Adam Brown: belief

Transcript context

…You could build AGI with that money, right? It's super interesting how everybody talks about how academics can't possibly compete with the big labs, but the cost of CERN is larger than the cost of big model training runs by a lot. So that's just academics pooling their money. That's an interesting fact. They got so expensive that it's difficult to persuade people to buy a new one for us that's even bigger. It's a very natural thing to do, to build an atom smasher that just smashes things together to higher energy. It's a very natural thing to see what comes out. People were perhaps somewhat disappointed with the output of the LHC, where it made the Higgs, which was great, and we found it, but we also expected it to be there. And it didn't make anything else, any of these more fanciful scenarios or anything basically unexpected. People had speculated we'd see supersymmetry there, or we'd see extra dimensions, and basically that was a null result. We didn't see anything like that. I would say we should definitely build another one if it was cheap to do so, and we should build another one once AGI has made us all so rich that it's cheap to do so. But it's not the obvious place to spend $50 billion if you had $50 billion to spend on science. Often it's these smaller experiments that can look for things in unexpected places. A decade ago, there was BICEP, which is a reasonably cheap, tens of millions of dollars, experiment at the South Pole that thought it had seen some hints in the cosmic microwave background of gravitational waves. That would have been revolutionary if true. Not worth doing BICEP if it cost $10 billion. Definitely worth doing BICEP if it costs $10 million. So there's all sorts of experiments like that, often observational. What is the value of seeing these primordial gravitational waves?…

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