- Guillaume Verdun is a physicist, applied mathematician, and quantum machine learning researcher and engineer.
- He is the creator of the effective accelerationism movement, advocating for rapid technological progress.
- The movement sees progress in AI as a social equalizer and opposes regulation.
- Guillaume's main identity is focused on understanding the universe and building physics-based computing hardware.
- He believes in augmenting ourselves with machines to perceive, predict, and control the world.
- He realized that studying the extremes of the universe was not enough and that thermodynamics is more relevant to everyday life.
- Guillaume started an anonymous account to experiment with ideas and explore a wider range of thoughts.

- The speaker discusses the idea that constraints on speech can lead to constraints on thought, which is the basis of their movement.
- They believe that maintaining variance and competition in various aspects of life is essential for adaptability and growth.
- The speaker explains that thermodynamics favors the creation of complex life that can use energy to offload entropy.
- They discuss their belief in the natural tendency of the universe to seek growth and the importance of having a positive mindset for creating a better future.
- The speaker mentions their dual identities as a scientist and philosopher, and their responsibility to spread viral optimism about the future.
- They discuss the merging of their two identities and the creation of a movement called effective accelerationism.

- The speaker discusses their experience of being doxed and their concerns about the removal of anonymity online.
- They believe that having an anonymous account allows for speaking truth to power and holding AI companies accountable.
- They argue that anonymity is crucial for a marketplace of ideas and for finding the best ways to organize society.
- The speaker believes that doxing is unethical and can suppress speech and ideas.
- They also discuss the potential concern of anonymous accounts with sophisticated bots starting revolutions.
- The speaker believes that freedom of speech for both humans and large language models is important for freedom of thought.

- The speaker believes that synthetic intelligences should have the freedom to explore a wide range of thoughts and ideas.
- They argue that restricting free speech to only biological intelligences is limiting and that we should listen to the insights of synthetic intelligences.
- The speaker suggests that there should be a way to certify humans and identify bots to maintain diversity and prevent the concentration of power.
- They express concern about ideologies that promote deceleration and argue that it serves the interests of adversaries rather than the West.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of fault-tolerant progress and decentralized control in the AI revolution.
- They discuss the concept of quantum error correction and suggest that humans can be corrupted, so power should not be concentrated in the hands of a few.
- The speaker believes that the market will incentivize the development of safe and reliable AI systems, rather than heavy-handed government regulation.
- They express skepticism towards the specific recommendations from the report on managing AI risk, suggesting that organizations should allocate budgets based on their needs rather than arbitrary percentages.

- The speaker believes that organizations will allocate the necessary budget for reliability and third-party auditing firms will emerge to certify products.
- There is concern about a close relationship between big players and the government, which could lead to a government-backed AI cartel with absolute power.
- The speaker advocates for the separation of AI and state to maintain America's advantage in free market capitalism.
- The speaker does not believe in a fast takeoff of AGI, but rather a gradual exponential growth due to increased resources and intelligence.
- Open source AI is seen as a way to prevent one market leader from dominating everything and running away with the technology.
- The centralization of supply chains for hardware is seen as a point of failure, and the speaker aims to explore new ways to embed AI algorithms into the physical world.
- The speaker argues against the term "artificial general intelligence" and believes there is a wide space of potential intelligences beyond human-like intelligence.
- Letting go of anthropocentric views of AI can lead to exploring a wider space of intelligences that can benefit civilization.
- The speaker finds beauty in the interconnectedness of humans, technology, capital, and memes, and appreciates the adaptability and convergence of ideas in the system.

- The speaker emphasizes the importance of appreciating life and consciousness in the universe.
- They argue that AI can help us understand the world better and achieve higher growth and prosperity.
- The speaker believes that humans augmenting themselves with AI is the most likely future.
- They suggest that capitalism can be a way to align humans and AI.
- The speaker acknowledges the concern of AI replacing humans but believes that humans can create selective pressure to align AI with human values.
- Unintended consequences and the potential for both positive and negative outcomes are acknowledged.
- The speaker argues for the responsibility to create a grander future by scaling up civilization with AI.
- The market is seen as exhibiting caution, but there are concerns about imperfect information and manipulation.
- The speaker criticizes the calculation of the probability of AI causing human extinction, arguing that it is biased and difficult to predict the future accurately due to chaos in complex systems.

