He Comes Promising AI Freedom For All

**Guillaume Verdon** (0:00)
If a set of companies control the extension of your brain, and it's like the collective extension of our brain, then they could just like steer it to think a certain way, and now they kind of control you by proxy. And to me, I think that's like, that's fundamentally risky, and so we kind of have to arm the rebels.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:30)
Well, we are joined today by an Internet legend, and possibly a computing legend in the making, Guillaume Verdon. Although, I hear you say Verdon.

**Guillaume Verdon** (0:45)
Verdon, yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:46)
But you're French-Canadian, right, or?

**Guillaume Verdon** (0:50)
That's right.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:50)
Yeah, so I don't know, how do you prefer people to say it?

**Guillaume Verdon** (0:53)
Yeah, I mean, the proper way to say it is like Guillaume Verdon. So it's like, it's French, but.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:59)
I was going to lean in, but then I heard you say it somewhere else, and I didn't know if I should be leading it. Also known as Beff Jezos.

**Guillaume Verdon** (1:09)
Yeah, that's my pseudonym.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:10)
Yes, which we will get into. Just before we get too far, I want to thank e1 Ventures for sponsoring our podcast. We actually have e1 Ventures representatives here today to watch the show. So they've been kind enough to sponsor our show. And I guess maybe, full disclosure, this was a coincidence, but I think you're actually an investor in your company, in Extropic. I didn't know this was happening when we invited you on. There you go. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for coming in, man.

**Guillaume Verdon** (1:44)
Yeah, super happy to be here. It's an honor.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:46)
I feel, oh, that was way too far.
I feel like there's two giant buckets we can get into, which is obviously the EAC, the Effective Accelerationist Movement, and then Extropic, your company, and they both take some unpacking. Why don't we just real, we'll come back to it more in more detail as we get on, but let's do Extropic a little bit first just to give people a frame of where you're coming from, and I'll take a crack and then you can fix everything. I mess up, but a whole new field of, a whole new approach to computing, definitely angled at AI, but not just AI, and so it's called thermodynamic computing.

**Guillaume Verdon** (2:35)
That's right.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:36)
Different to quantum, very different to our traditional bits. Is there a way to explain it that just about everybody can understand?

**Guillaume Verdon** (2:47)
Essentially, what we're doing is we're creating new primitives in what is called stochastic electronics, or bio-inspired electronics. It's new silicon primitives. It's not just an architecture. We're not just taking floating point arithmetic and memory and changing the configuration. That's usually an architecture that's like many existing companies are proposing. For us, it's like a new paradigm from the physics of the electrons all the way up. From the algorithms you run on it, to the compiler, to the way the problem is imbedded into the physics of electrons. And so it just makes a lot of sense that as the workloads, the typical workload you want to run is a probabilistic workload. LMs are like virtual probabilistic computers that you would build a hardware that is a probabilistic computer because it's a much more natural fit. It fits like a glove. And once you really understand physics and once you really understand AI algorithms, it's like you can't unsee how much of a perfect fit this is. And that's where the extreme conviction comes from, that this is the most natural way to do this algorithm. And I think our results are going to show that over time. Of course, you got to start with first principles, some mathematics, then some models, then some simulations, then some early experiments. And then you scale it, and then you show a scale system to people, and then they really believe. Because then you're no longer telling you're showing. And that's the sort of transition we're going through this year. And that feels really good, because when you have an idea that violates people's priors about what is possible with today's technology, due to the free energy principle of your brain, actually, your neurons want to preserve themselves, they're kind of greedy. And updating your world model massively is too costly. So your brain just literally filters out ideas, or says the person proposing them is crazy. So that's been the story of my life for two years. I mean, there's a lot of supporters, but there's also a lot of doubters, and it makes a lot of sense because it's like, you know, overwhelming, you know, there's going to be an overwhelming change to computing, and they want overwhelming evidence, right? But those that can be convinced earlier are going to get in earlier, and are going to start building for this paradigm, and are going to be ahead of the next wave, right? And that's like, that's the history of every paradigm shift in technology, right? And I guess, like, I exuded a lot of confidence because I thought about it for 10 years, right? And I burned every, I burned all the boats going back to quantum computing. I could have worked anywhere in quantum computing. And I left that whole career, and went all in on this, from first principles conviction. And now the experiments are starting to back what we've been saying.