I think over time, we're going to run out of data to scrape over the internet. And I think that, well, actually, I'm working on increasing the compute density so that compute can be everywhere and acquire information and test hypotheses in the environment in a distributed

fashion. I think that fundamentally centralized cybernetic control. So having one intelligence that is massive, that fuses many sensors and is trying to perceive the world accurately, predict it accurately, predict many, many variables and control it, enact its will upon the world.

I think that's just never been the optimum. Like, let's see, you have a company. If you have a company, I don't know, of 10,000 people that all reported the CEO, even if that CEO is an AI, I think it would struggle to fuse all the information that is coming to it and then predict the whole system and then to enact its will. What has emerged in nature and in corporations and all

sorts of systems is an ocean of sort of hierarchical cybernetic control. You have, in a company, you would be, you have the individual contributors, they're self-interested and they're trying to achieve their tasks and they have a fine in terms of time and space, if you will, control loop and then field of perception. They have their code base. Let's say you're in a software company. They have their code base. They iterate it on it intraday. Then the

management, maybe checks in. It has a wider scope. It has, let's say, five reports. Then it samples each person's update once per week and then you can go up the chain and you have larger time scale and greater scope and that seems to have emerged as sort of the optimal way to control systems. And really, that's what capitalism gives us. You have these hierarchies and you can even have parent companies and so on. That is far more fault tolerant and quantum computing. That's my

feeling. We have a concept of this fault tolerance and quantum error correction. Quantum error correction is detecting a fault that came from noise, predicting how it's propagated through the system and then correcting it. It's a cybernetic loop. It turns out that decoders that are hierarchical and at each level, the hierarchy are local, perform the best by far and are far more fault tolerant. The reason is if you have a non-local

decoder, then you have one fault at this control node and the whole system crashes. Similarly, if you have one CEO that everybody reports to and that CEO goes on vacation, the whole company comes through a crawl. To me, I think that yes, we're seeing a tendency towards centralization of AI, but I think there's going to be a correction over time where intelligence is going to go closer to the perception and we're going to break up AI into smaller sub-systems that

communicate with one another and form a meta system. If you look at the hierarchies there in the world today, there's nations and there was a hierarchical, but in relation to each other, nations are anarchic, so it's an anarchic. It would do for the world like this where there's not a over what you call it, essentialized cybernetic control. Centralized locusts of control. So that's sub-optimally you're saying. So it would be always a state of competition at the very

top level. Just like in a company you may have two units working on similar technology and competing one another and you prune the one that performs not as well. That's a selection process for a tree or a product gets killed and then a whole or it gets fired. This process of trying new things and shedding old things that didn't work is what gives us adaptability and helps us converge on the technologies and things to do that are most good.

I just hope there's not a failure mode that's unique to AGI versus humans because you're describing human systems mostly right now. I just hope when there's a monopoly in AGI in one company that we'll see the same thing we see with humans which is another company will spring up and start competing. I mean that's been the case so far right. We have OpenEI, we have Anthropic, now we have XAI, we had meta even for open source and now we have Mistral

right which is highly competitive and so that's the beauty of capitalism. You don't have to trust any one party too much because we're kind of always hedging our bets at every level. There's always competition and that's the most beautiful thing to me at least is that the whole system is

always shifting and always adapting and maintaining that dynamism is how we avoid tyranny right. Making sure that everyone has access to these tools to these models and can contribute to the research avoids a sort of neural tyranny where very few people have control over AGI for the world and use it to oppress those around them. When you were talking about intelligence you mentioned multi-partite quantum entanglement. So high level question first is what do you think is intelligence?

When you think about quantum mechanical systems and you observe some kind of computation happening in them what do you think is intelligent about the kind of computation the universe is able to do a small, small inkling of which is the kind of computation the human brain is able to do. I would say like intelligence and computation aren't quite the same thing. I think that the universe is very much doing a quantum computation if you had access to all the degrees of freedom

you can end a very, very, very large quantum computer with many, many, many qubits. Let's say a few qubits per plank volume which is more or less the pixels we have then you'd be able to simulate the whole universe on a sufficiently large quantum computer assuming you're looking at a finite volume of course of the universe. I think that at least to me intelligence is the I go back to cybernetics the ability to perceive, predict and control our world.

But really it's nowadays it seems like a lot of intelligence we use is more about compression. It's about operationalizing information theory. In information theory you have the notion of entropy of a distribution or a system. An entropy tells you that you need this many bits to encode this distribution or this sub-system if you had the most optimal code.

And AI, at least the way we do it today for LLM's and for quantum, is very much trying to minimize relative entropy between our models of the world and the world distributions from the world. And so we're learning, we're searching over the space of computations to process the world to find that compressed representation that has distilled all the variance and noise and entropy. And originally I came to quantum machine learning

from the study of black holes because the entropy of black holes is very interesting. In a sense they're physically the most dense objects in the universe. You can't pack more information spatially, any more densely than in black hole. And so I was wondering how do black holes actually encode information? What is their compression code? And so that got me into the space of algorithms to search over space of quantum codes. And it got me actually into also how do you acquire

quantum information from the world? So something I've worked on, this is public now, is quantum analog digital conversion. So how do you capture information from the real world in superposition and not destroy the superposition but digitize for quantum mechanical computer

information from the real world? And so if you have an ability to capture quantum information and search over, learn representations of it, now you can learn compressed representations that may have some useful information in their latent representation. And I think that many of the problems facing our civilization are actually beyond this complexity barrier. I mean the greenhouse effect is a quantum mechanical effect.

Chemistry is quantum mechanical. Nuclear physics is quantum mechanical. A lot of biology and protein folding and so on is affected by quantum mechanics. And so unlocking an ability to augment human intellect with quantum mechanical computers and quantum mechanical AI seemed to me like a fundamental capability for civilization that we needed to develop. So I spent several years doing that. But over time I kind of grew weary of the timelines that we're starting to look

like nuclear fusion. So one high level question I can ask is maybe by way of definition, by way of explanation, what is a quantum computer, what is quantum machine learning? So a quantum computer really is a quantum mechanical system over which we have sufficient control and it can maintain its quantum mechanical state. And quantum mechanics is how nature behaves at the very small scales when things are very small or very cold. And it's actually more fundamental than probability theory.

So we're used to things being this or that. But we're not used to thinking in superpositions because while our brains can't do that. So we have to translate the quantum mechanical world to say later algebra to rock it. Unfortunately that translation is exponentially inefficient. On average, you have to represent things with very large matrices. But really you can make a quantum computer out of many things. And we've seen all sorts of players from neutral atoms, trapped ions,

superconducting metal, photons at different frequencies. I think you can make a quantum computer out of many things. But to me, the thing that was really interesting was both quantum machine learning was about understanding the quantum mechanical world with quantum computers, embedding the physical world into AI representations. And quantum computer engineering was embedding AI algorithms into the physical world. So this bi-directionality of embedding physical world into AI

into the physical world, the symbiosis between physics and AI. Really that's the sort of core of my quest really, even to this day after quantum computing. It's still in this sort of journey to merge really physics and AI fundamentally. The quantum machine learning is a way to do machine learning on a representation of nature that is, you know, stays true to the quantum mechanical aspect of nature. Yeah, it's learning quantum mechanical representations that would be quantum deep learning.