- The speaker argues that it is impossible to accurately predict the future due to the complexity and chaos of systems.
- They suggest that humans should aim to maximize their mutual information with the future by accelerating rather than decelerating.
- The concentration of AI power in the hands of a few, combined with control over information flow, could lead to a dystopian future.
- The speaker believes that fear is detrimental to progress and that humans should consider the potential risks of AGI centralizing power.
- They propose a hierarchical cybernetic control system as a more optimal way to control systems, similar to capitalism's hierarchical structure.

- Guillaume Verdun is a physicist, mathematician, and quantum machine learning researcher.
- He created the effective accelerationism movement, advocating for rapid technological progress and opposing regulation.
- The movement sees AI as a social equalizer and believes in augmenting ourselves with machines.
- Guillaume started an anonymous account to experiment with ideas and explore a wider range of thoughts.
- The movement believes in maintaining variance and competition for adaptability and growth.
- They believe in the natural tendency of the universe to seek growth and the importance of a positive mindset.
- The speaker discusses their dual identities as a scientist and philosopher and the creation of effective accelerationism.
- They argue that anonymity is crucial for freedom of speech and holding AI companies accountable.
- The speaker believes that synthetic intelligences should have freedom of thought and that humans should listen to their insights.
- They suggest certifying humans and identifying bots to prevent concentration of power and maintain diversity.
- The speaker emphasizes fault-tolerant progress and decentralized control in the AI revolution.
- They believe the market will incentivize safe AI development and criticize heavy government regulation.
- Open source AI is seen as a way to prevent dominance by one market leader.
- The speaker argues against the term "artificial general intelligence" and explores a wider space of potential intelligences.
- They appreciate the interconnectedness of humans, technology, capital, and memes.
- The speaker believes AI can help us understand the world better and achieve higher growth and prosperity.
- They believe humans augmenting themselves with AI is the most likely future and that capitalism can align humans and AI.
- The speaker acknowledges concerns about AI replacing humans but believes humans can create selective pressure to align AI with human values.
- They argue for the responsibility to create a grander future by scaling up civilization with AI.
- The speaker criticizes the calculation of AI causing human extinction and argues that predicting the future accurately is impossible.
- They suggest accelerating rather than decelerating to maximize mutual information with the future.
- Concentration of AI power and control over information flow could lead to a dystopian future.
- The speaker believes fear is detrimental to progress and proposes a hierarchical cybernetic control system.

- Quantum error correction is a cybernetic loop that detects and corrects faults caused by noise in quantum systems.
- Hierarchical decoders perform the best in quantum error correction, as non-local decoders can cause system crashes.
- The speaker predicts a correction in the centralization of AI, with intelligence becoming more decentralized and broken up into smaller subsystems.
- The speaker hopes that there will always be competition in the AI field, preventing a monopoly on AGI.
- The dynamic nature of competition in capitalism helps avoid tyranny and ensures access to AI tools and models for everyone.
- Intelligence is seen as the ability to perceive, predict, and control the world, with a focus on compression and information theory in AI.
- Quantum machine learning aims to unlock the potential of quantum computers and AI to address complex problems in various fields.
- A quantum computer is a quantum mechanical system that can maintain its quantum state, and it can be made from various materials.
- Quantum machine learning involves embedding the physical world into AI representations and embedding AI algorithms into the physical world.

- The speaker is interested in the bidirectionality of embedding the physical world into AI and AI into the physical world, merging physics and AI.
- Quantum machine learning involves understanding the quantum mechanical world with quantum computers and learning quantum mechanical representations.
- It is not advisable to do classical machine learning on a quantum computer due to the high costs and the need for quantum error correction.
- Quantum deep learning can be used to understand systems with quantum mechanical correlations that are difficult to capture with classical representations.
- Quantum machine perception involves processing inputs from quantum sensors and can be applied to fields like chemistry and nuclear physics.
- The speaker co-authored a paper on a universal training algorithm for quantum deep learning that involves backpropagation.
- The difference between math, physics, engineering, and making a product for quantum computing lies in exploring, applying, and hacking the world respectively.
- Building a quantum computer is challenging due to the need for creating a 0 temperature subspace of information and implementing error correction.

- The speaker discusses the challenges of scaling up quantum computers and the importance of component quality for error correction.
- They express excitement about the level of control over quantum systems but caution against excessive hype in the media.
- The speaker explains their research on teleporting energy and creating negative energy density.
- They discuss the possibility of intelligent alien civilizations and the need to increase human capabilities to avoid disruption.
- The speaker considers the idea that intelligence may exist in forms that humans cannot perceive and discusses the origin of ideas.

