Guillaume Verdon: belief

Transcript context

…Well, there’s some degree where being concerned… Maybe using human psychology, being concerned about threats all around us is a motivator. 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, we’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 AIs that are reliable, and I think that’s what he’s trying to do with xAI. So I’m all for it. What I am against is stopping, let’s say the OpenSource ecosystem from thriving by, let’s say in the executive order, claiming that OpenSource LMs are dual-use technologies and 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 dissuade a lot of hackers from contributing, hackers that could later become the researchers that make key discoveries that push us forward, including discoveries for AI safety. And so I think I just want to maintain ubiquity of opportunity to contribute to AI and to own a piece of the future. It can’t just be legislated behind some wall where only a few players get to play the game. The e/acc movement is often caricatured to mean progress and innovation at all costs. Doesn’t matter how unsafe it is, doesn’t matter if it causes a lot of damage. You just build cool shit as fast as possible, stay up all night with a Diet Coke, whatever it takes. 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 e/acc, is AI safety?…

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