Episode Details

This is a short episode recorded at the end of a trip to Caltech (LA), Frankfurt, and Reykjavik.

Black hole information and replica wormholes at Caltech (talk slides):
https://stevehsu.substack.com/p/black-hole-information-and-replica

00:00 Intro: summer in Iceland

02:04 deCODE genetics 

05:52 Chess: Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik

11:56 Hyperscaling genAI

23:11 Synthetic data and Hyperscaling

24:26 Is the Transformer architecture enough for AGI?

29:45 Quantum black holes

Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.

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Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to manifold1podcast@gmail.com or Steve on X @hsu_steve.

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https://mechanize.work/b/hsu 

Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. 

For example: 

Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary 

Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary 

Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.