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Nat Friedman: belief

22 Mar 2023 Dwarkesh Podcast Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI

“I think ML engineer salaries and compensation packages will probably be adjusted to try to address this because you don't want your secrets walking out the door.”

— Nat Friedman

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Nat Friedman
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
22 Mar 2023
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

Transcript context

…On the particular point of AI labs potentially storing secrets, you have this sort of strange norm of different people from different AI labs, not only being friends, but often living together, right? It would be like Oppenheimer living with somebody working on the Russian atomic bomb or something like that. Do you think those norms will persist once the value of the secrets is realized? Yeah, I was just wondering about that some more today. It seems to be sort of slowing, they seem to be trying to close the valves. But I think there's a lot of things working against them in this regard. So one is that the secrets are relatively simple. Two is that you're coming off this academic norm of publishing and really the entire culture is based on sort of sharing and publishing. Three is, as you said, they all live in group houses, summer in polycules. There's just a lot of intermixing. And then it's all in California. And California is a non-compete state. We don't have non-competes. And so they'd have to change the culture, get everybody their own house, and move to Connecticut and then maybe it'll work. I think ML engineer salaries and compensation packages will probably be adjusted to try to address this because you don't want your secrets walking out the door. There are engineers, Igor Babushkin for example, who has just joined Twitter. Elon hired him to train. I think that's public, is that right? I think it is. It will be now.…

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