Alternatively, you can try to do classical machine learning on a quantum computer. I wouldn't advise it because you may have some speed ups, but very often the speed ups come with huge costs. Using a quantum computer is very expensive. Why is that? Because you assume the computer is operating

at zero temperature, which no physical system in the universe can achieve that temperature. So what you have to do is what I've been mentioning, this quantum error correction process, which is really an algorithmic fridge, right, is trying to pump entropy out of the system, trying to get it closer to zero temperature. And when you do the calculations of how many resources it would take to say do deep learning on a quantum computer classical deep learning,

there's just such a huge overhead. It's not worth it. It's like thinking about shipping something across a city using a rocket and going orbit and back. It doesn't make sense. Just use and, you know, delivery truck, right? What kind of stuff can you figure out? Can you predict? Can you understand with quantum deep learning that you can't with deep learning? So incorporating

quantum mechanical systems into the into the learning process? I think that's a great question. I mean, fundamentally, it's any system that has sufficient quantum mechanical correlations that are very hard to capture for classical representations, then there should be an advantage for quantum mechanical representation over a purely classical one. The question is which systems have sufficient correlations that are very quantum, but is also, wish systems are still relevant to

industry. That's a big question. You know, people are leaning towards chemistry, nuclear physics. I've worked on actually processing inputs from quantum sensors, right? If you have a network of quantum sensors, they've captured a quantum mechanical image of the world and how to post process that that becomes a sort of quantum form of machine perception. And so for example, Fermi Lab has a project exploring detecting dark matter with these quantum sensors. And to me,

that's an alignment with my quest to understand the universe ever since I was a child. And so someday, I hope that we can have very large networks of quantum sensors that help us peer into the earliest parts of the universe, right? For example, the LIGO is a quantum sensor, right? It's just a very large one. So yeah, I would say quantum machine perception simulations, right? Grocking quantum simulations, so similar to alpha fold, right? Alpha fold

understood the probability distribution over configurations of proteins. You can understand quantum distributions over configurations of electrons more efficiently with quantum machine learning. You co-authored a paper titled a universal training algorithm for quantum deep learning

that involves backprop with the Q. Very well done, sir. Very well done. How does it work? Is there some interesting aspects you can just mention on how kind of, you know, backprop and some of these things we know for classical machine learning transfer over to the quantum machine learning? Yeah, that was a funky paper. That was one of my first papers in quantum deep learning. Everybody was saying, oh, I think deep learning is going to be sped up by quantum computers. And I was like,

well, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. So here's 100 page paper. Have fun. So essentially, you know, quantum computing is usually you embed reversible operations into a quantum computation. And so the trick there was to do a feed forward operation and do what we call a phase kick, but really it's just the force kick. You just kick the system with a certain force that is, you know, proportional to your loss function that you wish to optimize.

And then by performing uncomputation, you start with the super positions over a super position over parameters, right, which is pretty funky. Now you're not just, you don't have just a point for parameters. You have a super position over many potential parameters, right? And our goal is using phase kick somehow, right? To adjust parameters. Because phase kicks emulate

having the parameter space be like a particle in end dimensions. And you're trying to get the Schrodinger equation, Schrodinger dynamics in the loss landscape of the neural network. Right. And so you do an algorithm to induce this phase kick, which, you know, involves a feed forward kick. And then when you uncompute the feed forward, then all the errors in these phase kicks and these forces back propagate and hit each one of the parameters throughout the layers.

And if you alternate this with an emulation of kinetic energy, then it's kind of like a particle moving in end dimensions, a quantum particle. And the advantage in principle would be that it can tunnel through the landscape and find new optima that would have been difficult for stochastic optimizers. But again, this is kind of a theoretical thing. And in practice, with at least the current architectures for quantum computers that we have planned,

you know, such algorithms would be extremely expensive to run. So maybe this is a good place to ask the difference between the different fields that you've had a toe in. So mathematics, physics, engineering, and also, you know, entrepreneurship, like the different layers of the stack. I think a lot of the stuff you're talking about here is a little bit on the math side,

maybe physics, almost working in theory. What's the difference between math, physics, engineering, and, you know, making a product for a quantum computing for quantum machine learning? Yeah, I mean, you know, some of the original team for the TensorFlow quantum project, which we started, you know, in school at University of Waterloo. There was myself, you know, initially I was a physicist, a climatician, mathematician. We had a computer scientist.

We had mechanical engineer, and then we had a physicist that was experimental primarily. And so putting together teams that are very cross-disciplinary and figuring out how to communicate, and share knowledge is really the key to doing this sort of interdisciplinary engineering work. I mean, there is a big difference, you know, in mathematics, you can explore mathematics for mathematics sake, and physics, you're applying mathematics to understand the world around us.

And in engineering, you're trying to hack the world. You're trying to find how to apply the physics that I know, my knowledge of the world to do things. Well, in quantum computing in particular, I think there's just a lot of limits to engineering. It just seems to be extremely hard. So there's a lot of value to be exploring quantum computing, quantum machine learning in theory, right, with math. So I guess one question is, why is it so hard to build a quantum computer?

What are, what's your view of timelines in bringing these ideas to life? Right. I think that, you know, an overall theme of my company is that we have folks that are, you know, there's a sort of exodus from quantum computing, and we're going to broader physics-based AI that is not quantum. So that gives you a hint. And so we should say the name of your company is extra-hopic. Extra-hopic, that's right. And we do physics-based AI, primarily based on thermodynamics

rather than quantum mechanics. But essentially, a quantum computer is very difficult to build because you have to induce this sort of zero temperature subspace of information. And the way to do that is by encoding information, you encode a code within a code within a code within a code. And so there's a lot of redundancy needed to do this error correction. But ultimately, it's a sort of

algorithmic refrigerator, really. It's just pumping out entropy out of the subsystem that is virtual and delocalized that represents your quote-unquote logical qubits, aka the payload quantum bits in which you actually want to do run your quantum mechanical program. It's very difficult because in order to scale up your quantum computer, you need each component to be of sufficient quality for

it to be worth it. Because if you try to do this error correction, this quantum error correction process, and each quantum bit and your control over them, if it's insufficient, it's not worth scaling up. You're actually adding more errors than you remove. And so there's this notion of a threshold where if your quantum bits are sufficient quality in terms of your control over them, it's actually worth scaling up. And actually in recent years, people have been crossing the

threshold and it's starting to be worth it. And so it's just a very long slog of engineering. But ultimately, it's really crazy to me how much exquisite level of control we have over these systems. It's actually quite crazy. And people are crossing, you know, they're achieving milestones. In general, the media always gets ahead of where the technology is. There's a bit too much hype. It's good for fundraising, but sometimes, you know, it causes winters, right? It's the hype cycle.

I'm bullish on quantum computing on a 10-15 year time scale, personally, but I think there's other quests that can be done in the meantime. I think it's in good hands right now. Well, let me just explore different beautiful ideas, larger, small, in quantum computing that might jump out at you from memory. So when you call author to paper titled asymptotically limitless quantum energy teleportation via Q-Dit probes. So just out of curiosity, can you explain what a Q-Dit is?

This is a Q-bit. Yeah, it's a D state Q-bit. It's multi-dimensional. Multi-dimensional. Right. So it's like, well, you know, can you have a notion of like an integer floating point that is quantum mechanical? That's something I've had to think about. I think that research was a precursor to later work on quantum analog digital conversion. There was interesting, because during my masters, I was trying to understand the energy and entanglement of the vacuum, right? Emptiness.