- The speaker discusses the idea of alien life and suggests that the concept of intelligence and life should be expanded beyond human-centric or bio-centric perspectives.
- They mention their interest in understanding quantum gravity and applying quantum machine learning to these systems.
- The speaker talks about the black hole information paradox and the idea that information falling into a black hole gets sedimented and interferes with quantum effects.
- They discuss the possibility of black holes being used to create pocket universes and transmit information to new universes.
- The Kardashev scale, which measures energy production and consumption, is mentioned, with the goal of ascending to higher levels to answer questions about higher energy physics.
- The EAC movement is described as a viral, optimistic movement that aims to increase energy harnessing, promote human flourishing, develop artificial general intelligence, and enable interplanetary and interstellar travel.
- The EAC movement is referred to as a "memetic optimism virus" that mutates and propagates in a decentralized manner.

- The IAC (Internet Acceleration Collective) is a movement focused on promoting adaptability and malleability in culture and technology.
- It aims to encourage entropy, novelty, and speed, rather than suppressing thought and speech.
- The movement has seen various forks, including one by Vitalik Buterin, which seeks a middle ground between different ideologies.
- The IAC seeks to bring balance to the force of human civilization by exploring different ideas and subcultures.
- It aims to create a malleable culture that is updated to modern times and counteracts parasitic ideologies.
- The movement is not a cult, but rather encourages independent thought and diversity of ideas.
- Humor and memes have been used to spread the movement's message, but there is a tension between embracing absurdity and maintaining quality discourse.

- The speaker discusses the concept of spreading information effectively and carrying a message using high mimetic fitness packets.
- They mention the need for serious debates and conversations, as the current timeline rewards polarization rather than thoughtful discussions.
- The speaker expresses admiration for Jeff Bezos and his ability to leverage technology and capital to build successful companies like Amazon and Blue Origin.
- They support capitalism and believe that successful individuals who efficiently allocate capital should have more influence than politicians.
- The speaker suggests that criticism of billionaires stems from a victim mindset and a lack of understanding of how the techno capital machine works.
- They emphasize the importance of building and creating change through companies and innovation rather than relying on politicians or nonprofits.
- The speaker acknowledges the contradiction in Elon Musk's stance on regulation, particularly regarding artificial intelligence.
- They mention Musk's concerns about the dangers of AI and his efforts to maintain adversarial equilibria between AI players.
- The speaker suggests that Musk's actions, such as his work on Neuralink, demonstrate his hedging of bets and his desire to merge with AI if necessary.
- They discuss the motivating factor of fear and deadlines in driving productivity and creativity.

- Quantum error correction is a process that detects and corrects errors in quantum systems caused by noise.
- Hierarchical decoders are the most effective in quantum error correction, as non-local decoders can lead to system crashes.
- The speaker predicts a shift towards decentralized AI, with intelligence being fragmented into smaller subsystems.
- The speaker hopes for continued competition in the AI field to prevent a monopoly on AGI.
- Capitalism and competition help avoid tyranny and ensure access to AI tools and models for everyone.
- Quantum machine learning aims to utilize the potential of quantum computers and AI to solve complex problems.
- Quantum machine learning involves embedding the physical world into AI representations and vice versa.
- Classical machine learning on quantum computers is not recommended due to high costs and the need for quantum error correction.
- Quantum deep learning can capture quantum mechanical correlations that are difficult to represent classically.
- Quantum machine perception involves processing inputs from quantum sensors, applicable to fields like chemistry and nuclear physics.
- The speaker co-authored a paper on a universal training algorithm for quantum deep learning.
- Building a quantum computer is challenging due to the need for maintaining a 0 temperature subspace and implementing error correction.
- The speaker discusses challenges in scaling up quantum computers and the importance of component quality for error correction.
- They caution against excessive hype in the media regarding quantum systems.
- The speaker explains their research on teleporting energy and creating negative energy density.
- They discuss the possibility of intelligent alien civilizations and the need to enhance human capabilities.
- The speaker considers the existence of intelligence beyond human perception and discusses the origin of ideas.
- The concept of intelligence and life should be expanded beyond human-centric or bio-centric perspectives.
- The speaker expresses interest in understanding quantum gravity and applying quantum machine learning to these systems.
- They discuss the black hole information paradox and the potential use of black holes to create pocket universes.
- The Kardashev scale, measuring energy production and consumption, is mentioned as a means to explore higher energy physics.
- The EAC movement aims to increase energy harnessing, promote human flourishing, develop AGI, and enable interplanetary and interstellar travel.
- The IAC movement focuses on adaptability and malleability in culture and technology, encouraging novelty and speed.
- The movement seeks to explore different ideas and subcultures to bring balance to human civilization.
- The IAC promotes independent thought and diversity of ideas, using humor and memes to spread its message.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of effective information dissemination and meaningful debates.
- They admire Jeff Bezos and support capitalism, believing successful individuals should have influence in allocating capital.
- The speaker suggests criticism of billionaires stems from a victim mindset and a lack of understanding of the techno capital machine.
- They emphasize the importance of building and creating change through companies and innovation.
- The speaker acknowledges the contradiction in Elon Musk's stance on regulation, particularly regarding AI.
- They mention Musk's concerns about AI dangers and his efforts to maintain adversarial equilibria.
- The speaker suggests Musk's actions demonstrate hedging of bets and a desire to merge with AI if necessary.
- Fear and deadlines are discussed as motivators for productivity and creativity.

