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TRANSCRIPT:
https://lexfridman.com/george-hotz-3-transcript

EPISODE LINKS:
George's Twitter: https://twitter.com/realgeorgehotz
George's Twitch: https://twitch.tv/georgehotz
George's Instagram: https://instagram.com/georgehotz
Tiny Corp's Twitter: https://twitter.com/__tinygrad__
Tiny Corp's Website: https://tinygrad.org/
Comma-ai's Twitter: https://twitter.com/comma_ai
Comma-ai's Website: https://comma.ai/
Comma-ai's YouTube (unofficial): https://youtube.com/georgehotzarchive
Mentioned:
Learning a Driving Simulator (paper): https://bit.ly/42T6lAN

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:39 - Time is an illusion
11:18 - Memes
13:55 - Eliezer Yudkowsky
26:19 - Virtual reality
32:38 - AI friends
40:03 - tiny corp
53:24 - NVIDIA vs AMD
56:21 - tinybox
1:08:30 - Self-driving
1:23:09 - Programming
1:31:06 - AI safety
1:56:03 - Working at Twitter
2:33:46 - Prompt engineering
2:39:42 - Video games
2:55:57 - Andrej Karpathy
3:06:02 - Meaning of life

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What possible ideas do you have for how a human species ends?

Sure, so I think the most obvious way to me is wireheading.

We end up all staring at that infinite TikTok and forgetting to eat.

Now, to be fair, it's probably hard to get all of humanity.

Yeah, the interesting thing about humanity is the diversity in it.

I mean, diversity in humanity is- We do respect.

The following is a conversation with George Hotz.

He's the founder of Kama.ai that seeks to solve autonomous driving and is the founder of a new company called TinyCorp that created TinyGrad, a neural network framework that is extremely simple with the goal of making it run on any device by any human easily and efficiently.

As you know, George also did a large number of fun and amazing things from hacking the iPhone to recently joining Twitter for a bit as a intern in quotes, making the case for refactoring the Twitter code base.

In general, he's a fascinating engineer and human being and 1 of my favorite people to talk to.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

You mentioned something in a stream about the philosophical nature of time.

You know, I sell phone calls to comma for $1, 000 and some guy called me and like, you know, it's $1, 000, you can talk to me for half an hour.

And he's like, yeah, okay, so time doesn't exist, and I really wanted to share this with you.

I'm like, oh, what do you mean time doesn't exist?

I think time is a useful model, whether it exists or not.

It's about whether it's a useful model to describe reality.

you think there is an objective reality or is everything just useful models?

Like underneath it all, is there an actual thing that we're constructing models for?

I mean, this kind of connects to the models we're constructing reality with machine learning, right?

Like, is it just nice to have useful approximations of the world such that we can do something with it?

And I think hard things are actually hard.

I don't think you're the person that follows the majority in all walks of life.

Yeah, in theoretical computer science, you're 1 of the sheep.

What were you talking about on the stream with time?

I remembered half the things I said on stream.

Someday someone's gonna make a model of all of it and it's gonna come back to haunt me.

Would that be exciting to you or sad that there's a George Hotz model?

I mean, the question is when the George Hotz model is better than George Hotz.

Like, I am declining and the model is growing.

What is the metric by which you measure better or worse in that, if you were competing with yourself?

Maybe you can just play a game where you have the George Hotz answer and the George Hotz model answer and ask which people prefer.

Either 1, it will hurt more when it's people close to me, but both will be overtaken by the George Hotz model.

Loved ones, family members would rather have the model over for Thanksgiving than you.

Or like significant others would rather sext with the large language model version of you.

Especially when it's fine tuned to their preferences.

Yeah, well, that's what we're doing in a relationship, right, we're just fine tuning ourselves, but we're inefficient with it, because we're selfish and greedy and so on.

Our language models can fine-tune more efficiently, more selflessly.

There's a Star Trek Voyager episode where, you know, Catherine Janeway, lost in the Delta Quadrant, makes herself a lover on the holodeck.

And the lover falls asleep on her arm and he snores a little bit.

And Janeway edits the program to remove that.

And then of course the realization is, wait, this person's terrible.

It is actually all their nuances and quirks and slight annoyances that make this relationship worthwhile.

But I don't think we're gonna realize that until it's too late.

Well, I think a large language model could incorporate the flaws and the quirks and all that kind of stuff.

Just the perfect amount of quirks and flaws to make you charming without crossing the line.

And that's probably a good approximation of the percent of time the language model should be cranky or an asshole or jealous or all this kind of stuff.

And of course it can and it will, but all that difficulty at that point is artificial.

Okay, what's the difference between real and artificial?

Artificial difficulty is difficulty that's constructed or could be turned off with a knob.

Real difficulty is like you're in the woods and you got to survive.

LRB So if something cannot be turned off with a knob, it's real.

Or I mean you can't get out of this by smashing the knob with a hammer.