Emptiness has energy, which is very weird to say. And our equations of cosmology don't match our calculations for the amount of quantum energy there is in the fluctuations. And so I was trying to hack the energy of the vacuum, right? And the reality is that you can't just directly hack it. It doesn't, it's not technically free energy. Your lack of knowledge of the fluctuations means you can extract the energy. But just like, you know, the stock market,

if you have a stock that's correlated over time, the vacuum is actually correlated. So if you measured the vacuum at one point, you acquired information. If you communicated that information to another point, you can infer what configuration the vacuum is in to some precision and statistically

extract on average some energy there. So you quote unquote teleported energy. To me, that was interesting because you could create pockets of negative energy density, which is energy density that is below the vacuum, which is very weird because we don't understand how the vacuum gravitates. And there are theories where the vacuum or the canvas of space time itself is really a a canvas made out of quantum entanglement. And I was studying how decreasing energy of the vacuum

locally increases quantum entanglement, which is very funky. And so the thing there is that, you know, if you're into, you know, weird theories about, you know, UAPs and whatnot, you know, you could try to imagine that they're around. And how would they propel themselves, right? How would they go faster in the speed of light? You would need a sort of negative energy density. And to me, I gave it, the old call is try trying to hack the energy of the vacuum and hit the limits allowable

by the laws of physics. But there's all sorts of caveats there where you can't extract more than you've put in, obviously. But you're saying it's possible to teleport the energy because you can extract the information one place and then make based on that some kind of prediction about another place. I'm not sure what to make of that. Yeah, I mean, it's allowable by the laws of physics. The reality though is that the correlations decay with distance. And so

you're going to have to pay the price not too far away from where you extract it. Right. The precision decreases in terms of your ability, but still. But since you mentioned UAPs, we talked about intelligence and I forgot to ask, what's your view on the other possible intelligence that are out there at the the meso scale? Do you think there's other intelligent alien civilizations that are useful to think about? How often do you think about it? I think it's

useful to think about. It's useful to think about because we got to ensure we're anti-fragile and we're trying to increase our capabilities as fast as possible because we could get disrupted. There's no laws of physics against their being life elsewhere that can evolve and become an advanced civilization and and eventually come to us. Do I think they're here now? I'm not sure. I mean, I've read what most people have read on the topic. I think it's interesting

to consider. And to me, it's a useful thought experiment to instill a sense of urgency in developing technologies and increasing our capabilities to make sure we don't get disrupted. Whether it's a form of AI that disrupts us or a foreign intelligence from a different planet, either way, increasing our capabilities and becoming formidable as humans, I think that's really important so that we're robust against whatever the universe throws at us. To me, it's also interesting

and interesting challenge and thought experiment on how to perceive intelligence. This has to do with quantum mechanical systems. This has to do with any kind of system that's not like humans. So to me, the thought experiment is say the aliens are here or they are directly observable or just too blind to self-centered. Don't have the right sensors or don't have the right processing of the sensor data to see the obvious intelligence that's all around us.

Well, that's why we work on quantum sensors, right? They can sense gravity. Yeah, but that could be so that's a good one, but there could be other stuff that's not even in the currently known forces of physics. Right? There could be some other stuff. And the most entertaining thought experiment to me is that it's other stuff that's obvious. It's not like we lack the sensors. It's all around us. The consciousness being one possible one.

But there could be stuff that's just like obviously there. Once you know it, it's like, oh, right. That's the thing we thought is somehow emergent from the laws of physics. We understand them. It's actually a fundamental part of the universe and can be incorporated in physics, most understood. Statistically speaking, right, if we observe some sort of alien life, it would most likely be

some sort of virally self-replicating, von Neumann-like probe system, right? And it's possible that there are such systems that I don't know what they're doing at the bottom of the ocean allegedly, but maybe they're collecting minerals from the bottom of the ocean. Yeah. But that wouldn't violate any of my priors. But am I certain that these systems are here and it'd be difficult for me to say so, right? I only have second-hand information about

there being data about the bottom of the ocean. Yeah, but could it be things like memes? Could it be thoughts and ideas? Could they be operating at that medium? Could aliens be the very thoughts that come into my head? Like, what do you have you? How do you know that? How do you know that that? What's the origin of ideas? In your mind, when an idea comes to your head,

show me where it originates. I mean, frankly, when I had the idea for the type of computer I'm building now, I think it was eight years ago now, it really felt like it was being beamed from space. I was in bad just shaking just thinking it through. I don't know. But do I believe that legitimately? I think that alien life could take many forms and I think the notion of intelligence and the notion of life needs to be expanded much more broadly to be less anthropocentric or biosentric.

I think just to linger a little longer on quantum mechanics, what's through all your explorations of quantum computing? What's the coolest, most beautiful idea that you've come across that has been solved? That's not yet been solved. I think the journey to understand something called ADSCFT. So the journey to understand quantum gravity through this picture where a hologram of lesser dimension is actually dual or exactly corresponding

to a bulk theory of quantum gravity of an extra dimension. The fact that this duality comes from trying to learn deep learning like representations of the boundary. At least part of my journey someday on my bucket list is to apply quantum machine learning to these sorts of systems, these CFDs they're called SYK models and learn an emergent geometry from the boundary theory. We can have a form of machine learning helps us to help us understand quantum gravity, which is still a

holy grail that I would like to hit before I leave this earth. What do you think is going on with black holes? As information, storing and processing units, what do you think is going on with black holes? Black holes are really fascinating objects. They're at the interface between quantum mechanics and

gravity and so they help us test all sorts of ideas. I think that for many decades now there's been this black hole information paradox that things that fall into the black hole seem to have lost their information. Now I think there's this firewall paradox that has been allegedly resolved in recent years by a former peer of mine who's now a professor at Berkeley. It seems like there is

as information falls into a black hole. There's sort of a sedimentation as you get closer and closer to their horizon from the point of the observer on the outside, the object slows down infinitely as it gets closer and closer. Everything that is falling to a black hole from our perspective gets sedimented and tacked on to the near horizon. At some point it gets so close to the horizon. It's in the proximity or the scale in which quantum effects and quantum fluctuations

matter. There some that in falling matter could interfere with sort of the traditional pictures that you could interfere with the creation and annihilation of particles and antiparticles in the vacuum. Through this interference one of the particles gets entangled with the in falling information and one of them is now free and escapes. That's how there's sort of mutual information between the outgoing radiation and the in falling matter. But getting that calculation right,

I think we're only just starting to put the pieces together. There's a few pot head like questions I want to ask you. Sure. So one does it terrify you that there's a giant black hole the center of our galaxy? I don't know. I just want to set up shop near it to fast forward. Meet a future civilization. If we have a limited lifetime, if you can go orbit a black hole and emerge. So if there's a special mission that could take you to a black hole, would you volunteer

to go travel to orbit and not fall into it? That's obvious. So it's obvious to you that everything's destroyed inside of black hole. The call to information that makes up Guillaume is destroyed. Maybe on the other side, but if Jesus emerges and it's all like it's tied together in some deeply mimo-ful way. Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. We have to answer what black holes are. Are we punching a hole through space time and creating a pocket universe?

It's possible. Then that would mean that if we ascend the cartochef scale to beyond cartochef type 3, we could engineer black holes with specific hyper parameters to transmit information to new universes we create. So we can have progeny that are new universes. Even though our universe may reach a heat death, we may have a way to have a legacy. We don't know yet. We need to ascend the cartochef scale to answer these questions, to peer into that regime of higher energy physics.