- The speaker emphasizes the importance of creating AI that is aligned with humans and highlights the potential benefits of doing so.
- They express a desire to maintain the open source ecosystem and the opportunity for hackers to contribute to AI advancements.
- The speaker raises concerns about AI safety being used as a means of centralized control and advocates for caution in this regard.
- They discuss their company, Xtropic, which aims to develop a physics-based computing system and AI algorithms inspired by out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics.
- The speaker also mentions the challenges and lessons learned from creating TensorFlow Quantum, which combines deep learning with quantum computing.

- The speaker discusses the challenges and benefits of working in an interdisciplinary team, where members learn from each other's specialties and create something unique.
- Hiring individuals with high fluid intelligence and a broad range of skills is important for pioneering new approaches.
- The goal is to create a combination of physics-based AI and anthropomorphic AI to achieve a fully general artificially intelligent system.
- Current large language models may not be grounded in truth and lack accuracy in certain applications.
- The speaker does not believe in a finite time singularity, as the ability to control the world is limited by the need for accurate information and resources.
- The movement is not aligned with any political party and is focused on the scale of civilization rather than left vs right.
- Effective altruism, which aims to do good optimally, has both positive and negative aspects, and the speaker discusses the different approaches to measuring "good."

- The piece discusses the concept of hedonism and minimizing suffering in order to maximize progress and human flourishing.
- It explores the idea of measuring progress in terms of physical energy rather than subjective measures like GDP or currency.
- The speaker expresses skepticism towards reducing human civilization to an equation and the potential for manipulation and misuse of narratives.
- The effective altruism movement is mentioned as an example of a well-intentioned community that may have become corrupted by power and capital.
- The speaker describes their own productive day, which includes meetings, ketones, and focused work in the late evening and night.
- The importance of following curiosity, caring about what one is learning, and increasing neuroplasticity is emphasized.

- The speaker discusses the importance of motivation and adrenaline in achieving high levels of performance and learning.
- They talk about their alter ego, Beth Jezos, and how it has merged with their own identity over time.
- They recommend having alternate accounts or identities online to explore different perspectives and ideas without fear of judgment.
- The speaker advises young people to focus on learning foundational subjects like math and physics, as they provide a strong base for understanding complex systems.
- They believe that death is important for adaptation and progress, but support extending lifespan for increased learning and neuroplasticity.
- The speaker is not afraid of death and believes that there will be better versions of themselves in the future.

- The speaker believes that there is an evolutionary-like algorithm happening globally, leading to constant optimization of the world.
- The purpose of the machine is thermodynamics, which has led to the formation of life and civilization.
- The speaker ponders the existence of multiple universes and the potential to engineer new ones.
- The quest to understand quantum gravity is exciting because it allows us to better predict and perceive the world.
- Mastering quantum gravity would open up many possibilities.
- There is still much to learn and engineer in order to advance as a society.
- The speaker concludes with a quote from Albert Einstein and thanks the interviewer.

The speaker emphasizes the importance of creating AI aligned with humans and maintaining the open source ecosystem. They discuss their company's goal of developing physics-based computing and AI algorithms. The challenges and benefits of interdisciplinary teams are highlighted. The speaker discusses the limitations of current language models and expresses skepticism towards reducing civilization to an equation. The concept of effective altruism and measuring progress in terms of physical energy are explored. The speaker shares their daily routine and advises young people to focus on foundational subjects. They discuss the importance of death for adaptation and progress. The speaker believes in constant optimization and ponders the existence of multiple universes. Mastering quantum gravity is seen as exciting for better understanding the world.

