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Published · transcript-backed

Tim Scarfe: belief

24 Dec 2025 Machine Learning Street Talk "I Desperately Want To Live In The Matrix" - Dr. Mike Israetel

“Oh, yeah. And I'm glad that I think you're implicitly agreeing there that I look at today's architecture.”

— Tim Scarfe

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Tim Scarfe
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
24 Dec 2025
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

Transcript context

…It's today's architecture, yes. Oh, yeah. And I'm glad that I think you're implicitly agreeing there that I look at today's architecture. Don't get me wrong. I'm not being cynical. I think that this is a new innovation. It's up there with the invention of the internet and mobile phones. And when the Internet came out, we all said to each other, didn't we, that now everyone has the world's information in their pocket. They can just go and they can look up all of this scientific information. It's gonna revolutionize society. And it did, but not in the way that we thought it would do. Mostly because people could give a fuck for scientific information. They just want porn. They sure shit got a lot of that. There was a there's a just because there's a supply of something does not imply that there is a demand of that something. First of all, second of all, I have a very persnickety thing. I think you might appreciate like a huge fraction of the world's information is still stored in books and graduate libraries. They didn't upload those yet to the Internet. Someone say, access to all the world's knowledge. I'm like, well, is that that's not how it works, but oh, maybe a large fraction of it. Right? But this is the there's a couple of problems with that. A lot of the world's knowledge sits on local databases and said bio labs and 3 people who work there and that database knows it and no 1 else does. So there's that problem. I would say I I take all of your comments in in very good faith. We're sure shit not gonna magic our way to intelligence. I know of a few folks whom I respect, but I find their positions curious that say we're like a few years from solving all potential problems. And like I read that shit and I'm like, man, holy I want to believe that's almost certainly not gonna happen in my assessment. What I will say though is I wouldn't bet against the general vibe of what Ray Kurzweil said back in the day. And what I would also do is attempt not to doubt things that are massively scalable in a way we already understand is likely to bear incredible amount of fruit. Paul Krugman, economist, Nobel laureate, fucking genius, had a the kind of quote that it just sucks. You know, you said 1 thing. He said like a 100 things. See 20 of those are just infections of political ideology, which if pressed on in an exam room, he would say I don't really believe maybe or I want to believe but I know they're not true. About 79 of them are like just spot on literally revolutionary economic work. He's the fucking man. And then the 1 was like the Internet will have roughly no big big impact than the fax machine. I just want to make sure that no 1 in their right mind says that about AI today because the clown show for shit people said in 2022 is already in full effect in 2025. And I'll say another thing, how many people predicted that the Turing test would be 2 things in 2024 passed convincingly, and I rolled away as it never was a test…

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