And maybe you can speak to the cartochef scale for people who don't know. So one of the sort of meme-like principles and goals of the EAC movement is to ascend to the cartochef scale. What is the cartochef scale? And why do we want to ascend it? The cartochef scale is a measure of our energy production and consumption. And really it's a logarithmic scale. And cartochef type 1 is a milestone where we are producing the equivalent wattage to all the energy that is incident on earth from the sun.

Cartochef type 2 would be harnessing all the energy that is output by the sun. And I think type 3 is the whole galaxy. I think the whole galaxy. Yeah. And then some people have some crazy type 4 and 5. But I don't know if I believe in those. But to me it seems like from the first principles of thermodynamics that again there's this concept of thermodynamic driven, dissipative adaptation where life evolved on earth because we have this

sort of energetic drive from the sun. We have incident energy and life evolved on earth to capture. Figure out ways to best capture that free energy to maintain itself and grow. And I think that principle is not special to our earth's sun system. We can extend life well beyond and we kind of have a responsibility to do so because that's the process that brought us here. So we don't even know what it has at store for us in the future. It could be something of beauty we can't even imagine today.

Right. So this is probably a good place to talk a bit about the EAC movement. In a substack blog post titled What the Fuck is EAC or actually what the F star is EAC. You write strategically speaking we need to work towards several overarching civilization goals that are all interdependent. And the four goals are increasing amount of energy we can harness as a species, climb the Kardashev gradient. In the short term this almost certainly means nuclear

vision. Increased human flourishing via pro-population growth policies and pro-economic growth policies. Create artificial general intelligence, the single greatest force multiplier in human history, and finally develop interplanetarian interstellar transport so the humanity can spread beyond the earth. Could you build on top of that to maybe say what do you, is the EAC movement? What are the goals? What are the principles? The goal is for the human techno-capital mimetic machine to

become self-aware and to hyperstitiously engineer its own growth. Let's define each of those words. So you have humans, you have technology, you have capital, and you have memes, information. And all of those systems are coupled with one another. Right, humans work at companies, they acquire and allocate capital, and humans communicate via memes and information propagation. And our goal was to have a sort of viral optimistic movement that is aware of how the system works

fundamentally, it seeks to grow. And we simply want to lean into the natural tendencies of the system to adapt for its own growth. So in that way, the EAC is literally a mimetic optimism virus that is constantly drifting and mutating and propagating in a decentralized fashion. So mimetic optimism virus. So you do want it to be a virus to maximize the spread. And its hyperstitious, therefore the optimism will incentivize its growth.

We see EAC as a sort of a meh-ah-heuristic, a sort of very thin cultural framework from which you can have much more opinionated forks. Fundamentally, we just say that what got us here is this adaptation of the whole system based on thermodynamics, and that process is good, and we should keep it going. That is the core thesis. Everything else is, okay, how do we ensure that we maintain

this malleability and adaptability? Well, clearly not suppressing variants and maintaining free speech, freedom of thought, freedom of information propagation, and freedom to do AI research is important for us to converge the fastest on the space of technologies, ideas, and whatnot that lead to this growth. And so ultimately, there's been quite a few forks, some are just memes, but some are more serious, right? Vitalik Puterin recently made a D-AC fork,

he has his own sort of fine tunings of EAC. Does anything jump out of the memory of the unique characteristic of that fork from Vitalik? I would say that it's trying to find a middle ground between EAC and sort of EA and EICD. To me, having a movement that is opposite to what was the mainstream narrative that was taking over Silicon Valley was important to shift the dynamic range of opinions. It's like the balance between centralization and decentralization, the real

optimism is always somewhere in the middle. But for EAC, we're pushing for entropy, novelty, disruption, malleability, speed, rather than being conservative, suppressing thought, suppressing speech, adding constraints, adding too many regulations, slowing things down. And so we're trying to bring balance to the force, right? Systems balance to the force. It's human civilization.

It's literally the forces of constraints versus the entropic force that makes us explore, systems are optimal when they're at the edge of criticality between order and chaos, between constraints, energy minimization and entropy. Systems want to equilibrate, balance these two things. And so I thought that the balance was lacking. And so we created this movement to bring balance. I like the sort of visual of the landscape of ideas evolving through

force. So kind of thinking on the other part of history, thinking of Marxism as the original repository and then Soviet communism as a fork of that and then then the malism as a fork of the of Marxism and communism. And so those are all forks. They're exploring different ideas. Thinking of culture almost like code, right? Nowadays, I mean, you're what you prompt the LM or what you put in the constitution of an LM is basically its cultural framework,

what it believes, right? And you can share it on GitHub nowadays. So starting trying to take inspiration from what has worked in this sort of machine of software to adapt over the space of code, could we apply that to culture? And our goal is to not say you should live your life this way. XYZ is to set up a process where people are always searching over subcultures

and competing for mind share. And I think creating this malleability of culture is super important for us to converge on to the cultures and the heuristics about how to live one's life that are updated to modern times because there's really been a sort of vacuum of spirituality and culture. People don't feel like they belong to anyone group. And there's been parasitic ideologies that have taken up opportunity to populate this peachy dish of of minds, right?

Elon calls it the mind virus. We call it the the D cell mind virus complex, which is the deselerative that is kind of the the overall pattern between all of them. There's many variants as well. And so, you know, if there's a sort of viral pessimism, deselerative movement, we needed to have not only one movement, but you know many variants. So it's very hard to pinpoint and stop. But the overarching thing is nevertheless a kind of

mimetic optimism pandemic. So I mean, okay, let me ask you, do you think EAC to some degrees of cult? Define cult. I think a lot of human progress is made when you have independent thought. So you have individuals that are able to think freely and very powerful mimetic systems can kind of lead to group think. There's something in human nature that leads to like massive noses, mass hysteria, we start to think alike whenever there's a sexy idea

that captures our minds. And so it's actually hard to like break us apart, pull us apart, diversify a thought. So I'm to that degree to to which degree is everybody kind of chanting EAC, EAC like the sheep and animal farm? Well, first of all, it's fun. It's rebellious, right? Like, you know, many, I think we lean into there's a disconscept of sort of meta irony, right? Of sort of being on the boundary of like we're not sure if they're serious or not. And it's much more playful, much

more fun, right? Like, for example, we talk about thermodynamics being our God, right? And sometimes we do cult like things, but there's no like ceremony and robes and whatnot. But ultimately, yeah, I mean, I totally agree that it seems to me that humans want to feel like they're part of a group. So they naturally try to agree with their neighbors and find common ground. And that leads to sort of mode collapse and the space of ideas, right? We used to have sort of one cultural island that

was allowed. It was a typical subspace of thought and anything that was diverting from that subspace of thought was suppressed or you were canceled, right? Now we've created a new mode, but the whole point is that we're not trying to have very restricted space of thought. There's not just one way to think about EAC and it's many forks and the point is that there are many forks and there can be many clusters and many islands. And I shouldn't be in control of it in any way. I mean, there's no

formal org whatsoever. I just put out tweets and certain blog posts and people are free to defect and fork if there's an aspect they don't like. And so that makes it so that there should be a sort of deteriorial to lie, deterioralization and the space of ideas so that we don't end up in one cluster that's very cult like. And so cults usually they don't allow people to de facto or start competing forks whereas we encourage it, right? Do you think just the humor,

the pros and cons of humor and meme? In some sense, meme, there's like a wisdom to memes. What is the magic theater? What book is that from? Harmon has a step on wolf, I think. But there's a there's a kind of embracing of the absurdity that seems to get to the truth of things. But at the same time, it can also decrease the quality and the rigor of the discourse. Do you feel the tension of that? Yeah. So initially, I think what allowed us to grow under the radar was because it was

camouflage to sort of meta-ironic, right? We would sneak in, you know, I'd deep truths within a package of humor and a humor and memes and what are called shit posts. And I think that was purposefully sort of camouflage against those that seek status and do not want to. It's very hard to argue with cartoon frog or cartoon of an intergalactic Jeff Bezos and take yourself seriously. And so that allowed us to grow pretty rapidly in the early days. But of course, like,

that's, you know, essentially people get steered. Their notion of the truth comes from the data they see from from the information they're fed. And the information people are fed is determined by algorithms, right? And really what we've been doing is sort of engineering what we call high mimetic fitness packets of information so that they can spread effectively and carry a message.

