Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I should do more of them. Yeah. Look, obviously X is doing great. And then like I said, Substack know has become the center for a lot of them. I think the best deeply thought through, certainly intellectual content, tons of current events stuff there as well. And then, yeah, then there’s a bunch of new systems that are very exciting. So I think one of the things we can look forward to in the next four years is number one, just a massive reinvigoration of social media as a consequence of the changes that are happening right now. I’m very excited to see what’s going to happen with that. And then it’s happened on X, but it’s now going to happen on other platforms. And then the other is crypto’s going to come right back to life. And actually that’s very exciting. Actually, that’s worth noting is that’s another trillion-dollar question on AI, which is in a world of pervasive AI, and especially in a world of AI agents, and imagine a world of billions or trillions of AI agents running around, they need an economy. And crypto, in our view, happens to be the ideal economic system for that, because it’s a programmable money. It’s a very easy way to plug in and do that. And there’s this transaction processing system that can do that. And so I think the crypto AI intersection is potentially a very, very big deal. And so that was going to be impossible under the prior regime, and I think under the new regime, hopefully, it’ll be something we can do. Almost for fun. Let me ask a friend of yours, Yann LeCun, what are your top 10 favorite things about Yann LeCun? I think he’s a brilliant guy. I think he’s important to the world. I think you guys disagree on a lot of things, but I personally like vigorous disagreement, I, as a person in the stands, like to watch the gladiators go at it. And- No, he’s a super genius. I mean, look, I wouldn’t say we’re super close, but casual friends. I worked with him at Meta. He was the chief scientist at Meta for a long time and still works with us. And obviously is a legendary figure in the field and one of the main people responsible for what’s happening. My serious observation would be it’s the thing I’ve talked to him about for a long time, and I keep trying to read and follow everything he does, is he’s probably, he is the, I think, see if you agree with this, he is the smartest and most credible critic of LLMs as the path for AI. And he’s not, there’s certain, I would say, troll-like characters who are just cropping everything but Yann has very deeply thought through, basically, theories as to why LLMs are an evolutionary dead end. And I actually, I try to do this thing where I try to model, try to have a mental model of the two different sides of a serious argument. And so I’ve tried to internalize that argument as much as I can. Which is difficult because we’re investing it behind LLMs as aggressively as we can. And so if he’s right, that could be a big problem, but we should also know that. And then I sort of use his ideas to challenge all the bullish people to really test their level of knowledge. So I like to grill people. I got my CS degree 35 years ago, so I’m not deep in the technology, but to the extent I can understand Yann’s points, I can use them to really surface a lot of the questions for the people who are more bullish. And that’s been, I think, very, very productive. So it is very striking that you have somebody who is that central in the space, who is actually a full-on skeptic. And again, this could go different ways. He could end up being very wrong. He could end up being totally right, or it could be that he will provoke the evolution of these systems to be much better than they would’ve been.…

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