Guillaume Verdon: Should We Have a 'Second Amendment for AI'?

Just Asking Questions

Must we accelerate AI innovation?

You've probably heard of "effective altruism," but how about "effective accelerationism," or e/acc? "You claim to be building an artificial god in the human image. We're building the conduit for the thermodynamic god that created us. We are not the same."

Those are the words of Based Beff Jezos, a pseudonymous X account devoted to spreading the e/acc message far and wide, once described by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen as a "patron saint of techno-optimism" and by its detractors as "unhinged" and "absolutely toxic for the AI discourse."

The man behind Based Beff Jezos was unmasked in Forbes magazine last December as Guillaume Verdon, a Google quantum computing engineer-turned-co-founder of the AI startup Extropic, which has received about $14 million in seed funding to develop a new kind of chip for running AI models.

He joins us today to talk about effective accelerationism, the politics of AI, and what his company is doing to make sure that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) arrives quickly and remains beyond the control of a single corporation or government.

Sources Referenced:

• "Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite's 'E/Acc' Movement?" by Emily Baker-White in Forbes
• what the f* is e/acc, the e/acc newsletter
• "SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: The Decade Ahead," by Leopold Aschenbrenner
• Gavin Newsom's veto of California's AI bill
• "What is Moore's Law?" by Our World in Data
• "Microsoft, Google and Amazon turn to nuclear energy to fuel the AI boom," by Mehek Mazhar in CBC Radio
• Extropic: Ushering in the Thermodynamic Future
• Just Asking Questions with Bryan Johnson

Chapters

• 00:00 Coming up…
• 00:28 Introductions
• 02:13 What is effective accelerationism?
• 04:33 Building a conduit for the thermodynamic god that created us?
• 09:54 Is AGI inevitable?
• 17:01 Why open source AI doesn't need regulation
• 29:18 A Second Amendment for AI?
• 31:58 Philosophical foundations of e/acc
• 37:16 An AI arms race between the U.S. and China?
• 55:27 Criticism of OpenAI
• 01:01:08 AI under the second Trump administration
• 01:07:22 Designing a biologically inspired chip
• 01:15:46 How the American chip industry will be impacted by China and Taiwan
• 01:18:44 Will AI make humans irrelevant?
• 01:23:53 How do we reimagine governance?

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

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