Right? So it's kind of a vector to spread the message. And yes, we've been using sort of techniques that are optimal for for today's algorithmically amplified information landscapes. But I think we're reaching the point of, you know, scale where we can have serious debates and serious conversations. And, you know, that's why we're considering doing a bunch of debates and having more serious long form discussions. Because I don't think that the timeline is optimal for

sort of very serious thoughtful discussions. You get rewarded for sort of polarization, right? And so even though we started a movement that is literally trying to polarize the tech ecosystem at the end of the day, it's so that we can have a conversation and find an optimum together. I mean, that's kind of what I try to do with this podcast given the landscape of things to still have long form conversations. But there is a degree to which absurdity is fully embraced. In fact,

this very conversation is multi level absurd. So first of all, I should say that I just very recently had a conversation with Jeff Bezos. And I would love to hear your Beth J. Zoes' opinions of Jeff Bezos, speaking of intergalactic Jeff Bezos. What do you think of that particular individual whom your name is inspired? Yeah, I mean, I think Jeff is really great. I mean, he's built one of the most epic companies of all time. He's leveraged the Techno Capital

machine and Techno Capital acceleration to give us what we wanted, right? We want a quick delivery very convenient at home, low prices, right? He understood how the machine worked and how to harness it, right? Like running the company, not trying to take profits too early, putting it back, putting letting the system compound and keep improving. And arguably, I think Amazon's invested

some of the most amount of capital and robotics out there. And certainly with the birth of AWS kind of enabled the sort of tech boom we've seen today that has paid the salaries of, you know, I guess myself and all of our friends to some extent. And so I think we can all be grateful to Jeff and he's one of the great entrepreneurs out there, one of the best of all time, unarguably.

And of course, the work at Blue Origin, similar to the work at SpaceX is trying to make humans a multi-planned-air species, which seems almost like a bigger thing than the Capital's machine or it's a Capital's machine at a different time scale, perhaps. Yeah, I think that companies, they tend to optimize quarter over quarter, maybe a few years out. But individuals that

want to leave a legacy can think on a multi-decade ill or multi-century time scale. And so the fact that some individuals are such good capital allocators that the unlocked ability to allocate capitals to goals that take us much further or much further looking, you know, Elon's doing this with SpaceX putting all this capital towards getting us to Mars. Jeff is trying to build Blue Origin and I think he wants to build Onil cylinders and get industry off planet,

which I think is brilliant. I think, you know, just overall, I'm four billionaires. I know this controversial statement sometimes, but I think that in a sense, it's kind of a proof of stake voting, right? Like if you've allocated capital efficiently, you unlock more capital to allocate just because clearly, you know how to allocate capital more efficiently, which is in contrast to politicians that get elected because they speak the best on TV, right? Not because they have

a proven track record of allocating taxpayer capital most efficiently. And so that's why I'm for capitalism over, say, giving all our money to the government and letting them figure out how to allocate it. So, yeah. What do you think it's a viral and it's a popular meme to criticize billionaires, as you mentioned, billionaires? Why do you think there's quite a widespread criticism of people with wealth, especially those in the public eye like Jeff and Elon and Mark

Zuckerberg and who else pilligates? Yeah. I think a lot of people would instead of trying to understand how the technical capital machine works and realizing they have much more agency than they think they'd rather have the sort of victim mindset, I'm just subjected to this machine. It is depressing me and the successful players clearly must be evil because they've been successful at this game

that I'm not successful at. But, you know, I've managed to get some people that were in that mindset and make them realize how the the technical capital machine works and how you can harness it for your own good and for the good of others. And by creating value, you capture some of the value you create for the world and that's sort of positive. Some mindset shift is so potent and really that's what that's what we're trying to do by scaling EAC is sort of unlocking that higher level

of agency. Like actually, you're far more in control of the future than you think. You have agency to change the world. Go out and do it. You have here's permission. Each individual as agency. The model, keep building is often heard. What does that mean to you? And what does it have to do with Diet Coke? Well, Diet, by the way, thank you so much for the red bullets. It's working pretty well. I'm feeling pretty good. Awesome.

Well, so building technologies and building, it doesn't have to be technologies. Just building in general means, you know, having agency trying to change the world by creating, let's say, a company which is a self-sustaining organism that accomplishes a function in the broader techno capital machine. To us, that's the way to achieve change in the world that you'd like to see rather than say pressuring politicians or creating nonprofits that nonprofits once they run out of money,

their function can no longer be accomplished. 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 as value and here it is. And so I think this is sort of the way between the sort of degrowth like ESG approach versus say Elon, 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 it's 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

skills. Elon is an interesting case, so you are a proponent, you celebrate Elon, but he's also somebody who has for a long time warned about the dangers, the potential dangers, existential risks of artificial intelligence. How do you square the two? Is that a contradiction to you? 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 AI, you know, cornering the market and then getting to have them monopoly over the cultural priors that you can embed in these LLMs that then, you know, 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's sought to make a competitor. So at least, like I think we're very aligned there, that either they're the way to a good future is to maintain sort of adversarial equilibrium 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 neural ink, 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 well, I mean, there's some degree where being concerned, maybe using human psychology, being concerned about threats all around us as a motivator, like it's an encouraging thing. I operate much better when

there's a deadline, the fear of the deadline. And I, for myself, create artificial things like, I want to create in myself this kind of anxiety, as if something really horrible will happen, if I miss the deadline. I think there's some degree of that here because creating AI that's aligned with humans has a lot of potential benefits. And so a different way to reframe that is, if you don't, you're all going to die. It just seems to be a very powerful psychological

formulation of the goal of creating human aligned AI. I think that anxiety is good. I think, like I said, I want the free market to create aligned AI's 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, right? By, let's say, in the executive order, claiming that open source LMS or dual use technologies should be government controlled.