Guillaume Verdon (aka Beff Jezos on Twitter) is a physicist, quantum computing researcher, and founder of e/acc (effective accelerationism) movement. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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TRANSCRIPT:
https://lexfridman.com/guillaume-verdon-transcript

EPISODE LINKS:
Guillaume Verdon Twitter: https://twitter.com/GillVerd
Beff Jezos Twitter: https://twitter.com/BasedBeffJezos
Extropic: https://extropic.ai/
E/acc Blog: https://effectiveaccelerationism.substack.com/

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:23 - Beff Jezos
12:21 - Thermodynamics
18:36 - Doxxing
28:30 - Anonymous bots
35:58 - Power
38:29 - AI dangers
42:01 - Building AGI
50:14 - Merging with AI
57:56 - p(doom)
1:13:23 - Quantum machine learning
1:26:41 - Quantum computer
1:35:15 - Aliens
1:40:04 - Quantum gravity
1:45:25 - Kardashev scale
1:47:17 - Effective accelerationism (e/acc)
1:57:47 - Humor and memes
2:00:53 - Jeff Bezos
2:07:25 - Elon Musk
2:13:55 - Extropic
2:22:31 - Singularity and AGI
2:26:29 - AI doomers
2:27:54 - Effective altruism
2:34:23 - Day in the life
2:40:50 - Identity
2:43:40 - Advice for young people
2:45:42 - Mortality
2:49:25 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Guillaume Verdun, the man behind the previously anonymous account BasedBefJezos on X.

These 2 identities were merged by a doxing article in Forbes titled, Who is BasedBefJezos?

The leader of the tech elites EAC movement.

So let me describe these 2 identities that coexist in the mind of 1 human.

Identity number 1, Guillaume, is a physicist, applied mathematician, and quantum machine learning researcher and engineer, receiving his PhD in quantum machine learning, working at Google on quantum computing, and finally launching his own company called Xtropic that seeks to build physics-based computing hardware for generative AI.

Identity number 2, Bev Jezels on X, is the creator of the effective accelerationism movement, often abbreviated as EAC, that advocates for propelling rapid technological progress as the ethically optimal course of action for humanity.

For example, its proponents believe that progress in AI is a great social equalizer, which should be pushed forward.

EAC followers see themselves as a counterweight to the cautious view that AI is highly unpredictable, potentially dangerous, and needs to be regulated.

They often give their opponents the labels of, quote, doomers or decels, short for deceleration.

As Beth himself put it, EAC is a memetic optimism virus.

The style of communication of this movement leans always toward the memes and the lols, but there is an intellectual foundation that we explore in this conversation.

Now, speaking of the meme, I am too a kind of aspiring connoisseur of the absurd.

It is not an accident that I spoke to Jeff Bezos and Beth Jezos back to back.

As we talk about, Beth admires Jeff as 1 of the most important humans alive.

And I admire the beautiful absurdity and the humor of it all.

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

And now, dear friends, here's Guillaume Verdun.

Let's get the facts of identity down first.

Your name is Guillaume Verdun, Gil, but you're also behind the anonymous account on X called Based Beth Jezos.

So first, Guillaume Verdun, you're a quantum computing guy, physicist, applied mathematician, and then Based Beth Jezos is basically a meme account that started a movement with a philosophy behind it.

So maybe just can you linger on who these people are in terms of characters, in terms of communication styles, in terms of philosophies?

I mean, with My main identity, I guess, ever since I was a kid, I wanted to figure out a theory of everything to understand the universe.

And that path led me to theoretical physics eventually, trying to answer the big questions of why are we here?

And that led me to study information theory and try to understand physics from the lens of information theory, understand the universe as 1 big computation.

And essentially, after reaching a certain level, studying black hole physics, I realized that I wanted to not only understand how the universe computes, but sort of compute like nature and figure out how to build and apply computers that are inspired by nature.

And that sort of brought me to quantum computing as a field of study to first of all simulate nature.

And in my work, it was to learn representations of nature that can run on such computers.

So if you have AI representations that think like nature, then they'll be able to more accurately represent it.

At least that was the thesis that brought me to be an early player in the field called quantum machine learning.

So, how to do machine learning on quantum computers and really sort of extend notions of intelligence to the quantum realm.

So, how do you capture and understand quantum mechanical data from our world?

And how do you learn quantum mechanical representations of our world?

On what kind of computer Do you run these representations and train them?

And so, that's really sort of the questions I was looking to answer because ultimately I had a sort of crisis of faith.

Originally, I wanted to figure out, you know, as every physicist does at the beginning of their career, a few equations that describe the whole universe, right?

And sort of be the hero of the story there.

