Guillaume Verdon: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, it’d be interesting to also be able to sign where the bot came from like, who created the bot? What are the parameters, the full history of the creation of the bot, what was the original model? What was the fine tuning? All of it, the kind of unmodifiable history of the bot’s creation. Because then you can know if there’s a swarm of millions of bots that were created by a particular government, for example. I do think that a lot of pervasive ideologies today have been amplified using these adversarial techniques from foreign adversaries. 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 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. There was all sorts of green movements there that induced shutdowns of nuclear power plants. And then that later on induced a dependency on Russia for oil. And that was a net negative for Germany and the West. 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, well, first of all, that’s far more unstable. We almost lost OpenAI to this ideology. It almost got dismantled a couple of weeks ago. That would’ve 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 achieving this fall tolerance. Actually, there’s a concept in quantum computing. When you design a quantum computer, quantum computers are very fragile to ambient noise, and the world is jiggling about, there’s cosmic radiation from outer space that usually flips 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 hitting some of your quantum bits with a hammer proverbial hammer, if your information is sufficiently de-localized, it is protected from that local fault. And to me, I think that humans fluctuate. They can get corrupted, they can get bought out. And if you have a top-down hierarchy where very few people- 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, it was a couple board members and they had enough power to potentially collapse the organization. And at least to me, 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 in AI and we can maintain a nice, stable, adversarial equilibrium of powers, right. I think the, at least to me, attention between ideas here, so to me, deceleration can be both used to centralize power and to decentralize it and the same with acceleration. So 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, diverse development of AI that also considers the dangers of AI? And AI, we can generalize to 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 a wise strategic optimism versus reckless optimism?…

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