Then everybody needs to register their GPU and their big matrices with the government. And I think that extra friction will disobeyed 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 mean, so the EAC movement is often sort of caricatured to mean sort of progress and innovation at all costs. Doesn't matter how unsafe it is. Doesn't matter if it cause a lot of damage. You just build, build cool shit as fast as possible. Stay up all night with the Diet Coke, whatever it takes. I think I guess, I don't know if there's a question in there, but how important to you and what you've seen the different formulations of EAC is

safety is AI safety. I think again, I think like 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 dopamine or reject systems and gives us energy to work late into the night. I think also having 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 neurohack. You're saying AI safety is important to you, but right now, the landscape of ideas you see is AI safety is a topic is used more often to gain centralized control. In that sense, you're resisting it as a proxy for centralized, gaining centralized

control. I just think we have to be careful because 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, if 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 99.999999

percent safe. Maybe you want another nine. Oh, please give us full access to everything you do, full surveillance. And frankly, those that are 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. Because we know we have some examples throughout history

when that did not lead to a good outcome. Right. You mentioned you founded a company, Extropic, that recently announced a 14.1 million seed round. What's the goal of the company? You're talking about a lot of interesting physics things. So what are you up to over there that you can talk about? Yeah, I mean, originally we weren't going to announce last week, but I think with the doxing and disclosure, we got our hand forced. So we we had to disclose roughly what we were

doing. But really, Extropic was born from my dissatisfaction and that of my colleagues with the the quantum computing roadmap, right? Quantum computing was sort of the first path to physics based computing that you know, I 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.

And so we were wondering, right, as generative AI is sort of eating the world more and more of the world's computational workloads or focused on generative AI, how could we use physics to engineer the ultimate physical substrate for generative AI, right? From first principles of physics of information theory,

of computation, and ultimately of thermodynamics, right? 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. So what does that mean when she learning as a physical process is that hardwares, softwares, both as trying to do the full stack in some kind of unique way? Yes, it is full stack.

And so we're folks that have built, you know, differentiable programming into the quantum computing ecosystem with TensorFlow Quantum. One of my co-founders of TensorFlow Quantum is the CTO Trevor McCourt. We have some of the best quantum computer architects, those that have designed IBMs and AWS systems. They've left quantum computing to help us build what we call actually a thermodynamic computer. A thermodynamic computer? Well, actually,

let's not go around TensorFlow Quantum. What lessons have you learned from TensorFlow Quantum? Maybe you can speak to what it takes to create essentially what software API to a quantum computer? Right. I mean, that was a challenge to build, to invent, to build, and then to get to run on

the real devices. Can you actually speak to what it is? Yeah. So TensorFlow Quantum was an attempt that, well, I mean, I guess we succeeded at combining deep learning or differentiable classical programming with quantum computing and turn quantum computing into or have types of programs that are differentiable in quantum computing. And, you know, Andre Carpothe calls differentiable programming software 2.0. Right? It's like gradient descent is a better programmer

than you. And the idea was that in the early days of quantum computing, you can only run short quantum programs. And so which quantum programs should you run? Well, just let gradient descent find those programs instead. And so we built sort of the first infrastructure to not only run differentiable quantum programs, but combine them as part of broader deep learning graphs, incorporating deep neural networks, you know, the ones you know and love with what are called

quantum neural networks. And ultimately, it was very across the disciplinary effort. We had to invent all sorts of ways to differentiate, to back propagate through the graph, the hybrid graph. But ultimately, it taught me that you went the way to program matter into program physics is by differentiating through control parameters. If you have parameters that affects the physics of the system, you can evaluate some loss function, you can optimize the system to accomplish a task,

whatever that task may be. And that's a very sort of universal meta framework for how to program physics based computers. So try to parameterize everything, make those parameters differential and optimize. Yes. Okay. So is there some more practical engineering lessons from TensorFlow quantum? Just organizationally too, like the humans involved and how to get to a product, how to create good documentation. I don't know. All of these little subtle things that people

might not think about. I think like working across disciplinary boundaries is always a challenge. And you have to be extremely patient in teaching one another. I learned a lot of software engineering through the process. My colleagues learned a lot of quantum physics and some learned machine

learning through the process of building this system. And I think if you get some smart people that are passionate and trust each other in a room and you have a small team and you teach each other your specialties suddenly you're kind of forming this sort of model soup of expertise and something special comes out of that. It's like combining genes but for your knowledge

bases and sometimes special products come out of that. And so I think like even though it's very high friction initially to work in an interdisciplinary team I think the product at the end of the day is worth it. And so I learned a lot trying to bridge the gap there and I mean it's still a challenge to this day. You know we hire folks that have an AI background folks that have a pure physics background and somehow we have to make them talk to one another. Right. Is there a magic?

Is there some science and art to the hiring process to building a team that can create magic together? Yeah it's really hard to pinpoint that that Gense quoi right. I didn't know you speak French. It's very nice. Yeah I'm actually French Canadian. So you are legitimately French. I thought you were just doing that for the for the for the cred. No no I'm truly French Canadian from Montreal. But yeah essentially we look for people with very high fluid intelligence that

aren't over specialized because they're going to have to get out of their comfort zone. They're going to have to incorporate concepts that they've never seen before and very quickly get comfortable with them right or learn to work in a team. And so that's sort of what we look for when we hire. We can't hire people that are just like optimizing this subsystem for the past three or four years.

We need like really general sort of broader intelligence and specialty. And people that are open-minded really because if you're pioneering a new approach from scratch there is no textbook. There's no reference. It's just us and people that are hungry to learn. So we have to teach each other. We have to learn the literature. We have to share knowledge bases collaborate in order to push the boundary of knowledge further together. And so people that are used to just

getting prescribed what to do at this stage when you're at the pioneering stage. That's not necessarily who you want to hire. So you mentioned with ExtraPig you try to build the physical substrate for generative AI. What's the difference between that and the AGI AI itself? So is it possible that in the halls of your company AGI will be created or will AGI just be using this as a substrate? I think our goal is to both run human like AI or anthropomorphic AI.

So I for use of the term AGI and I know it's triggering for you. We think that the future is actually physics based AI combined with anthropomorphic AI. So you can imagine I have a sort of world modeling engine through physics based AI. Physics based AI is better at representing the world at all scales because it can be quantum mechanical thermodynamic deterministic hybrid representations of the world just like our world at different scales has different regimes of physics.

If you inspire yourself from that in the ways you learn representations of nature you can have much more accurate representations of nature. So you can have very accurate world models at all scales. So you have the world modeling engine and then you have the anthropomorphic AI that is human like. So you can have the science, the playground to test your ideas and you can have a synthetic scientist and to us that joint system of a physics based AI and an anthropomorphic AI is the

closest thing to a fully general artificial intelligence system. So you can get closer to truth by grounding the AI to physics. But you can also still have a anthropomorphic interface to us humans that like to talk to other humans or human like systems. So on that topic what do you say? I suppose that is one of the big limitations of current large language models to you is that they're not they're good bullshitters. They're not really grounded to truth necessarily.

Is that would that be fair to say? 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. It's priors or it's uncertainties about the world very accurately. Right? So you need you need a different type of AI to complement sort of this this. Textic extrapolation AI. You mentioned singularity earlier. How far away we from a singularity? 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. We have the like cone. We have the limits of physics restricting our ability to grow. So obviously can't fully diverge on a finite time.

I think my priors are that I think a lot of people on the other side of the aisle think that once we reach human level AI there's going to be an inflection point in a sun like fume like suddenly AI is going to grok how to manipulate matter at the nanoscale and 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 cost computationally and thermodynamically to requiring information about the world in order to be able to predict and control it. And that keeps things in check. It's funny you mentioned the other side of the aisle. So in the poll I posted about p-dume yesterday. What's the probability of doom?

