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Pushing compute to the limits of physics
Dr. Maxwell Ramstead grills Guillaume Verdon (AKA “Beff Jezos”) who's the founder of Thermodynamic computing startup Extropic.
Guillaume shares his unique path – from dreaming about space travel as a kid to becoming a physicist, then working on quantum computing at Google, to developing a radically new form of computing hardware for machine learning. He explains how he hit roadblocks with traditional physics and computing, leading him to start his company – building "thermodynamic computers." These are based on a new design for super-efficient chips that use the natural chaos of electrons (think noise and heat) to power AI tasks, which promises to speed up AND lower the costs of modern probabilistic techniques like sampling. He is driven by the pursuit of building computers that work more like your brain, which (by the way) runs on a banana and a glass of water!
Guillaume talks about his alter ego, Beff Jezos, and the "Effective Accelerationism" (e/acc) movement that he initiated. Its objective is to speed up tech progress in order to “grow civilization” (as measured by energy use and innovation), rather than “slowing down out of fear”. Guillaume argues we need to embrace variance, exploration, and optimism to avoid getting stuck or outpaced by competitors like China. He and Maxwell discuss big ideas like merging humans with AI, decentralizing intelligence, and why boundless growth (with smart constraints) is “key to humanity's future”.
REFS:
1. John Archibald Wheeler - "It From Bit" Concept
00:04:45 - Foundational work proposing that physical reality emerges from information at the quantum level
Learn more: https://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf
2. AdS/CFT Correspondence (Holographic Principle)
00:05:15 - Theoretical physics duality connecting quantum gravity in Anti-de Sitter space with conformal field theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
3. Renormalization Group Theory
00:06:15 - Mathematical framework for analyzing physical systems across different length scales
https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/dbs26/AQFT/Wilsonchap.pdf
4. Maxwell's Demon and Information Theory
00:21:15 - Thought experiment linking information processing to thermodynamics and entropy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-entropy/
5. Landauer's Principle
00:29:45 - Fundamental limit establishing minimum energy required for information erasure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
6. Free Energy Principle and Active Inference
01:03:00 - Mathematical framework for understanding self-organizing systems and perception-action loops
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2787
7. Max Tegmark - Information Bottleneck Principle
01:07:00 - Connections between information theory and renormalization in machine learning
https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.07331
8. Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection
01:11:45 - Mathematical relationship between genetic variance and evolutionary fitness