You know, Into the Wild when Alexander Supertramp, he wants to explore something that's never been explored before.

But it's the 90s, everything's been explored.

So he's like, well, I'm just not gonna bring a map.

There was a bridge a mile from where you were camping.

How does that connect to the metaphor of the knob?

By not bringing the map, you didn't become an explorer.

What if we just don't have access to the knob?

CB1 Well, that maybe is even scarier, right?

We already exist in a world of nature and nature has been fine-tuned over billions of years.

To have humans build something and then throw the knob away in some grand romantic gesture is horrifying.

Do you think of us humans as individuals that are like born and die or is it, are we just all part of 1 living organism that is earth, that is nature?

I don't think there's a clear line there.

I think it's all kind of just fuzzy, I don't know.

Everything running in your head is computation.

Everything running in the universe is computation, I think.

I believe the extended church time thesis.

Yeah, but there seems to be an embodiment to your particular computation.

Well, yeah, but I mean models have consistency too.

Models that have been RLHF'd will continually say, well how do I murder ethnic minorities?

It's all RLHF, like we all RLHF each other.

We provide human feedback and thereby fine tune these little pockets of computation, but it's still unclear why that pocket of computation stays with you for years.

It just kind of, you have this consistent set of physics, biology, whatever you call the neurons firing, the electrical signals, the mechanical signals, all of that, that seems to stay there.

And it contains information, it stores information, and that information permeates through time and stays with you.

Okay, to be fair, like a lot of the models we're building today are very...

Even RLHF is nowhere near as complex as the human loss function.

Reinforcement learning with human feedback.

When I talked about will GPT-12 be AGI, my answer is, No, of course not.

I mean, cross-entropy loss is never gonna get you there.

You need probably RL in fancy environments in order to get something that would be considered like AGI-like.

So to ask the question about why, I don't know, it's just some quirk of evolution, right?

I don't think there's anything particularly special about where I ended up, where humans ended up.

So, okay, we have human level intelligence.

Would you call that AGI, whatever we have, GI?

Look, actually, I don't really even like the word AGI, but general intelligence is defined to be whatever humans have.

Okay, so why can GPT-12 not get us to AGI?

If your loss function is categorical cross entropy, if your loss function is just try to maximize compression, I have a SoundCloud I rap, and I tried to get ChatGPT to help me write raps, and the raps that it wrote sounded like YouTube comment raps.

you can go on any rap beat online and you can see what people put in the comments.

And it's the most like mid quality rap you can find.

Every time I talk to you, I learn new words.

Kind of, it's like middle of the curve, right?

And you have like the dumb guy, the smart guy, and then the mid guy.

The smart guy is like, I put all my money in Bitcoin.

The mid guy is like, you can't put money in Bitcoin.

Memes, the humor, the idea, the absurdity encapsulated in a single image.

And it just kind of propagates virally between all of our brains.

I didn't get much sleep last night, so I'm very, I sound like I'm high.

Do you think we have ideas or ideas have us?

I think that we're gonna get super scary memes once the AIs actually are super human.

So, Infinite Jest, it's introduced in the first

pages, is about a tape that once you watch it once, you only ever want to watch that tape.

In fact, you want to watch the tape so much that someone says, okay, here's a hacksaw, cut off your pinky, and then I'll let you watch the tape again, and you'll do it.

So we're actually going to build that, I think, but it's not going to be 1 static tape.

I think the human brain is too complex to be stuck in 1 static tape like that.

If you look at like ant brains, maybe they can be stuck on a static tape.

But we're going to build that using generative models.

We're going to build the TikTok that you actually can't look away from.

So TikTok is already pretty close there, but the generation is done by humans.

The algorithm is just doing their recommendation, but if the algorithm is also able to do the generation.

Well, it's a question about how much intelligence is behind it, right?

So the content is being generated by, let's say, 1 humanity worth of intelligence, and you can quantify a humanity, right?

That's a, you know, it's exaflops, yadaflops, but you can quantify it.

Once that generation is being done by a hundred humanities, You're done.

So it's actually scale that's the problem.

And what if it's sort of manipulating the very limited human dopamine engine for porn?

I don't even know what it'll look like, right?

Like again, you can't imagine the behaviors of something smarter than you, but a super intelligent, and an agent that just dominates your intelligence so much will be able to completely manipulate you.

Is it possible that it won't really manipulate, it'll just move past us?

It'll just kind of exist the way water exists or the air exists.

It's not the machine that's gonna do that.

It's other humans using the machine that are gonna do that to you.

Yeah, because the machine is not interested in hurting humans.

But the human gets the machine, and there's a lot of humans out there very interested in manipulating you.

Well, let me bring up Eliezer Yudkowsky, who recently sat where you're sitting.

He thinks that AI will almost surely kill everyone.

And I'll try to get you to find hope, or we could find a no to that answer, but why yes?

Okay, why didn't nuclear weapons kill everyone?

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George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387