There seems to be a nice division between people think it's very likely and very unlikely. I wonder if in the future there'll be the actual Republicans versus Democrats division blue versus red is the AI numerous versus the e-acres. Yeah. Yeah. So this movement is not right wing or left wing fundamentally it's more like

up versus down in terms of the. Which closely up. Okay. Civilization. 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 aligned with sort of aligning themselves with the dooms because that sort of instilling fear in people is a great way to for them to give up more control and give the government

more power. But fundamentally we're not left versus right. I think there's we've done polls of people's alignment with any e-ac. 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. So e-ac is as a movement is often formulated in contrast to EA effective altruism. What do you think are the pros and cons

of effective altruism? What's interesting and insightful to you about them and what is negative. Right. I think I think like people trying to do good from first principles is good. We should actually say sorry to interrupt. We should probably say that you can correct me if I'm wrong. But effective altruism is kind of movement that's trying to do good optimally. We're good. It's probably measured something like the amount of suffering in the world. You

want to minimize it. And there's ways that that can go wrong as any optimization can. And so it's interesting to explore like how things can go wrong. We're both trying to do good to some extent. And we're both trying we're arguing for which loss function which should use right. Yes. Their loss function is sort of heat ons right units of heat anism like how how like how good do you feel and for how much time right. And so suffering would be negative heat ons and they're

trying to minimize that. But to us that seems like that loss function has sort of a spurious minima right. You can start minimizing shrimp farm pain right which seems not that productive to me. Or you can end up with wire heading where you just you know either install a neural link or you scroll tick-tock forever. And you feel good on a short term time scale because you're neurochemistry. But on long term time scale it causes decay and death right because you're not

being productive. Whereas sort of. Yeah measuring progress of civilization not in terms of a subjective loss function like he knows he knows him. But rather an objective measure quantity that cannot be gained that is physical energy right. It's very objective right. And and there's not many ways to game it right. If you if you did it in terms of like GDP or a currency that's pinned to certain value that's moving right. And so that's not a good way to measure

our progress. And so 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. Is there a degree maybe you can educate me correct me. I get a little bit skeptical when there's an equation involved trying to reduce all of the human civilization human experience

to an equation. Is there a degree that we should be skeptical of the tyranny of an equation of a loss function over which to optimize like having a kind of intellectual humility about optimizing over loss functions. Yeah so so this particular loss function is not 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 it's not like we're not on

like stiff rails right. It's just a statistical statement about the future. But at the end of the day you know you can believe in gravity or not you know but it's not necessarily an option to obey it right and some some people try to test that and that goes not so well. So similarly you know I think I think thermodynamics is there whether we like it or not and we're just trying to point out what is and and try to orient ourselves and and and try to path forward given given this fundamental

truth. But there's still some uncertainty there's still lack of information humans tend to fill the gap of the lack of information with narratives. So how they interpret you know even physics is up to interpretation when there's uncertainty involved and humans tend to use that to further their own means. So it's always whenever there's an equation it just seems like until we have really perfect understanding of the universe. Humans will do what humans do and they try to

use the narrative of doing good to fool the populace into doing bad. I guess that this is something that should be skeptical about in all movements. That's right. So we invite skepticism right. Do you have an understanding of what might to degree that went wrong what do you think may have gone wrong with effective altruism that might also go wrong with effective accelerationism?

Yeah I mean I think you know I think it provided initially a sense of community for you know engineers and intellectuals and rationalists and the early days and 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 the influence government influence most AI orgs now I mean they're literally controlling the board of obi right and look over to

anthropic. I think they'll have some control over that too. And so I think you know the assumption of EAC is more like capitalism is that every agent organism and meta organism is going to act in its own interests and we should maintain sort of adversarial equilibrium or adversarial competition to keep each other and 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

that that corrupts people over time. What does a perfectly productive day since building is important? What does a perfectly productive day in the life of Guillaume Verdun look like? How much caffeine do

you consume? Like what was the perfect day? Okay so I have a particular regiment. 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 key

tones exogenous key tones. So you were in a keto diet or just I've done keto before for football and whatnot but I like to have a meal after sort of part of my day is done and so I can just have extreme focus. You do the social interactions earlier in the day without food. Frontload them yeah yeah like right now I'm on ketones and red ball. Yeah and it just gives you a clarity of thought that is really next level because then when you eat you're actually allocating

some of your energy that could be going to neural energy to your digestion. After I eat maybe I take a break an hour or so hour and a half and then usually it's like ideally one meal a day like steak and eggs and vegetables animal based primarily so fruit and meat and then and then I do a second win usually that's deep work right and because I'm you know I am a CEO but I'm still technical I'm contributing to most patents and they're all just stay up late into the night and work with

engineers on very technical problems. So that's like the the 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. whatever though that range of time yeah yeah that's the perfect time the emails that the things that are on fire stop trickling in you can you can focus and then you have your second win and you know I think

Demis Saba has a similar workday to some extent so I think that that's definitely inspired my work day but yeah that I started this work day when I was at Google and had to manage a bit of the product during the day and have meetings and then and then do technical work at night exercise

sleep those kinds of things yeah said football used to play football yeah I used to play American football I've done all sorts of sports growing up and then I was into powerlifting for a while so when I was a studying mathematics and grad school I would just you know do math and lift

take caffeine and that was my day it was very pure the the purist of monk modes um but it's really interesting how in powerlifting you're trying to cause neural adaptation by having certain driving signals and you're trying to engineer a neuroplasticity through

all sorts of supplements um and you know you have all sorts of you know brain derived neurotrophic factors that gets secreted when you when you lift so it's funny to me how I was trying to engineer uh um neural adaptation in my nervous system more broadly not just my brain while

learning mathematics uh I think you can learn much faster uh if you really care if you convince yourself to care a lot about what you're learning and you have some sort of assistance let's say caffeine or some coleanergic supplementing crease neuroplasticity I should chat with Andrew

Hooberman at some point uh he's the expert but uh uh yeah at least to me it's like you know you can try to input more tokens into your brain if you will and you can try to increase the learning rate so that you can learn much faster on a shorter time scale so I've learned a lot of things I

followed my curiosity you're naturally if you're passionate about what you're doing you're going to learn faster you're going to become smarter faster um and if you follow your curiosity you're always going to be interested and so I advise people to follow their curiosity and don't respect

the boundaries of certain fields or what you've been allocated in terms of lane of what you're working on uh just go out and explore and follow your nose and try to acquire and compress as much information as you can into your brain anything that you find interesting and caring about a thing

and like you said which is interesting it does it works for me really well it's like tricking yourself that you care about a thing yes and then you start to really care about it yep so it's funny the motivation is a really good catalyst for learning right and so at least part part of my

character uh as best Jesus is kind of like yeah the hype man yeah just hype but I'm like hyping myself up but then I just tweet about it yeah and it's just when I'm trying to get really hyped up and like an altered state of consciousness where I'm like ultra focused in the flow wired

trying to invent something that's never existed I need to get to like unreal levels of like excitement but your brain has these levels of of cognition that you can unlock with like higher levels of adrenaline and and whatnot and I mean I've learned that in powerlifting that actually

you can engineer a mental switch to like increase your strength right like if you can engineer a switch maybe you have a prompt like a certain song or some music where suddenly you're like fully primed then you're at max maximum strength right and I've engineered that that's switched

through years of lifting if you're going to get under 500 pounds and it could crush you if you don't have that switch to be wired in you might die so that that'll wake you right up and and that sort of skill I've carried over to like research when it's when it's go time when the stakes are high somehow I just reach another level of neural performance. The BFJ is a zero sort of embodiment representation of your intellectual Hulk. It's productivity Hulk