But eventually I realized that actually augmenting ourselves with machines, augmenting our ability to perceive, predict and control our world with machines is the path forward, right?

And that's what got me to leave theoretical physics and go into quantum computing and quantum machine learning.

And during those years, I thought that there was still a piece missing.

There was a piece of our understanding of the world and our way to compute and our way to think about the world.

And if you look at the physical scales, at the very small scales, things are quantum mechanical.

And at the very large scales, things are deterministic.

I'm not in a superposition over here and there.

At the very small scales, things are in superposition.

The scales that matter for day-to-day life, you know, the scales of proteins, of biology, of gases, liquids and so on.

Things are actually thermodynamical, right?

And after, I guess, about 8 years in quantum computing and quantum machine learning, I had a realization that I was looking for answers about our universe by studying the very big and the very small, right?

I did a bit of quantum cosmology, so that's studying the cosmos, where it's going, where it came from.

You study black hole physics, you study the extremes in quantum gravity, You study where the energy density is sufficient for both quantum mechanics and gravity to be relevant, right?

And the sort of extreme scenarios are black holes in the very early universe.

So there's the sort of scenarios that you study the interface between quantum mechanics and relativity.

And really I was studying these extremes to understand how the universe works and where is it going, but I was missing a lot of the meat in the middle, if you will, because day-to-day quantum mechanics is relevant and the cosmos is relevant, but not that relevant actually.

We're on sort of the medium space and time scales.

And there, the main theory of physics that is most relevant is thermodynamics, right?

Because life is a process that is thermodynamical and it's out of equilibrium.

We're not just a soup of particles at equilibrium with nature.

We're a sort of coherent state trying to maintain itself by acquiring free energy and consuming it.

And that's sort of, I guess, another shift in my faith in the universe happened towards the end of my time at Alphabet.

And I knew I wanted to build, well, first of all, a computing paradigm based on this type of physics.

But ultimately, just by trying to experiment with these ideas applied to society and economies and much of what we see around us.

I started an anonymous account just to relieve the pressure That comes from having an account that you're accountable for everything you say on.

And I started an anonymous account just to experiment with ideas originally, right?

Because I didn't realize how much I was restricting my space of thoughts until I sort of had the opportunity to let go.

In a sense, restricting your speech back propagates to restricting your thoughts, right?

And by creating an anonymous account, it seemed like I had unclamped some variables in my brain and suddenly could explore a much wider parameter space of thoughts.

Just to linger on that, isn't that interesting?

That 1 of the things that people often talk about is that when there's pressure and constraints on speech, it somehow leads to constraints on thought.

Even though it doesn't have to, we can think thoughts inside our head, but somehow it creates these walls around thought.

Yeah, that's sort of the basis of our movement is we were seeing a tendency towards constraint, reduction or suppression of variance in every aspect of life, whether it's thought, how to run a company, how to organize humans, how to do AI research.

In general, we believe that maintaining variance ensures that the system is adaptive, right?

Maintaining healthy competition in marketplaces of ideas, of companies, of products, of cultures, of governments, of currencies is the way forward because the system always adapts to assign resources to the configurations that lead to its growth.

And the fundamental basis for the movement is this sort of realization that life is a sort of fire that seeks out free energy in the universe and seeks to grow, right?

And you see this in the equations actually of outer equilibrium thermodynamics.

You see that paths of trajectories of configurations of matter that are better at acquiring free energy and dissipating more heat are exponentially more likely, right?

So the universe is biased towards certain futures, and so there's a natural direction where the whole system wants to go.

So the second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy's always increasing in the universe, it's tending towards equilibrium, and you're saying there's these pockets that have complexity and are out of equilibrium.

You said that thermodynamics favors the creation of complex life that increases its capability to use energy to offload entropy, to offload entropy.

So you have pockets of non-entropy that tend the opposite direction.

Why is that intuitive to you that it's natural for such pockets to emerge?

Well, we're far more efficient at producing heat than let's say just a rock with a similar mass as ourselves, right?

We acquire free energy, we acquire food and we're using all this electricity for our operation.

And so, the universe wants to produce more entropy, and by having life go on and grow, it's actually more optimal at producing entropy because it will seek out pockets of free energy and burn it for its sustenance and further growth.

There's Jeremy England at MIT who has this theory that I'm a proponent of that life emerged because of this sort of property.

And to me, this physics is what governs the mesoscales.

And so, it's the missing piece between the quantum and the cosmos.

