Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…I agree and I would love to see a lot of people, all of the other labs talk about science, but I think we’re really the only ones using it for science and doing that. And that’s why projects like AlphaFold are so important to me. And I think to our mission is to show how AI can be clearly used in a very concrete way for the benefit of humanity. And also, we spun out companies like Isomorphic off the back of Alpha Fold to do drug discovery and it’s going really well and you can think of build additional AlphaFold type systems to go into chemistry space to help accelerate drug design. And the examples I think we need to show and society needs to understand are where AI can bring these huge benefits. Well, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for pushing the scientific efforts forward with rigor, with fun, with humility, all of it. I just love to see and still talking about P equals NP, it’s just incredible. So I love it. There’s been seemingly a war for talent. Some of it is meme, I don’t know. What do you think about Meta buying up talent with huge salaries and the heating up of this battle for talent? I should say that I think a lot of people see DeepMind as a really great place to do cutting-edge work for the reasons that you’ve outlined. There’s this vibrant scientific culture. Yeah. Well look, of course there’s a strategy that Meta is taking right now. I think that from my perspective at least, I think the people that are real believers in the mission of AGI and what it can do and understand the real consequences, both good and bad from that and what that responsibility entails, I think they’re mostly doing it to be like myself, to be on the frontier of that research so they can help influence the way that goes and steward that technology safely into the world. And Meta right now are not at the frontier. Maybe they’ll manage to get back on there and it’s probably rational what they’re doing from their perspective because they’re behind and they need to do something. But I think there’s more important things than just money. Of course one has to pay people their market rates and all of these things and that continues to go up. And I was expecting this because more and more people are finally realizing, leaders of companies, what I’ve always known for 30 plus years now, which is that AGI is the most important technology probably that’s ever going to be invented. So in some senses, it’s rational to be doing that. But I also think there’s a much bigger question. People in AI these days are very well paid. I remember when we were starting out back in 2010, I didn’t even pay myself a couple of years because it wasn’t enough money. We couldn’t raise any money, and these days, interns are being paid the amount that we raised as our first entire seed round. So it’s pretty funny. And I remember the days where I used to have to work for free and almost pay my own way to do an internship. Right now, it’s all the other around, but that’s just how it is. It’s the new world. But I think that we’ve been discussing what happens post- AGI and energy systems are solved and so on, what is even money going to mean? So I think in the economy and we’re going to have much bigger issues to work through and how does the economy function in that world and companies? So I think it’s a little bit of a side issue about salaries and things like that today.…

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