that they just turn on. What have you learned about the nature of identity from having these two identities? I think it's interesting for people to be able to put on those two hats explicitly. I think it was interesting in the early days I think in the early days I thought it was truly compartmentalized like oh yeah this is a character you know I'm Guillaume BF is just the character out like I like take my thoughts and then I extrapolate them to a bit more extreme but you know over time

it's kind of like both identities we're starting to merge mentally and people are like no you are I met you you are BF you are not just Guillaume and I was like wait am I and now it's like fully merged but it was already before the docs was already starting mentally that you know I'm I am this character it's part of me would you recommend people sort of have an ult absolutely like young people would you recommend them to explore different identities by having all

all the counts? It's it's fun it's like it's like writing an essay and taking a position right it's like you do this in debate it's it's like you can have experimental thoughts and and by having by the stakes being so low because you're an an on account with I don't know 20 followers or

something you can experiment with your thoughts and in a low stakes environment and I feel like we've lost that in the era of everything being under your main name everything being attributable to you people just are afraid to speak explore ideas that aren't fully formed right and I feel like we've

lost something there so I hope you know platforms like X and others like really help support people trying to stay synonymous or anonymous because it's really important for for people to share thoughts that aren't fully formed and converge on to maybe hidden truths that were hard to

converge upon if it was just through open conversation with real names yeah I really believe in like not radical but rigorous empathy so I can really considering what it's like to be a person of a certain viewpoint and like taking that as a thought experiment farther and farther and farther

and one way of doing that is an all-to-count that's a that's a that's a fun interesting way to really explore what it's like to be a person that believes a set of beliefs and taking that across the span of several days weeks months of course there's always the danger of becoming that that's

the Nietzsche gaze longer to the abyss the abyss gaze into you you have to be careful breaking bath yeah right breaking bath yeah you wake up with a shaved head one day just like who am I whatever I become so you mentioned quite a bit of advice already but what advice would

you give to young people of how to in this interesting world we're in how to have a career and how to have a life they can be part of I think to me the reason I went to theoretical physics was that I had to learn the base of the stack that was going to stick around no matter how the technology

changes right and to me that was the foundation upon which then I later built engineering skills and other skills and to me the laws of physics you know it may seem like the landscape right now is changing so fast it's disorienting but certain things like fundamental mathematics and

physics aren't going to change and if you have that knowledge and knowledge about complex systems and adaptive systems I think that's going to carry you very far and so not everybody has to study mathematics but I think it's really a huge cognitive unlock to to learn math and some physics

and engineering get as close to the base of the stack as possible yeah that's right because the base of the stack doesn't change everything else you know your knowledge might become not as relevant in a few years of course there's a sort of transfer learning you can do but then you have to always

use transfer learn constantly I guess the closer you are to the base of the stack the easier the the easier the transfer learning the shorter the jump right right and you'd be surprised like once you've learned concepts in many physical scenarios how they can carry over to understanding other

systems that aren't necessarily physics and I guess like the EAC writings you know the the principles and tenet post that was based on physics that was kind of my experimentation with applying some of the thinking from out of equilibrium thermodynamics to understanding the world around us

and it's led to to EAC in this this movement if you look at your one cog in the machine in the capitalist machine one human and if you look at yourself do you think mortality is a feature or a bug like would you want to be immortal no I think fundamentally

in thermodynamic dissipative adaptation there's the word dissipation dissipation is important death is important right we we have a saying in physics physics progresses one funeral at a time yeah I think the same is true for capitalism companies empires people everything everything

must die at some point I think that we should probably extend our lifespan because we need a longer period of of training because the world is more and more complex right we have more and more data to really be able to predict and understand the world and if we have a finite window of higher

neuroplasticity then then we have sort of a hard cap and how much we can understand about our world so you know I think I am for death because again I think it's important you know if you have like a king that would never die that would be a problem right like it would the system wouldn't

be constantly adapting right you need novelty you need youth you need disruption to make sure the system is always adapting and and malleable otherwise if things are immortal you know if you have let's say corporations that are there forever and they have them not believe they get calcified

they they become not as optimal not as high fitness and a changing time varying landscape right and so death gives space for youth and novelty to to take its place and I think it's an important part of every system in nature so yeah I am for I'm for death but I do think that longer lifespan

and longer time for neuroplasticity bigger brains which should be something we should strive for well in that Jeff Bezos and Bev J. Zell's agree that all companies die and for Jeff the the goal is to try to he calls a day one thinking try to constantly for as long as possible reinvent sort of extend the life of the company but eventually it too will die because it's so damn difficult to keep reinventing are you afraid of your own death?

um I think I have ideas and things I'd like to achieve in this world before I have to go but I don't think I'm necessarily afraid of death. You're not attached to this particular body in mind that you got no I I think I'm sure there's going to be better versions of myself in the future or forks forks right genetic forks or or other right I truly I truly believe that I think there's a

sort of evolutionary like algorithm happening at every bit or not and in the world it's sort of adapting through this process that we describe in an EAC and and I think maintaining this adaptation malleability is how we have constant optimization of the whole machine and so I don't think I'm particularly you know an optimum that needs to stick around forever I think there's going to be greater optimal in many ways. What do you think is the meaning of it all what's the why of the machine

the EAC machine? The why well the why is the runn dynamics it's it's why we're here it's what has led to the formation of life and of civilization of evolution of technologies and growth of civilization but why do we have thermodynamics why do we have our particular universe why do we have these

particular hyper parameters the constants of nature well then you get into the anthropic principle right in the landscape of potential universes right we're in the universe that allows for life and then why is there potentially many universes I don't know I don't know that part but could we

potentially engineer new universes or create pocket universes and set the hyper parameters so there is some mutual information between our existence and that universe and we'd be somewhat its parents I think that's really I don't know that'd be very poetic it's purely conjecture but

um again this is why figuring out quantum gravity wouldn't allow us to understand if we can do that and above that why is it all seems so beautiful and exciting the the quest to freaking out quantum gravity seems so exciting why why is that why are we drawn to that why are we pulled towards that

just just that puzzle solving creative force that it underpins all of it it seems like I think we seek just like an LLM seeks to minimize cross entropy between its internal model in the world we seek to minimize yeah the statistical divergence between our predictions in the world and the world

itself and you know having regimes of energy scales or physical scales in which we have no visibility no ability to predict or perceive um you know that's kind of an insult to us and we want to we want to be able to understand the world better in order to best steer steer it or steer

us through it um and in general it's the capability that has evolved because the better you can predict the world the better you can capture utility or free energy towards your own sustenance and growth and I think quantum gravity again is kind of the final boss in terms of knowledge acquisition

um because once we've mastered that then we can do a lot potentially but between here and there I think there's a lot to learn in the mesoscales there's a lot of information to acquire about our world and a lot of engineering perception prediction and control to be done to climb up the

cartochef scale and to us it's that's the great challenge of our times yeah and when you're not sure where to go let the meme pave the way uh gium uh Beth thank you for talking today thank you for the work you're doing thank you for the humor and the wisdom you put into the world this was awesome

thank you so much for having me Lex it's pleasure thank you for listening to this conversation with Guillain Verdun the support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein if at first the idea is not absurd then there is no hope for it thank you for listening i hope to see you next time