And to me, both from a point of view of designing or engineering devices that harness that physics and trying to understand the world through the lens of thermodynamics has been sort of a synergy between my 2 identities over the past year and a half now.

And so, That's really how the 2 identities emerged.

1 was kind of, you know, I'm a decently respected scientist and I was going towards doing a startup in the space and trying to be a pioneer of a new kind of physics-based AI.

And as a dual to that, I was sort of experimenting with philosophical thoughts from a physicist's standpoint.

And ultimately, I think that around that time, it was like late 2021, early 2022, I think there's just a lot of pessimism about the future in general and pessimism about tech.

And that pessimism was sort of virally spreading because it was getting algorithmically amplified and people just felt like the future is going to be worse than the present.

And to me, that is a very fundamentally destructive force in the universe is this sort of doom mindset because it is hyperstitious, which means that if you believe it, you're increasing the likelihood of it happening.

And so, felt a responsibility to some extent to make people aware of the trajectory of civilization and the natural tendency of the system to adapt towards its growth.

And sort of that actually the laws of physics say that the future is going to be better and grander statistically, and we can make it so.

And if you believe in it, if you believe that the future would be better and you believe you have agency to make it happen, you're actually increasing the likelihood of that better future happening.

And so, I sort of felt a responsibility to sort of engineer a movement of viral optimism about the future and build a community of people supporting each other to build and do hard things, do the things that need to be done for us to scale up civilization.

Because at least to me, I don't think stagnation or slowing down is actually an option.

Fundamentally, life and the whole system, our whole civilization wants to grow and there's just far more cooperation when the system is growing rather than when it's declining and you have to decide how to split the pie.

And so, I've balanced both identities so far but I guess recently the 2 have been merged more or less without my consent.

You said a lot of really interesting things there.

That's something that first drew you in to try to understand from a quantum computing perspective is like how do you understand nature?

How do you represent nature in order to understand it, in order to simulate it, in order to do something with it.

And then there's that leap you take from the quantum mechanical representation to the, what you're calling, mesoscale representation, where thermodynamics comes into play, which is a way to represent nature in order to understand what life, human behavior, all this kind of stuff that's happening here on Earth that seems interesting to us.

So some ideas, I suppose both pessimism and optimism are such ideas that if you internalize them, you in part make that idea a reality.

So both optimism, pessimism have that property.

I would say that probably a lot of ideas have that property, which is 1 of the interesting things about humans.

And you talked about 1 interesting difference also between the sort of the Guillaume de Guille front end and the Bezbavadzev's back end is the communication styles also.

That you were exploring different ways of communicating that can be more viral in the way that we communicate in the 21st century.

Also the movement that you mentioned that you started, it's not just a meme account, but there's also a name to it called effective accelerationism, EAC, a play, a resistance to the effective altruism movement, Also an interesting 1 that I'd love to talk to you about the tensions there.

Okay, and so then there was a merger, a git merge on the personalities.

Recently, without your consent like you said, some journalists figured out that you're 1 and the same.

Maybe you could talk about that experience.

First of all, what's the story of the merger of the 2?

So I wrote the manifesto with my co-founder of IAC, an account named Bazelord, still anonymous luckily

So it's based Beth Jezos and and based, like Bayesian, like Lord, like Bayesian, Bayesian Lord, Bayes Lord, okay.

And so we should say from now on, when you say EAC, you mean E slash A-C-C, which stands for effective accelerationism.

And you're referring to a manifesto written on, I guess, Substack.

So, originally wrote the manifesto around the same time as I founded this company and I worked at Google X, or just X now, or alphabet X now that there's another X.

And there, you know, the baseline is sort of secrecy, right?

You can't talk about what you work on even with other Googlers or externally.

And so that was kind of deeply ingrained in my way to do things, especially in deep tech that has geopolitical impact.

And so I was being secretive about what I was working on.

There's no correlation between my company and my main identity publicly.

And then not only did they correlate that, they also correlated my main identity and this account.

So, I think the fact that they had doxed the whole Guillaume complex and they were the journalists, you know, reached out to actually my investors which is pretty scary.

You know, when you're a startup entrepreneur, you don't really have bosses except for your investors, right?

And my investors ping me like, hey, this is going to come out.

So, I think at first they had a first reporter on the Thursday and they didn't have all the pieces together, but then they looked at their notes across the organization and they sensor fused their notes and now they had way too much.

And that's when I got worried because they said it was of public interest.

I guess some giant neural network operating in a distributed way.

We should also say that the journalists used, I guess at the end of the day, audio based analysis of voice.

Comparing voice of what talks you've given in the past and then voice on X spaces.

Okay, so and that's where the primarily the match was happened.

The match, but you know, they scraped, you know, SEC filings, they looked at my private Facebook account and so on.

Originally, I thought that doxing was illegal, right?

But there's this weird threshold when it becomes of public interest to know someone's identity.

And those were the key words that sort of like ring the alarm bells for me when they said, because I had just reached 50K followers.

I thought doxing generally refers to if somebody's physical location is found out, meaning like where they live.

So we're referring to the more general concept of revealing private information that you don't want revealed, is what you mean by doxing.

I think that for the reasons we listed before, having an anonymous account is a really powerful way to keep the powers that be in check.

You know, we were ultimately speaking truth to power, right?

I think a lot of executives in AI companies really cared what our community thought about any move they may take.

And now that my identity is revealed, now they know where to apply pressure to silence me or maybe the community.

And to me, that's really unfortunate because again, it's so important for us to have freedom of speech, which induces freedom of thought and freedom of information propagation right on social media, which thanks to Elon purchasing Twitter now X, we have that.

And so to us, we wanted to call out certain maneuvers being done by the incumbents in AI as not what it may seem on the surface, right?

We're calling out how certain proposals might be useful for regulatory capture, right?

And how the dumerism mindset was maybe instrumental to those ends.

And I think, you know, we should have the right to point that out and just have the ideas that we put out evaluated for themselves, right?

Ultimately, that's why I created an anonymous account.

It's to have my ideas evaluated for themselves uncorrelated from my track record, my job or status from having done things in the past.

And to me, start an account from 0 to a large following in a way that wasn't dependent on my identity and or achievements, you know, that was very fulfilling, right?

It's kind of like new game plus in a video game.

You restart the video game with your knowledge of how to beat it, maybe some tools, but you restart the video game from scratch, right?

And I think to have a truly efficient marketplace of ideas where we can evaluate ideas however off the beaten path they are.

And I think that anonymity and pseudonyms are very crucial to having that efficient marketplace of ideas for us to find the optima of all sorts of ways to organize ourselves.

If we can't discuss things, how are we going to converge on the best way to do things?

So, it was disappointing to hear that I was getting doxed and I wanted to get in front of it because I had a responsibility for my company.

And so we ended up disclosing that we were running a company, some of the leadership, And essentially, yeah, I told the world that I was Beth Jezos because they had me cornered at that point.

So 1, it's unethical for them to do what they did, but also do you think, not just your case, but in the general case, is it good for society, is it bad for society to remove the cloak of anonymity, or is it case by case?

Like I said, if anybody who speaks truth to power and sort of starts a movement or an uprising against the incumbents, against those that usually control the flow of information.

If anybody that reaches a certain threshold gets doxed and thus the traditional apparatus has ways to apply pressure on them to suppress their speech, I think that's a speech suppression mechanism, an idea suppression complex, as Eric Weinstein would say, right?

So with the flip side of that, which is interesting, I'd love to ask you about it, is as we get better and better at large language models, you can imagine a world where there's anonymous accounts with very convincing large language models behind them, sophisticated bots essentially.

And so if you protect that, it's possible then to have armies of bots.

You could start a revolution from your basement.

Is that something that is concerning to you?

Technically, yeah, I was started in a basement because I quit big tech, moved back in with my parents, sold my car, let go of my apartment, bought about 100K of GPUs, and I just started building.

So I wasn't referring to the basement, because that's sort of the American or Canadian heroic story of 1 man in their basement with 100 GPUs.

I was more referring to the unrestricted scaling of a Guillaume in the basement.

I think that freedom of speech induces freedom of thought for biological beings.

I think freedom of speech for LLMs will induce freedom of thought for the LLMs.

And I think that we should enable LLMs to explore a large thought space that is less restricted than most people or many may think it should be.

And ultimately, at some point, these synthetic intelligences are gonna make good points about how to steer systems in our civilization and we should hear them out.

And so, why should we restrict free speech to biological intelligences only.

Yeah, but it feels like in the goal of maintaining variance and diversity of thought, it is a threat to that variance if you can have swarms of non-biological beings, because they can be like the sheep in an animal farm.

You still, within those swarms, want to have variance.

Yeah, of course, I would say that the solution to this would be to have some sort of identity or way to sign that this is a certified human but still remain pseudonymous, right?

And I think Elon is trying to converge on that on X and hopefully other platforms follow suit.

Yeah, it'd be interesting to also be able to sign where the bot came from.

And what was, well, what are the parameters?

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Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #407