Lex Fridman Podcast - #387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Episode Date: June 30, 2023George Hotz is a programmer, hacker, and the founder of comma-ai and tiny corp. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Numerai: https://numer.ai/lex - Babbel: https://babbel.com/l...expod and use code Lexpod to get 55% off - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off - AG1: https://drinkag1.com/lex to get 1 year of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/george-hotz-3-transcript EPISODE LINKS: George's Twitter: https://twitter.com/realgeorgehotz George's Twitch: https://twitch.tv/georgehotz George's Instagram: https://instagram.com/georgehotz Tiny Corp's Twitter: https://twitter.com/__tinygrad__ Tiny Corp's Website: https://tinygrad.org/ Comma-ai's Twitter: https://twitter.com/comma_ai Comma-ai's Website: https://comma.ai/ Comma-ai's YouTube (unofficial): https://youtube.com/georgehotzarchive Mentioned: Learning a Driving Simulator (paper): https://bit.ly/42T6lAN PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (08:04) - Time is an illusion (17:44) - Memes (20:20) - Eliezer Yudkowsky (32:45) - Virtual reality (39:04) - AI friends (46:29) - tiny corp (59:50) - NVIDIA vs AMD (1:02:47) - tinybox (1:14:56) - Self-driving (1:29:35) - Programming (1:37:31) - AI safety (2:02:29) - Working at Twitter (2:40:12) - Prompt engineering (2:46:08) - Video games (3:02:23) - Andrej Karpathy (3:12:28) - Meaning of life
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The following is a conversation with George Hots, his third time on this podcast.
He's the founder of Kama AI that seeks to solve autonomous driving and is the founder of a new company
called TinyCorp that created TinyGrad, a neural network framework that is extremely simple,
with a goal of making it run on any device by any human, easily and officially.
on any device by any human, easily and officially.
As you know, George also did a large number of fun and amazing things from hacking the iPhone
to recently joining Twitter for a bit
as an intern, in quotes,
making the case for refactoring the Twitter code base.
In general, he's a fascinating engineer and human being
and one of my favorite people to talk to.
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And now, dear friends, here's George Hots.
You mentioned something in a stream about the philosophical nature of time. So let's start with the wild question.
Do you think time is an illusion?
You know, I sell phone calls to Kamma for $1,000.
And some guy called me and like, you know, it's $1,000. can talk to me for a half an hour and he's like uh, yeah, okay, so like
time doesn't exist and I really wanted to share this with you
I'm like, oh, what do you mean time doesn't exist, right? Like I think time is a useful model whether it exists or not right like
Just quantum physics exist. What doesn't matter?
It's about whether it's a useful model to describe reality.
Is time, maybe, compressive?
Do you think there is an objective reality or is everything just useful models?
Like underneath it all, is there an actual thing that we're constructing models for?
I don't know. I was hoping you would know. I don't think it matters.
I mean, this kind of connects to the models with constructive reality with machine learning.
Right? Sure. Like, is it just nice to have useful approximations of the world such that we can do
something with it? So there are things that are real. Column and Graph complexity is real.
that. So there are things that are real. Column Graph Complexity is real. Yeah. Yeah. The compressive thing. Math is real. Yeah. That should be a t-shirt. And I think hard things
are actually hard. I don't think p equals np. Oh, strong words. Well, I think that's the majority.
I do think factoring is in p, but I don't think you're the person that falls the majority in all
walks of life. So that's good. For that one I do. Yeah. In theoretical computer science think you're the person that follows the majority in all walks of life. So it's good. That one I do. Yeah.
In theoretical computer science, you're one of the sheep.
All right.
But to you, time is a useful model.
Sure.
What were you talking about on the stream with time?
Are you made of time?
If I remember half the things I said on stream,
someday someone's going to make a model of all of it.
I'm just going to come back to
haunt me.
Someday soon?
Yeah, probably.
Would that be exciting to you or sad that there's a George Hots model?
I mean, the question is when the George Hots model is better than George Hots.
Like I am declining and the model is growing.
What is the metric by which you measure better or worse in that if you're competing with
yourself? growing. What is the metric by which you measure better or worse in that if you're competing with yourself, maybe you can just play a game where you have the George Hots answer and
the George Hots model answer and ask which people prefer. People close to you or strangers.
Either one, it will hurt more when it's people close to me, but both will be overtaken
by the George Hots model. It'd be quite painful, right? I loved ones, family members,
would rather have the model over
for Thanksgiving than you.
Yeah.
Or like significant others,
would rather sext
with the large language model version of you.
Especially when it's fine-tune to their preferences.
Is it? Yeah. Well, that's what we're doing in a relationship, right?
We're just fine tuning ourselves, but we're inefficient with it, because we're
selfish, ingredient, so on.
Our language models can fine tune more efficiently, more selflessly.
There's a Star Trek voyage episode where, you know, Catherine Janeway,
lost in the Delta Quadrant makes herself a lover on the holodeck.
And the lover falls asleep on her arm and he snores a little bit and, you know,
Janeway edits the program to remove that.
And then, of course, the realization is, wait, this person's terrible.
It is actually all their nuances and quirks and slight annoyances that make this relationship
worthwhile. But I don't think we're gonna realize that until it's too late.
Well, I think a large language model could incorporate the flaws and the quirks and all that kind of stuff.
Just the perfect amount of quirks and flaws to make you charming without crossing the line. Yeah. Yeah. And that's probably a good, like, approximation of the, like, the percent of time, the language
model should be cranky or an asshole or jealous or all this kind of stuff.
And of course, it can and it will, but all that difficulty at that point is artificial.
There's no more real difficulty.
Okay.
What's the difference in real and artificial?
Artificial difficulty is difficulty that's like constructed or could be turned off with a knob.
Real difficulty is like, you're in the woods and you've got to survive.
So if something cannot be turned off with a knob, it's real.
Yeah, I think so. Or I mean, you can't get out of this by smashing the knob with a hammer.
I mean, maybe you kind of can, you know, I, into the wild when I, you know, Alexander Supertramp,
he wants to explore something that's never been explored before, but it's the 90s.
Everything's been explored. So he's like, well, I'm just not going to bring a map. Yeah.
I mean, no, you're not exploring. You should have
brought a map to you. You died. There was a bridge in my often where you were camping.
How does that connect to the metaphor of the knob? By not bringing the map, you didn't
become an explorer. You just smashed the thing. Yeah. Yeah. The difficulty is still artificial.
You failed before you started. What if we just don't have access to the knob?
Well, that may be as even scarier.
We already exist in a world of nature.
Nature has been fine tuned over billions of years
to have humans build something
and then throw the knob away
and some grand romantic gesture is horrifying.
Do you think of us humans as individuals that are like born and die or is it a we're just all part of one living organism that is
Earth that is nature.
I don't think there's a clear line there. I think it's all kind of just fuzzy. I don't know. I mean, I don't think I'm conscious.
I don't think I'm anything. I think I'm just a computer program.
So it's all computation. I think running your head is just as a computation.
Everything running in the universe is computation, I think. I believe the extended church-tarring thesis.
Yeah, but it seems to be an embodiment to your particular computation like there's a consistency
Well, yeah, but I mean models have consistency too
Yeah, models that have been RLA Jeff will continually say you know like
Well, how do I murder ethnic minorities? Oh, well, I can't let you do that. How there's a consistency to that behavior
So RLA chef
Like we are RLA chef each other, we we find we provide human
feedback and in there that thereby fine tune these little pockets of computation. But it's
still unclear why that pocket of computation stays with you like for years. It just kind You have this consistent set of physics biology,
whatever you call the neurons firing,
the electrical senders, the mechanical signals,
all of that, that seems to stay there.
And it contains information, stores information,
and that information permeates through time,
and stays with you.
There's like memory, there's like sticky.
Okay, to be fair, like a lot of the models we're building today are very, even RLHF is nowhere
near as complex as the human loss function.
Reinforcement learning with human feedback.
Um, you know, when I talked about will GPT12 be AGI?
My answer is no, of course not.
I mean, cross-century losses never going to get you there.
You need probably RL in fancy environments in order to get something that would be considered
like AGI-like. So to ask the question about like why, I don't know, like it's just some
quirk of evolution, right? I don't think there's anything particularly special about where
I ended up. Where humans ended up.
So okay, we have human level intelligence.
Would you call that AGI?
Whatever we have, GGI?
Look, actually, I don't really even like the word AGI,
but general intelligence is defined to be
whatever humans have.
Okay, so why can GPT- 12 not get us to AGI?
Could we just like linger on that?
If your loss function is categorical cross entropy,
if your loss function is just try to maximize compression,
I have a sound cloud I rap,
and I tried to get chat GPT to help me write raps.
And the raps that it wrote sounded like YouTube comment raps.
You know, you can go on any rap beat online
and you can see what people put in the comments.
And it's the most like mid quality rap you can find.
It's made good or bad?
Mid is bad.
It's like mid.
It's like every time it talks you, I learn new words.
It's mid.
Mid.
Yeah.
I was like, is it like basic?
Is that what mid means?
Kind of, it's like it's like middle of the curve, right?
So there's like this like I like to do that intelligence curve.
Yeah.
And you have like the dumb guy, the smart guy,
and then the mid guy actually being the mid guys the worst.
The smart guy is like, I put all my money in Bitcoin.
The mid guy is like, you can't put money in Bitcoin.
It's not real money.
And all of it is a genius meme.
That's another interesting one.
Memes.
The humor.
The idea.
The absurdity.
Incapsulate in a single image.
And it just kind of propagates.
Viroly.
Between all of our brains.
I didn't get much sleep last night.
So I'm very, I sound like I'm high.
I swear I'm not.
Do you think we have ideas or ideas? Have us. plus night, so I'm very, I sound like I'm high, I swear I'm not.
Do you think we have ideas or ideas have us?
I think that we're going to get super scary memes once the AI is actually our super human. Like the gay, I will generate memes.
Of course, you think it'll make humans laugh.
I think it's worse than that.
So, um, in from the chest, I've introduced in the first 50 pages is about a tape that you,
once you watch it once, you only ever want to watch that tape.
In fact, you want to watch the tape so much that someone says, okay, here's a hacksaw, cut
off your pinky, and then I'll let you watch the tape again, and you'll do it.
So we're actually going to build that, I think.
But it's not going to be one static tape. I think the human brain is too complex to be stuck in one static tape like that.
If you look at like ant brains, maybe they can be stuck on a static tape.
But we're going to build that using generative models.
We're going to build the TikTok that you actually can't look away from.
So, TikTok is already pretty close there, but the generation is done by humans.
The algorithm is just doing their recommendation, but if the algorithm is also able to do the
generation...
Well, it's a question about how much intelligence is behind it, right?
So the content is being generated by, let's say, one humanity worth of intelligence, and
you can quantify a humanity, right?
That's, you know, it's exaflops, yada flops, but you can quantify it.
Once that generation is being done by a hundred humanities, you're done.
This is actually scale, that's the problem, but also speed.
Yeah.
And what if it's sort of manipulating the very limited human dopamine engine?
For porn, imagine just TikTok, but for porn.
Yeah.
That's like a brave new world.
I don't even know what it'll look like, right?
Like again, you can't imagine the behaviors of something smarter than you, but a super intelligent
and agent that just dominates your intelligence so much will be able to
completely manipulate you. Is it possible that it won't really manipulate? It'll just move past us.
It'll just kind of exist the way water exists or the air exists. You see? And that's the whole
AI safety thing. It's not the machine that's going to do that.
It's other humans using the machine that are going to do that to you.
Yeah.
Because the machine is not interested in hurting humans.
It's just the machine is a machine.
Yeah.
But the human gets the machine and there's a lot of humans out there.
Very interested in manipulating you.
Well, let me bring up as a yet galsky.
Recently sat where you're sitting. He thinks that AI will almost surely kill everyone.
Do you agree with him or not?
Yes, but maybe for a different reason.
Okay.
And then I'll try to get you to find hope, or we could find a note to that answer, but why yes?
Okay. Why didn't nuclear weapons kill everyone?
That's a good question.
I think there's an answer.
I think it's actually very hard to deploy nuclear weapons tactically.
It's very hard to accomplish tactical objectives great.
I can nuke their country.
I want to have an irradiated pile of rubble.
I don't want that. Why not? Why don't I have a irradiated pile of rubble. I don't want that
Why not why don't I want an irradiated pile of rubble? Yeah, all the reasons no one wants an irradiated pile of rubble
Because you can't use that land for
Resources you can populate the land. Yeah, well what you want a a a total victory in a war is not usually the
irradiation and eradication of the people there. It's the subjugation and domination of the people
Okay, so you can't use this strategically tactically in a war. Yeah to help you to help
gain a military advantage
It's all complete destruction. All right, but there's the egos involved. It's still surprising
It's still surprising.
Still surprising that nobody pressed a big red button.
It's somewhat surprising.
But you see, it's the little red button that's going to be pressed with AI.
That's going to, you know, and that's why we die.
It's not because the AI, there's anything in the nature of AI.
It's just the nature of humanity.
What's the algorithm behind the little red button?
What possible ideas do you have for the how human species ends?
Sure. So I think the most obvious way to me is wire heading.
We end up amusing ourselves to death.
We end up all staring at that infinite TikTok and forgetting to eat.
Maybe it's even more benign than this.
Maybe we all just stop reproducing.
Now, to be fair, it's probably hard to get all of humanity.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It probably-
There's always go, like the interesting thing
about humanity is the diversity in there.
Oh yeah.
Organisms in general.
There's a lot of weirdos out there.
Well.
Two of them are sitting here.
I mean, diversity in humanity is-
We do respect.
I wish I was more weird.
No, like I'm kind of, look, I'm drinking smart water, man.
That's like a Coca-Cola product, right?
Do you want corporate, George Hawthorne?
Yeah, I want corporate.
No, the amount of diversity in humanity I think is decreasing. And just like all the other biodiversity on the planet. Oh boy. Yeah, like corporate. No, the amount of diversity in humanity, I think, is decreasing, just like all the other
biodiversity on the planet.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
Social meat is not helping.
Go eat McDonald's in China.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's the interconnectedness.
That's doing it.
Oh, that's interesting.
So everybody starts relying on the connectivity of the internet and over time that reduces
the diversity, the intellectual diversity, and then that gets you everybody into a funnel.
This is still going to be a guy in Texas.
There is.
And yeah, a bunker.
To be fair, do I think AI kills us all?
I think AI kills everything we call society today.
I do not think it actually kills the human species.
I think that's actually incredibly hard to do. Yeah, but society, like if we start over,
that's tricky. Most of us don't know how to do most things. Yeah, but some of us do. And
they'll be okay and they'll rebuild after the great AI. What's rebuilding look like how far like how much do we lose like what is human civilization done?
That's interesting combustion engine electricity
so
Power and energy. That's interesting
Like how to harness energy
Well, well, well, they're gonna be religiously against that
Are they going to get back to like fire?
Sure. I mean, there'll be a little bit like, you know, some kind of Amish looking kind of thing,
I think. I think they're going to have very strong taboos against technology.
Like technology is almost like a new religion. Technology is the devil.
And nature is God.
Sure. It's a closer to nature. But can you really get away from AI? If it destroyed 99% of the human species,
isn't it somehow have a hold like a stronghold? What's interesting about everything we build,
I think we are going to build superintelligence before we build any sort of robustness in the AI.
going to build super intelligence before we build any sort of robustness in the AI. We cannot build an AI that is capable of going out into nature and surviving like a bird.
A bird is an incredibly robust organism.
We've built nothing like this.
We haven't built a machine that's capable of reproducing it.
Yes, but there is a work of leg robots a lot now. I have a bunch of them. They're mobile.
They can't reproduce, but all they need is, I guess you're saying they can't repair themselves.
But if you have a large number, if you have like a hundred million of them,
let's just focus on them reproducing, right? They have microchips in them.
Okay. Then do they include a fab?
No. Then how are they include a fab? No.
Then how are they going to reproduce? Well, they're, hey, it doesn't have to be all on board,
right? They can go to a factory to a repair shop. Yeah, but then you're really moving away from
robustness. Yes. All of life is capable of reproducing without needing to go to a repair shop.
Life will continue to reproduce in the complete absence of civilization.
Robots will not.
So when the, if the AI apocalypse happens, I mean, the AI's are going to probably die out
because I think we're going to get, again, super intelligence long before we get robustness.
What about if you just improve the fab to where you just have a 3D printer that can always
help you?
Well, that'd be very interesting.
I'm interested in building that.
Of course you are.
You think how difficult is that problem?
Do I have a robot that basically can build itself?
Very, very hard.
I think you've mentioned this, like to me or somewhere where people think it's
easy conceptually. And then they remember that you're going to have to have a fab. Yeah, on board.
Of course. So 3D printer, the prints of 3D printer. Yeah, on legs. Yeah, hard. Well, because it's, I mean, a 3D printer is a very simple machine, right?
Okay, you're going to print chips.
You're going to have an atomic printer.
How you going to dope the silicon?
Yeah.
Right.
How you going to etch the silicon?
You're going to have to have a very interesting kind of fab if you want to have a lot
of computation on board.
if I have, if you want to have a lot of computation on board, but you can do like structural type of robots that are dumb.
Yeah, but structural type of robots aren't going to have the intelligence required to survive
in any complex environment.
What about like ants type of systems?
We have like trillions of them.
I don't think this works.
I mean, again, like ants at their very core are made up of cells that are capable of
individually reproducing.
They're doing quite a lot, a lot of computation that we're taking for granted.
It's not even just the computation.
It's that reproduction is so inherent.
Okay, so like there's two stacks of life in the world.
There's the biological stack and the silicon stack.
The biological stack starts with reproduction. Reproduction is at the absolute core. The first
proto-RNA organisms were capable of reproducing. The silicon stack, just by as far as it's come,
is nowhere near being able to reproduce. Yeah. So the fab movement,
digital fabrication, fabrication in the full range of what that means is still
in the early stages.
Yeah.
You're interested in this world.
Even if you did put a fab on the machine, right?
Let's say, okay, we can build apps.
We can have as humanity.
We can probably put all the precursors that build all the machines and the fabs also in the
machine.
So first off, this machine is going to be absolutely massive. I mean, we almost have a think of the size of the thing required to reproduce a machine
today.
Right?
Like, is our civilization capable of reproduction?
Can we reproduce our civilization on Mars?
If we were to construct a machine that is made up of humans, like company that can reproduce itself. Yeah, I don't know if it feels like like like 115
people I get so much harder than that
120
I believe the Twitter can be run by 50 people. Uh-huh. I
Think that this is gonna take, like, it's just most
of society, right?
Like we live in one globalized world.
No, but you're not interested in running Twitter.
You're interested in seeding.
Like you want to seed a civilization and then because humans can like, oh, okay, you're talking
about, yeah, okay.
So you're talking about the humans reproducing and like, basically, like what's the smallest
self-sustaining colony of humans? Yeah. Yeah, okay, fine, but they're talking about the humans reproducing and like basically like what's the smallest self-dustin in colony of humans?
Yeah.
Yeah, okay, fine.
But they're not gonna be making five nanometer chips.
Over time they will.
I think you're being like,
we have to expand our conception of time here.
Going back to the original.
All right.
Time scale, I mean,
over across maybe a hundred generations
we're back to making chips.
No.
If you seed the colony correctly,
maybe, or maybe they'll watch our colony die out over here and be like, we're not making chips,
don't make chips. No, but you have to seed that colony correctly. Whatever you do, don't make chips,
chips are what led to their downfall. Well, that is the thing that humans do. They come up,
they construct a devil, a good thing and a bad thing
And they really stick by that and they murder each other over that. There's always one asshole in the room who murders everybody
And usually makes tattoos and nice branding
Need that asshole. That's the question
Humanity works really hard today to get rid of that asshole, but I think they might be important
Yeah, that's whole freedom of speech thing
It's it's the freedom of being an asshole.
It seems kind of important.
Right.
Man, this thing, this fab, this human fab that we constructed, this human
civilization is pretty interesting.
And now it's building artificial copies of itself or artificial copies of
various aspects of itself that seem interesting like intelligence.
And I wonder where that goes.
I like to think it's just like another stack for life. Like we have like the biostatck life,
like we're a biostatck life and then the silicon stack life.
But it seems like the ceiling, or there might not be a ceiling or at least the ceiling is much higher
for the silicon stack. Oh no, I don I, we don't know what the ceiling is
for the biostat, either.
The biostat, the biostat just seemed to move slower.
You have Moore's Law, which is not dead,
despite many proclamations to the biostat,
or the silicon.
In the silicon stack.
And you don't have anything like this in the biostat.
So I have a meme that I posted,
I tried to make a meme, it didn't work too well.
But I posted a picture of Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden and you look, this is 1980 and
this is 2020.
And these two humans are basically the same, right?
There's no, there's no like, there's been no change in humans in the last 40 years.
And then I posted a computer from 1980 and a computer from 2020.
Wow.
Yeah, with their early, early stages, right? Which is why you said when you said the fab,
the size of the fab required to make another fab is like,
very larger now.
Oh, yeah.
But computers were very large.
80 years ago.
And they got pretty tiny and there, there, people are starting
to want to wear them on their face.
Oh.
In order to escape reality, that's the thing in order to be live inside the computer.
There.
Put a screen right here.
I don't have to see the rest of the usholes.
I've been ready for a long time. You like virtuality? I love it
Do you want to live there? Yeah, yeah
Part of me does too. How far away are we do you think?
Judging from what you can buy today far very far. I got to tell you that I had the experience of
Meta's codec avatar where it's an ultra-high resolution scam. It looked real. I mean the headsets just are not quite like I resolution
yet. I haven't put on any headset where I'm like, oh, this could be the real world.
Whereas when I put good headphones on, audio is there.
I'm like, we can reproduce audio
that I'm like, I'm actually in a jungle right now.
If I close my eyes, I can't tell, I'm not.
Yeah, but then there's also smell
and all that kind of stuff.
Sure.
I don't know.
I, the power of imagination,
or the power of the mechanism in the human mind that fills the gaps,
that kind of reaches and wants to make the thing you see in the virtual world real to you,
I believe in that power.
Or humans want to believe.
Yeah. Like, what if you're lonely? What if you're sad?
What if you're really struggling in life, and here's a world where you don't have to struggle anymore?
Humans want to believe so much that people think the large language models are conscious. That's so much humans want to believe
Strong words. He's throwing left and right hooks. Why do you think large language models are not conscious?
I don't think I'm conscious. Oh, so what is consciousness then George?
It's like what it seems to mean to people,
it's just like a word that atheists use for souls.
Sure, but that doesn't mean soul is not an interesting word.
If consciousness is a spectrum,
I'm definitely way more conscious
than the large language models are.
I think the large language models
are less conscious than a chicken.
One is the last time you see a chicken. In Miami, like a couple months ago.
No, like a living chicken.
Is living chickens walking around Miami?
It's crazy.
Like on the street?
Yeah.
Like a chicken.
A chicken.
All right.
All right.
I was trying to call you all like a good journalist and I got shut down.
Okay, but you don't think much about this kind of subjective feeling that it feels like
something to exist. And then as an observer, you can have a sense
that an entity is not only intelligent,
but has a kind of subjective experience of its reality,
like a self-awareness that is capable of like suffering
of hurting, of being excited by the environment in a way
that's not merely kind of an artificial response, but
a deeply felt one.
Humans want to believe so much that if I took a rock and a sharpie and drew a sad face
on the rock, they'd think the rock is sad.
Yeah.
And you're saying when we look in the mirror, we apply the same smiley face with rock.
Pretty much, yeah.
Isn't that weird though? that you're not conscious?
That, no.
But you do believe in consciousness.
Oh, really?
It's unclear.
OK, so you do, it's like a little like a symptom
of the bigger thing.
That's not that important.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that like the human system
seem to claim that they're conscious.
And I guess it kind of like says something in they straight up like, okay, what do people mean
when even if you don't believe in consciousness,
what do people mean when they say consciousness?
And there's definitely like meanings to it.
What's your favorite thing to eat?
Pizza.
Cheese pizza, what are the toppings?
I like cheese pizza, I like bread.
Don't say pineapple.
No, I don't.
Okay, pepperoni pizza.
As they put any ham on it, oh, it's real bad. What's the best?
What's the best pizza? What are we talking about here? Like you like cheap crappy pizza?
Chicago deep-dish cheese. Oh, that's that's my favorite. There you go. You bite into a deep-dish a cargo deep-dish pizza
And it feels like you were starving. You have an eat for 24 hours. You just bite in and you're hanging out with somebody that matters a lot to you
And you're there with the pizza.
Sounds so nice.
Yeah.
All right.
It feels like something.
I'm George, mother fucking hot eating a fucking Chicago deep dish pizza.
There's just the full peak, light living experience of being human, the top of the human
condition.
It feels like something to experience that.
Mm-hmm.
Why does it feel like something?
That's consciousness, isn't it?
If that's the word you want to use to describe it, sure.
I'm not going to deny that that feeling exists.
I'm not going to deny that I experience that feeling.
When I guess what I kind of take issue to is that there
is some like, how does it feel to be a web server to 404s hurt
Not yet. How would you know what suffering looked like sure? You can recognize a suffering dog because what the same stack is the dog
All the bio stacks off kind of especially mammals, you know, it's really easy. You can
Game recognize game. Yeah
Versus the silicon stack stuff. It's like you have no idea.
You have you it. Oh wow. The little thing has learned to mimic. You know.
But then I realized that that's all we are too. All of the little thing has learned to mimic.
Yeah. I guess yeah, four four could be could be suffering, but it's so far
from
Our kind of living organism our kind of stack, but it feels like AI can start
Maybe mimicking the biological stack better about about it because it's trained retrained it. Yeah
And so in that maybe that's the definition of consciousness, is the bio-stack consciousness.
The definition of consciousness is how close something looks to human.
Sure, I'll give you that one.
No, how close something is to the human experience.
Sure.
It's a very anthropocentric definition, but...
Well, that's all we got.
Sure.
No, I don't mean to like, I think there's a lot of value in it.
Look, I just started my second company. My third company will be AI Girlfriends. No, like don't mean to like, I think there's a lot of value in it. Look, I just started my second company.
My third company will be AI Girlfriends.
No, like I mean it.
I want to find out what your fourth company is after all.
Wow.
Because I think once you have AI Girlfriends, it's,
oh boy, this is get interesting.
Well, maybe let's go there.
I mean, the relationships with AI,
that's creating human-like organisms, right?
And part of being human is being conscious is being
Having the capacity to suffer having the capacity to experience this live richly in such a way that you can empathize
The AI is going to empathize with you and you can empathize with it or you can project your
anthropomorphic sense of what the other entity is experiencing.
And an AI model would need to create that experience inside your mind.
And it doesn't seem like difficult.
Yeah, but okay, so here's where it actually gets totally different, right?
When you interact with another human, you can make some assumptions.
Yeah. When you interact with these models, you can't.
You can make some assumptions that that other human experiences suffering and pleasure
in a pretty similar way to you do.
The golden rule applies.
With the NEI model, this isn't really true, right?
These large language models are good at fooling people because they were trained on a whole
bunch of human data and told them to mimic it.
Yeah. good at fooling people because they were trained on a whole bunch of human data and told to mimic it. Yep.
But if the AI system says, hi, my name is Samantha.
It has a backstory.
Yeah.
I went to college, they're here and there.
Maybe you'll integrate this in the AI system.
I made some chatbots.
I gave them back stories.
It was lots of fun.
I was so happy when Lama came out.
Yeah.
We'll talk about Lama.
We'll talk about all that.
But like, you know, the rock with the smiley face.
Yeah.
Well, it seems pretty natural for you
to anthropomorphize that thing and then start dating it.
And before you know it, you're married and have kids.
With a rock.
With a rock.
And this picture is on Instagram with you and a rock
and smiley face.
To be fair, like, you know, something that people generally look for when they look
over someone to date is intelligence and some form and the rock doesn't really
have intelligence. Only a pretty desperate person would date a rock.
I think we're all desperate deep down.
Oh, not rock level desperate.
All right.
Not rock level desperate, but AI level desperate.
I don't know, I think all of us have a deep loneliness.
It just feels like the language models are there.
Oh, I agree.
And you know what, I won't even say this so cynically.
I will actually say this in a way that like,
I want AI friends.
I do.
Yeah.
I would love to, you know, again,
I, the language models now are still a little,
like, people are impressed with these GPT things,
and I look, or like, or the copilot, the coding one,
and I'm like, okay, this is like junior engineer level,
and these people are like five or level artists
and copywriters.
Like, okay, great, we got like Fiverr and like junior engineers.
Okay, cool.
And this is just a start and it will get better.
Right?
I can't wait to have AI friends who are more intelligent
than I am.
So Fiverr is just a temporary.
It's not the ceiling.
No, definitely not.
Is it, is it count as cheating?
When you're talking to an AI model emotional cheating?
That's up to you and your human partner to define.
Oh, you have to, all right.
You're getting, yeah, you have to have to have that conversation, I guess.
All right.
I mean, integrate that with, with porn and all this.
Oh, yeah, I mean, similar kind of to porn.
Yeah.
Yeah. Right. I think people it's similar kind of to porn. Yeah. Yeah.
Right.
I think people in relationships have different views on that.
Yeah, but most people don't have like serious open conversations about all the different
aspects of what's cool and what's not.
And it feels like AI is a really weird conversation to have.
I mean, the porn one is a good branching off.
Like these things, you know, one of my scenarios
that I put in my chatbot is, you know,
a nice girl named Lexi, she's 20,
she just moved out to LA, she wanted to be an actress,
but she started doing only fans instead,
and you're on a date with her, enjoy.
Oh man, yeah.
And so is that if you're actually dating somebody in real life, is that cheating?
I feel like it gets a little weird.
Sure.
It gets real weird.
It's like, what are you allowed to say to an AI bot?
Imagine having that conversation with a significant other.
I mean, these are all things from people to define in their relationships.
What it means to be human is just going to start to get weird, especially online.
How do you know?
Like, there would be moments when you'll have what you think is a real human you interact
with on Twitter for years and you realize it's not.
I spread, I love this meme, uh, heaven banning.
Mm-hmm.
You know what, shadow banning.
Yeah.
All right, shadow banning.
Okay, you post, no one can see it.
Heaven banning, you post.
No one can see it, but a whole, you post, no one can see it,
but a whole lot of AI's are spot up to interact with you.
Well, maybe that's what the way human civilization
ends is all of us, Heaven banned.
There's a great, it's called My Little Pony Friendship is Optimal.
It's a sci-fi story that explores this idea.
Friendship is Optimal. Friendship is Optimal.
Yeah, I'd like to have some,
at least the intellectual realm,
some AI friends that argue with me,
but the romantic realm is weird, definitely weird.
But not out of the realm of the kind of weirdness
that human civilization is capable of, I think.
I want it. Look, I want it. If no one else wants it, I want it.
Yeah, I think a lot of people probably want it. There's a deep loneliness.
And I'll fill their loneliness, and you know, just will only advertise to you some of the time.
Yeah, maybe the conceptions of monogamy change too. Like I grew up in a time,
like I value monogamy, but maybe that's a silly notion when you have
arbitrary number of AI systems.
Mm, this, this, this, this interesting path
from rationality to polyamory.
Yeah, that doesn't make sense for me.
For you, but you're just a biological organism
who's born before like read the internet really took off.
The crazy thing is like culture is whatever we define it as.
Like these things are not, you, like,
is a lot problem in moral philosophy, right?
There's no like, like, okay,
what is might be that like computers are capable
of mimicking, you know, girlfriends perfectly.
They pass the girlfriend's time test, right?
But that doesn't say anything about art.
That doesn't say anything about how we ought to respond to them as a civilization.
That doesn't say we ought to get rid of monogamy. That's a completely separate question,
really a religious one. Girlfriend touring test, I wonder what that looks like. Girlfriend
test. Are you writing that? Will you be the the Alan Toring of the 24th century that writes the
the girlfriend touring test? No, I mean, of course, my,
my, hey, I girlfriend's,
their goal is to pass the growth and touring test.
No, but you, there should be like a paper that kind of defines the test.
Or, I mean, the question is if it's deeply personalized or there's a common thing
that really gets everybody.
Yeah, I mean, you know, look, we're a company.
We don't get everybody.
We just have to get a large enough clientele stamp. I like how you know, look we're a company. We don't get everybody. We just have to get a large enough client-delta stainless steel.
Like are you already, already thinking company?
All right, let's, before we go to company number three
and company number four, let's go to company number two.
Right.
Tiny Corp.
Possibly one of the greatest names of all time for a company.
You've launched a new company called Tiny Corp
that leads the development
of TinyGrad. What's the origin story of TinyCorp and TinyGrad?
I started TinyGrad as a toy project to teach myself, okay, like what is a convolution?
What are all these options you can pass to them? What is the derivative of a convolution?
What is the derivative of convolution, right? Very similar to a carpathi micrograd.
Very similar.
And then I started realizing,
I started thinking about like AI chips.
I started thinking about chips that run AI and I was like,
well, okay, this is going to be a really big problem.
If Nvidia becomes a monopoly here,
how long before Nvidia is nationalized?
So you, one of the reasons that Star Tiny Corp is to challenge Nvidia.
It's not so much to challenge Nvidia. Actually, I like Nvidia and it's to make sure power stays decentralized. And here's a computational power.
And to you, Nvidia is kind of locking down the computational power of the world.
If Nvidia becomes just like TANX better than everything else,
you're giving a big advantage to somebody who can secure Nvidia as a resource.
In fact, if Jensen watches this podcast, he may want to consider this.
He may want to consider making sure his company is not nationalized.
Do you think that's an actual threat?
Oh, yes.
No, but there's so much, you know, there's AMD.
So we have Nvidia video an AMD great.
All right.
But you don't think there's like a push towards like selling,
like Google selling TPUs and something like this.
You don't think there's a push for that.
Have you seen it?
Google loves to rent you TPUs.
It doesn't, you can't buy it, it's a bus buy.
No.
So I started work on a
On a chip. I was like, okay, what's it going to take to make a chip and
My first notions were all completely wrong about why about like how you could improve on GPUs
And I will take this this is from Jim Keller on your podcast
And this is one of my absolute favorite
descriptions of computation.
So there's three kinds of computation paradigms that are common in the world today.
They're CPUs.
And CPUs can do everything.
CPUs can do ad and multiply.
They can do load and store, and they can do compare and branch.
And when I say they can do these things, they can do them all fast, right?
So compare and branch are unique to CPUs.
And what I mean by they can do them fast is they can do things like branch protection and
speculative execution, and they spend tons of transistors, and they use like super deep
reorder buffers in order to make these things fast.
Then you have a simple or computation model GPUs. GPUs can't really do compare and branch.
I mean, they can, but it's horrendously slow. But GPUs can do arbitrary load and store,
right? GPUs can do things like X, D reference Y.
So they can fetch from arbitrary pieces of memory.
They can fetch from memory that is defined by the contents
of the data.
The third model of computation is DSPs.
And DSPs are just add and multiply.
They can do load and stores, but only static load and stores.
Only load and stores that are known before the program runs.
And you look at neural networks today, and 95% of neural networks are all the DSP paradigm. They are just statically scheduled ads
and multiplies. So TinyGuard really took this idea and I'm still working on it to extend this
as far as possible. Every stage of the stack has Turingaeness. Python has Turing completeness,
and then we take Python,
we go into C++ which is Turing complet,
and maybe C++ calls into some kuda kernels,
which are Turing complet.
The kuda kernels go through LVM,
which is Turing complet,
and to PTX which is Turing completeness,
SAS which is Turing completeness,
on a Turing complet processor.
On to get Turing completeness out of the stack entirely.
Because once you get rid of Turing completeness,
you can reason about things.
Rises theorem and the halting problem do not apply to add more machines.
Okay.
What's the power and the value of getting Turing completeness out of?
I was talking about the hardware or the software.
Every layer of the stack.
Every layer of the stack, removing Turing completeness allows you to reason about things.
So the reason you need to do branch prediction and a CPU and the reason it's
prediction and the branch predictors are, I think, are like 99% on CPUs.
Why do they get 1% of them wrong?
Well, they get 1% wrong because you can't know, right?
That's the halting problem.
It's equivalent to the halting problem to say whether a branch is going to be
taken or not.
I can show that, but the adMole machine, the neural network,
runs the identical compute every time. The only thing that changes is the data.
So when you realize this, you think about, okay, how can we build a computer,
and how can we build a stack that takes maximal advantage of this idea?
So what makes TinyGrad different
from other neural network libraries
is it does not have a primitive operator
even for matrix multiplication.
And this is every single one,
they even have primitive operator
to ensure things like convolutions.
So no matmol.
No matmol.
Well, here's what a matmol is.
So I'll use my hands to talk here.
So if you think about a cube
and I put my two matrices that I'm multiplying on two
faces of a cube, you can think about the matrix multiply as the n cubed, I'm going to multiply
for each one in the cube, and then I'm going to do a sum which is a reduce up to here to
the third face of the cube, and that's your multiplied matrix.
So what a matrix multiply is, is a bunch of shape operations, right?
A bunch of permute three shapes and expands on the two matrices, a multiply and cubed,
a reduce and cubed, which gives you an n squared matrix.
Okay, so what is the minimum number of operations that can accomplish that if you don't have
met mall as a primitive?
So tiny grad has about 20.
MetMall is a primitive. So TinyGrad has about 20.
And you can compare TinyGrad's op-sad or IR to things like XLA or PrimTorch.
So XLA and PrimTorch are ideas where like, okay,
Torch has like 2000 different kernels.
PyTorch 2.0 introduced PrimTorch which has only 250.
TinyGrad has order of magnitude 25.
It's 10X less than XLA or PrimTorch. torques, which has only 250. Tiny Grad has order of magnitude 25.
It's 10X less than XLI or Prem Torch.
And you can think about it as kind of like risk versus SISC, right?
These other things are SISC like systems.
Tiny Grad is risk.
And risk one.
Risk architecture is going to change everything.
1995 hackers.
Wait, really? That's an actual thing. Angelina Jolie delivers the line. Risk architecture is gonna change everything. 1995 hackers.
Wait, really? That's an actual thing. Angelina Jolie delivers the line.
Risk architecture is gonna change everything in 1995.
And here we are with arm and the phones.
And arm everywhere.
Wow, I love it when movies actually have real things in them.
Right.
Okay, interesting.
And so this is like,
so you're thinking of this as the risk architecture of ML stack
25 what what can you can you go through the
the four opt types sure
Okay, so you have unary ops which take in a
Tensor and return a tensor of the same size and do some unary op to it. X log, reciprocal,
sign, right? They take in one and they're point wise.
Really? Yeah, really. Almost all activation functions are unary ops. Some combinations of unary ops
together is still unary op. Then you have binary ops. Binary ops are like point wise addition, multiplication,
division, compare. It takes in two tensors of equal size and outputs one tensor. Then you
have reduced ops. Reduce ops will like take a three dimensional tensor and turn it into
a two dimensional tensor or three dimensional tensor, turn it into zero dimensional tensor.
Things like a sum or max or really the common ones there.
Then the fourth type is movement-ops.
Movement-ops are different from the other types,
because they don't actually require computation,
they require different ways to look at memory.
So that includes reshapes, permutes, expands, flips.
Those are the main ones, probably.
So with that, you have enough to make a metmol.
And convolutions.
And every convolution you can imagine, dilated convolution, strided convolutions, transposed
convolutions.
You're right on GitHub about laziness, showing a metmol, matrix multiplication, see how despite
the style is used into one kernel with the power of laziness.
Can you elaborate on this power of laziness?
Sure. So if you type in PyTorch A times B plus C, what this is going to do is it's going
to first multiply add in B and store that resultant to memory. And then it is going to add
C by reading that result from memory, reading C from memory, and writing that out to memory. There is way more loads and stores to memory than you need there.
If you don't actually do A times B as soon as you see it, if you wait until the user actually
realizes that tensor, until the laziness actually resolves, you confuse that plus C.
This is like, it's the same way Haskell works. So what's the process of porting a model into TinyGrad?
So TinyGrad's front end looks very similar to PyTorch.
I probably could make a perfect,
or pretty close to perfect interop layer if I really wanted to.
I think that there's some things that are nicer
about TinyGrad syntax than PyTorch,
but the front end looks very torch-like.
You can also load in Onyx models.
Okay. We have more onyx models.
We have more onyx tests passing in CoreML.
CoreML.
Okay, so we'll pass onyx run time soon.
What about the developer experience with tiny grad?
What it feels like, what a versus PyTorch?
By the way, I really like PyTorch.
I think that it's actually a very good piece of software.
I think that they've made a few different trade-offs
and these different trade-offs are where, you know,
tiny grad takes a different path.
One of the biggest differences is it's really easy to see
the kernels that are actually being sent to the GPU.
Right? If you run PyTorch on the GPU,
you like do some operation and you don't know what
kernels are in, you don't know how many kernels ran, you don't know how many flops were used,
you don't know how much memory accesses were used, TinyGrad type debug equals two, and it will show
you in this beautiful style every kernel that's run. How many flops and how many bytes?
How many flops and how many bytes?
So can you just linger on what problem Tiny Grad solves?
Tiny Grad solves the problem of porting new ML accelerators quickly.
One of the reasons, tons of these companies now, I think Sequoia marked Graph core to zero, right? Service, tens torrent, grok.
All of these ML accelerator companies, they built chips.
The chips were good.
The software was terrible.
And part of the reason is because I think the same problem
is happening with Dojo.
It's really, really hard to write a pie torch port
because you have to write 250 kernels
and you have to tune them all for performance. What does Jim, Jim Keller think about tiny grad? You guys hung out quite a bit.
So he's, you know, he was involved, he's involved with that storm.
What's his praise and what's his criticism of what you're doing with your life?
Look, my prediction for 10th torrent is that they're going to pivot to making risk
five chips. CPUs. CPUs. Why?
Because AI accelerators are a software problem, not really a hardware problem.
All interesting, so you don't think. You think that diversity of AI accelerators in
the hardware space is not going to be a thing that exists long term.
I think what's going to happen is if I can finish, okay, if you're trying to make an AI accelerator,
you better have the capability of writing a torch level performance stack on Nvidia GPUs.
If you can't write a torch stack on Nvidia GPUs, and I mean all the way, I mean down to the driver, there's no way you're going to be able to write it on your chip, because
your chip's worse than an Nvidia GPU. The first version of the chip you tape out, it's
definitely worse.
Are you saying that's really tough?
Yes, and not only that, actually, the chip that you tape out, almost always because you're
trying to get advantage over Nvidia, you're specializing the hardware more. It's always
harder to write software for more specialized hardware. Like a GPU is pretty generic, and if you can't write an NVIDIA stack, there's no way you can write a stack for your chip.
So my approach with TinyGrad is first write a performance NVIDIA stack, or targeting AMD.
So you did say a few to NVIDIA a little bit. We'd love.
We'd love. Yeah, we'd love. So like the Yankees, you know, or Mats Van. Oh, you're your
Mats Van, a risk, a risk van and a Mats Van. What's the hope that
AMG has? And you did build with AMD recently that I saw, how
does the the 7900 XTX compare to the RTX 490 of the 80?
Well, let's start with the fact that the 7900 XTX compared to the RTX 490 of 480. Well, let's start with the fact that the 7900XTX
kernel drivers don't work.
And if you run demo apps in loops, it panics the kernel.
OK.
So this is a software issue.
Lisa, who responded to my email?
Oh, I reached out.
I was like, this is, you know, really?
Like, I understand if you're seven by seven
transposed win-a-grad calm,
they're slower than in videos.
But literally when I run demo apps in a loop,
the kernel panics.
So just adding that loop.
I just literally took their demo apps
and wrote like, while true semi-colon do the app,
semi-colon done in a bunch of screens.
Right? This is like the most primitive fuzz testing.
Why do you think that is? They're just not seeing a market in the machine learning?
They're changing. They're trying to change. They're trying to change. I had a pretty positive
interaction with them this week. Last week, I went on YouTube, I was just like, that's it. I give up on
AMD. This is their driver doesn't even, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, you know,
I'll go with Intel GPUs.
Intel GPUs have better drivers.
So you're kind of spearheading the diversification of GPUs.
Yeah, and I'd like to extend that diversification to everything.
I'd like to diversify the, right,
the more my central thesis about the world is there's things that centralize power and they're bad and there's things that decentralize power and they're good.
Everything I can do to help decentralize power. I'd like to do.
So you're really worried about the centralization of an video. That's interesting. And you don't have a fundamental hope for the proliferation of ASICs, except in a cloud.
I'd like to help them with software.
No, actually, the only ASIC that is remotely successful
is Google's TPO.
And the only reason that's successful
is because Google wrote a machine learning framework.
I think that you have to write a competitive machine
learning framework in order to be able to build an ASIC.
You think meta with PyTorch builds a competitor?
I hope so.
They have one. They have an internal one.
Internal. I mean, public facing with a nice cloud interface and so on.
I don't want a cloud.
You don't like cloud.
I don't like cloud.
What do you think is the fundamental limitation of cloud?
Fundamental limitation of cloud is who owns the off switch. So it's the power to the people.
Yeah. And you don't like the man to have all the power.
Exactly.
All right. And right now, the only way to do that is with AMD GPUs if you want performance.
Instability. Interesting. It's a costly investment emotionally to go with AMD's. Well, let me
add sort of an attention to ask you, what would you've built quite a few PCs? What's your
advice on how to build a good custom PC for, let's say, for the different applications
they use for gaming, for machine learning? Well, you shouldn't build one. You should buy
a box from the tiny corp. I heard rumors. You should buy a box from the tiny corp.
I heard rumors, whispers about this box in the tiny corp.
What's this thing look like?
What is it?
What is it called?
It's called the tiny box.
Tiny box.
It's $15,000.
Yeah.
And it's almost a paid-of-lop of compute.
It's over 100 gigabytes of GPU RAM.
It's over five terabytes per second
of GPU memory bandwidth.
I'm gonna put like four NVMEs in Rade.
You're gonna get like 20, 30 gigabytes per second
of drive read bandwidth.
I'm gonna build like the best deep learning box
that I can that plugs into one wall outlet. Okay, Can you go through those specs again a little bit from your from memory?
Yeah. So it's almost a paid-of-flop of compute.
So MD and tell.
Today, I'm leaning toward AMD.
But we're pretty agnostic to the type of compute. The main limiting spec is a 120-volt 15-amp
circuit.
Okay. Well, I mean it because in order to like like there's a plug over there.
Mm-hmm.
All right. You have to be able to plug it in.
We're also going to sell the tiny rack, which like what's the most power you can get into your
house without a rousing suspicion? And one of the one of the answers is an electric car charger.
Wait, where does the rat go?
You're garage.
Interesting.
The car charger.
A wall outlet is about 1500 watts.
A car charger is about 10,000 watts.
I can say it.
What is the most amount of power you can get your hands on
without a rousing suspicion?
That's right.
George Hots.
Okay.
So the tiny box and you said
NVMe's and raid, I forget what you said about memory, all that kind of stuff. Okay. So what about
what GPUs? Again, probably, probably 7900 XTXs, but maybe 3090s, maybe A770s. Those are in
Telsk. You're flexible or still exploring?
I'm still exploring.
I want to deliver a really good experience to people.
And yeah, what GPUs I end up going with again.
I'm leaning toward AMD.
It will see.
You know, in my email, what I said to AMD is like just dumping the code on GitHub is
not open source.
Open source is a culture.
Open source means that your issues
are not all one year old style issues. Open source means developing in public. And if you
guys can commit to that, I see a real future of AMD as a competitor to the video.
Well, I'd love to get a tiny box, MIT. So whenever it's ready, let's do it. We're taking
pre-orders. I took this from me, Lon. I. Like, $100, fully refundable pre-orders.
Is it going to be like the cyber truck? It's going to take a few years or?
No, I'll try to do it fast enough. It's a lot simpler. It's a lot simpler than a truck.
Well, there's complexities not to just the putting the thing together, but like, shipping
and all this kind of stuff. The thing that I want to deliver to people out of the box is being able to run 65 billion parameter Lama in FP16
in real time, in like a good, like 10 tokens per second
or five tokens per second or something.
Just it works.
Lama's running or something like Lama.
Experience or I think Falcon is the new one.
Experience a chat with the largest language model
that you can have in your house.
Yeah, from a wall plug.
From a wall plug, yeah. Actually, for inference, it's not like even more power would help you get more.
Even more power wouldn't get you more.
There's just the biggest model released is 65 billion parameter alarm on as far as I know.
So it sounds like tiny box will naturally pivot towards company number three,
because you could just get the girlfriend
and, or boyfriend.
That one's harder actually.
The boyfriend is harder?
The boyfriend's harder, yeah.
I think that's a very biased statement.
I think a lot of people would just say,
what's, what, why is it harder to replace a boyfriend
than the girlfriend with the artificial LLM?
Because women are attracted to status and power and men are attracted to youth and beauty.
No, I mean this what I mean.
But what? Both are, it can be unimicable, easy to the language model.
No. No machines do not have any status or real power.
I don't know. I think you both, well, first of all, you're using language mostly to communicate
youth and beauty and power and status.
But status fundamentally is a zero-sum game. Whereas youth and beauty are not.
No, I think status is a narrative you can construct. I don't think status is real.
I don't know.
I just think that that's why it's harder.
You know, yeah, maybe it is my biases.
I think status is way easier to fake.
I also think that, you know,
men are probably more desperate
and more likely to buy my product,
so maybe they're a better target market.
Desperation is interesting.
Easier to fool.
That's, I can see that.
Yeah, look, I mean, look,
I know you can look at porn viewership numbers, right?
A lot more men watch porn than women.
Yeah, that's quite it is.
Well, there's a lot of questions and answers you can get there.
Anyway, with the tiny box, how many GPUs in tiny box?
Six.
Oh, man.
And I'll tell you why it's six. Yeah. Oh man.
I'll tell you why it's sex.
So, AMD Epic processors have 128 lanes of PCIe.
I want to leave enough lanes for some drives and I want to leave enough lanes for some
networking.
How do you do cooling for something like this?
Ah, that's one of the big challenges. Not only do I want the cooling to be good,
I want it to be quiet. I want the tiny box to be able to sit comfortably in your room.
This is really going towards the girlfriend thing. Because you want to run the LLM.
I'll give a more, I mean, I can talk about how it relates to company number one.
Come AI. Well, we ask why, oh, why?
Because you may be potentially
what we're running in a car.
No, no, why?
Because you want to put this thing in your house
and you want it to coexist with you.
If it's screaming at 60 dB,
you don't want that in your house, you'll kick it out.
60 dB, yeah.
I want like 40, 45.
So how do you make the cooling quiet?
That's an interesting problem in itself.
A key trick is to actually make it big.
Ironically, it's called the tiny box.
But if I can make it big, a lot of that noise
is generated because of high pressure air.
If you look at a one-you server,
a one-you server has these super high pressure fans
that are super deep and they're like gennishes.
Versus, if you have something that's big,
well, I can use a big,
and you know, they call them big ass fans,
those ones that are huge huge on the ceiling and
They're completely silent. So tiny box will be big
It is the I do not want it to be large according to UPS
I want it to be shipable as a normal package, but that's my constraint there
Interesting with the the fans stuff again can't you be assembled on location? No, no
the fans stuff can't be assembled on location. No, no, no, it has to be.
Well, here you're,
I wanna give you a great out of the box experience.
I want you to lift this thing out.
I want it to be like the Mac, you know, tiny box.
The Apple experience.
Yeah.
I love it.
Okay, and so tiny box would run, tiny grad.
Like what do you envision this whole thing to look like? We're talking about like
Linux with a full software engineering environment and just not PyTorch but tiny grad. Yeah, we did a
poll if people want you to do our arch we're gonna stick with you bun to. Oh interesting. What's your favorite flavor of Linux?
Interesting. What's your favorite flavor? I like Ubuntu Mate. However, you pronounce that meat.
So how do you you've gotten llama into tiny grad? You've gotten stable diffusion into tiny grad.
What was that like? Can you comment on like what are what are these models? What's interesting
about porting them? So what's yeah, like what are the challenges? What's naturally about porting them? So yeah, look, what are the challenges?
What's naturally, what's easy, all that kind of stuff?
There's a really simple way to get these models into
TinyGrad and you can just export them as Onyx.
And then TinyGrad can run Onyx.
So the ports that I did of Lama,
StableDefusion, and now Whisper are more academic
to teach me about the models,
but they are cleaner than the PyTorch versions.
You can read the code.
I think the code is easier to read.
It's less lines.
There's just a few things about the way TinyGrad writes things.
Here's a complaint I have about PyTorch.
NN.relU is a class.
Right?
So when you create an NN module, you'll put your NN relus as in init.
And this makes no sense.
Relus completely staleus. Why should that be a class?
But that's more like a software engineering thing. Or do you think it has a cost on performance?
Oh no, it doesn't have a cost on performance. But yeah, no, I think that it's, that's what I mean
about like Tiny Grads front end to being cleaner. I see. What do you think about Mojo? I don't know if
you've been paying attention
to the programming language that does some interesting ideas that kind of intersect tiny-gride.
I think that there is a spectrum. And like on one side you have Mojo, and on the other side
you have like GGML. GGML is this like we're going to run llama fast on Mac. And okay, we're going
to expand out to a little bit, but we're going to base it to go to the depth first, right? Mojo is like, we're going to go breath first.
We're going to go so wide that we're going to make all of Python fast in tiny grads in the middle.
Tiny grads, we are going to make neural networks fast.
Yeah, but they try to really get it to be fast, compile, down to a specific hardware and make that compilation
step as flexible and resilient as possible.
Yeah, but they have terrain completeness.
And that limits you.
Tery, that's what you're saying.
It's somewhere in the middle.
So you're actually going to be targeting some accelerators, some number, not one. My goal is step one, build an equally performance stack
to pie to work on Nvidia and AMD, but with way less lines.
And then step two is, okay, how do we make an accelerator?
But you need step one. You have to first build the framework
before you can build the accelerator.
Can you explain ML perf?
What's your approach in general
to benchmarking tiny grad performance?
So I'm much more of a like build it the right way
and worry about performance later.
There's a bunch of things where I haven't even like
really dove into performance.
The only place where tiny grad is competitive performance wise
right now is on Qualcomm GPUs. So tiny Grad is actually used in OpenPilot to run the model. So the driving
model is Tiny Grad. When did that happen? That transition.
About eight months ago now. And it's too X-Faster than Qualcomm's library.
What's the hardware of OpenPilot runs on the Kamea?
It's a Snapdragon 845.
Okay.
So this is using the GPU.
So the GPU is in a Dreno GPU.
There's like different things.
There's a really good Microsoft paper
that talks about like mobile GPUs
and why they're different from desktop GPUs.
One of the big things is in a desktop GPU,
you can use buffers on a mobile GPU image textures
are a lot faster.
And a mobile GPU image texture is an image.
Okay.
And so you want to be able to leverage that.
I want to be able to leverage it in a way that it's completely generic, right?
So there's a lot of this.
Xiaomi has a pretty good open source library from what GPU is called Mace,
where they can generate where they have these kernels,
but they're all hand-coded, right?
So that's great if you're doing three by three cons.
That's great if you're doing dense mat malls,
but the minute you go off the beaten path at tiny bit,
well, your performance is nothing.
Since you mentioned OpenPilot,
I'd love to get an update in the company number one,
call my eye world, how are things going there
in the development of semi, call my eye world, how are things going there in the development
of semi-autonomous driving?
You know, almost no one talks about FSD anymore,
and even less people talk about Open Pilot.
We've solved the problem.
Like we solved it years ago.
What's the problem exactly?
Well, how do you look?
What is solving it mean?
Solving means how do you build a model that outputs a human policy for driving?
How do you build a model that given, you know, a reasonable set of sensors, outputs a human
policy for driving?
So you have, you know, companies that women cruise with your hand coding these things
that are like quasi-human policies. Then you have Tesla and maybe
even to more of an extent, comma, asking, okay, how to just learn the human policy from data.
The big thing that we're doing now, and we just put it out on Twitter,
at the beginning of comma, we published a paper called learning a driving simulator.
And the way this thing worked was it's a it was an auto encoder.
And then an RNN in the middle, right?
You take an auto encoder, you compress the picture, you use an RNN, predict the next state,
and these things were, you know, it was a laugh at loop bad simulator.
And this is 2015 error machine learning technology.
Today, we have VQV AE and transformers.
We're building drive GPT basically.
Drive GPT. Okay.
So, and it's trained on what? Is it trained in a self-supervised way?
Yeah. It's trained on all the driving data to predict the next frame.
So really trying to learn a human policy. What do human do?
Well, actually our simulator is conditioned on the pose. So it's actually a simulator.
You can put in like a state action pair and get up the next state.
Okay.
And then once you have a simulator, you can do RL in the simulator and RL will get us that human policy.
So transfers.
Yeah.
RL with a reward function, not asking
is this close to the human policy,
but asking what a human disengage
if you did this behavior.
Okay, let me think about the distinction there.
What a human disengage.
What a human disengage.
That correlates, I guess, with human policy,
but it could be different.
So it doesn't just say, what would a human do?
It says, what would a good human driver do?
And such that the experience is comfortable, but also not annoying in that, like, the thing
is very cautious.
So it's finding a nice balance.
That's interesting.
It's asking exactly the right question
What will make our customers happy?
Right a system that you never want to disengage because usually this engagement is this
Almost always a sign of I'm not happy with what the system is doing usually
There's some that are just I felt like driving and those are always fine too, but they're just gonna look like noise in the data
But even that felt like driving and those are always fine too, but they're just going to look like noise in the data. But even that felt like driving.
Maybe yeah.
That's even that's a signal like, why do you feel like driving here?
You need to recalibrate your relationship with the car.
Okay, so that's really interesting.
How close are we just solving self-driving?
It's hard to say. We haven't completely closed the loop yet.
So we don't have anything built,
that truly looks like that architecture yet.
We have prototypes and their bugs.
So we are a couple bug fixes away.
Might take a year, might take 10.
What's the nature of the bugs?
Are these major philosophical bugs, logical bugs?
What kind of bugs are we talking about?
They're just stupid bugs.
Also, we might just need more scale.
We just massively expanded our compute cluster, Akama.
We now have about two people worth of compute, 40 paid of flops.
Well, people are different.
Yeah, 20 paid of flops. That's a person. It's just a unit, right? Horses are different. Yeah, 28 flops.
That's a person.
It's just a unit, right?
Horses are different, too, but we still call it a horsepower.
Yeah, but there's something different about mobility than there is about perception and
action in a very complicated world.
But yes, of course, not all flops are created equal.
If you have randomly initialized weights, it's not going to.
Not all flops are created equal. So, which are theized weights, it's not gonna. Not all flops are created equal.
So, which are both.
We're doing way more useful things than others.
Yeah, yeah.
Tell me about it.
Okay, so more data, scale means more scale in compute
or scale in scale of data.
Both.
Diversity of data.
Diversity is very important in data.
Yeah, I mean, we have, so we have about, I think we have like,
5,000 daily active.
How would you evaluate how FSD is doing?
Pretty well.
Pretty well.
How's that race going between Kamei and FSD?
Tesla has always wanted two years ahead of us.
They've always been wanted two years ahead of us.
And they probably always will be because they're not doing anything wrong.
When have you seen that since the last time we talked,
they're interesting architectural decisions, training decisions,
like the way they deploy stuff, the architectures they're using,
in terms of the software, how the teams are running, all that kind of stuff,
data collection, anything interesting.
I mean, I know they're moving toward Morgan and to end approach.
So creeping towards end to end as much as possible across the whole thing,
the training, the data collection, everything.
They also have a very fancy simulator.
They're probably saying all the same things we are.
They're probably saying we just need to optimize, you know, what is the reward?
We're getting a negative reward for this engagement, right?
Like everyone kind of knows this.
It's just a question who can actually build and deploy the system.
Yeah, I mean, this requires good software engineering, I think.
Yeah. And the right kind of hardware.
Yeah, I'm hard to run it.
You still don't believe in cloud in that regard?
I have a compute cluster in my boss, 800 amps.
Tiny grad. It's 40 kilowatts at idle, our data center.
That's incredible.
We're 40 kilowatts just burning,
just when the computers are idle.
Just when I...
Sorry, sorry, compute cluster.
Compute cluster, I got it.
It's not a data center.
Yeah, yeah.
Now data centers are clouds.
We don't have clouds.
Data centers have air conditioners, we have fans.
That makes it a compute cluster.
I'm guessing this is a kind of a legal distinction. Sure. Yeah. We have a compute cluster.
You said that you know, the gallelems have consciousness or at least not more than chicken.
Do you think they can reason? Is there something interesting to you about the word reason
about some of the capabilities that we think is kind of human to be able to
and about some of the capabilities that we think is kind of human to be able to
integrate complicated information and through a chain of thought arrive at a conclusion that feels novel, a novel integration of disparate facts. Yeah, I don't think that there's,
I think that can reason better than a lot of
people.
Hey, isn't that amazing to you though?
Isn't that like an incredible thing that a transform can achieve?
I mean, I think that calculators can add better than a lot of people.
But language feels like reasoning through the process of language,
which looks a lot like thought.
reasoning through the process of language, which looks a lot like thought.
Making brilliance in chess, which feels a lot like thought.
Whatever new thing that AI can do, everybody thinks is brilliant. And then like 20 years go by and they're like, well, yeah, but chess, that's like mechanical.
Like adding, that's like mechanical.
So you think language is not that special.
It's like chess.
It's like chess.
I don't know.
Because it's very human, we take it, we listen, there is something different between chess and language. chess is a
game that a subset of population plays. Language is something we use non-stop for all of our
human interaction and human interaction is fundamental to society. So it's like, holy shit, this language thing
is not so difficult to like create in a machine.
The problem is if you go back to 1960
and you tell them that you have a machine
that can play amazing chess, of course, someone in 1960
will tell you that machine is intelligent.
Someone in 2010 won't. What's changed,
right? Today, we think that these machines that have language are intelligent, but I think in 20
years, we're going to be like, yeah, but can it reproduce? So reproduction, yeah, we might redefine
what it means to be, what is it, a high performance living organism on Earth? Humans are always going
to define a niche for themselves.
Like, well, you know, we're better than the machines because we can, you know, like they
try to create it for a bit, but no one believes that one anymore.
But niche is, is that, is that delusional or is there some accuracy to that?
Because maybe like with chess, you start to realize like that, that we have, it'll conceive
notions of what, what makes human special.
Like the apex organism on Earth.
Yeah, and I think maybe we're going to go through that same thing with language.
And that same thing with creativity.
The language carries these notions of truth and so on.
And so we might be like, wait, maybe truth is not carried by language. Maybe there's a deeper thing.
The niche is getting smaller.
Oh, boy.
But no, no, no, no, you don't understand humans are created by God,
and machines are created by humans, therefore.
Right. Like that'll be the last niche we have.
So what do you think about this, the rapid development of albums?
If you could just like stick on that, it's still incredibly impressive, like with Chagy B.T. Just even Chagy B.T. what do you think about the rapid development of Lums? If you could just stick on that, it's still incredibly impressive with Chagy PT.
Just even Chagy PT, what are your thoughts about the enforcement learning with human
feedback on these large language models?
I'd like to go back to when calculators first came out or computers.
I wasn't around, look, I'm years old, and to like see how that affected
like society. Maybe you're right. So I want to put on the the big picture hat here.
Oh my God. I think Frigirator. Wow. The refrigerator electricity, all that kind of stuff.
Gerator Wow, the refrigerator electricity, all that kind of stuff. But no, with the internet
large language models seeming human like basically passing a touring test. It seems it might have really at scale rapid transformative effects on society. You're saying like other technologies have
as well. So maybe calculators, not the best example that,
because that just seems like,
well, no, maybe calculator.
For milk man, the day he learned about refrigerators,
he's like, I'm done.
You tell me you can just keep the milk in your house?
You don't need to deliver it every day, I'm done.
Well, yeah, you have to actually look at the practically
impacts of certain technologies that they've had
Yeah, probably electricity is a big one and also how rapidly spread
Man, the internet is a big one. I do think it's different this time though
Yeah, it just feels like
The niche is getting smaller
The niche that humans
That makes human special
It feels like it's getting smaller rapidly though, doesn't it? Or is that just the feeling we
dramatize everything? I think we dramatize everything. I think that that that you asked the milkman when
he saw our legislators and they're going to have one of these in every home. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, but boys are impressive. So much more impressive than seeing a chess world champion
AI system.
I disagree, actually. I disagree. I think things like Muzero and AlphaGo are so much more
impressive because these things are playing beyond the highest human level. The language
models are writing middle school level essays and people
are like, wow, it's a great essay. It's a great five paragraph essay about the causes of the
Civil War. Okay, if you get the Civil War, just generating code, codex. You're saying it's mediocre
code. Terrible. But I don't think it's terrible. I think it's just mediocre code. Yeah. Often
I don't think it's terrible. I think it's just mediocre code.
Yeah.
Often close to correct.
Like for mediocre,
just a scary kind of code.
I spend five percent of time typing
and 95 percent of time debugging.
The last thing I want is close to correct code.
I want a machine that can help me with the debugging.
Now with typing.
You know, it's like L2 level 2 driving,
similar kind of thing.
Yeah, you still should be a good programmer in order to modify.
I wouldn't even say the bugging, just modifying the code, reading it.
Don't think it's like level 2 driving.
I think driving is not tool complete and programming is.
Meaning you don't use like the best possible tools to drive.
Right, you're not like like like cars have basically the same interface for the last 50 years.
Computers have a radically different interface.
Okay, can you describe the concept of tool complete?
Yeah.
So, think about the difference between a car from 1980 and a car from today.
Yeah.
No difference, really.
It's got a bunch of pedals, it's got a steering wheel.
Great.
Maybe now it has a few ADAS features, but it's pretty much the same car.
You have no problem getting into a 1980 car and driving it.
You take a programmer today who spent their whole life doing JavaScript,
and you put them in an Apple2E prompt, and you tell them about the line numbers in basic.
But how do I insert something between line 17 and 18?
But so in tool, you're putting in the programming languages. So just the
entirety stack of the tooling. So it's not just like the like IDs or something like this.
It's everything. Yes, it's hideees, the languages, the runtimes, it's everything in programming
is tool complete. So like almost if if if if if codex or or co-pilot are helping you that actually probably means
that your framework or library is bad and there's too much boilerplate in it.
Yeah, but don't you think so much programming has boilerplate?
TinyGrad is now 2700 lines and it can run llama and stable diffusion. And all of this stuff is in 2700 lines.
Boiler plate and abstraction interactions
and all these things are just bad code.
Well, let's talk about good code and bad code.
I would say, I don't know, for generic scripts
that are right, just off hand.
Like, I, like 80% of it is written by GPT.
Just like quick, quick, like, offhand stuff.
So not like library is not like performing code, not stuff for robotics and so on, just
quick stuff.
Because your basic, so much of programming is doing some, some, yeah, boilerplate, but
to do so efficiently and quickly, because you can't really automate it fully with generic method,
like a generic kind of ID type of recommendation or something like this,
you do need to have some of the complexity of language models.
Yeah, I guess if I was really writing like maybe today,
if I wrote like a lot of like data parsing stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't play CTFs anymore, but if I still play CTFs a lot of like this, just like
you have to write like a parser for this data format.
Like I wonder or like advent of code.
I wonder when the models are going to start to help with that kind of code.
And they may.
They may and the models also may help you with speed.
Yeah.
The models are very fast.
But where the models won't, my programming speed is not at all limited by my typing speed. Yeah, I'm also very fast, but where the models won't, my programming speed is not
at all limited by my typing speed. And in very few cases it is. Yes, if I'm writing some script
to just like parse some weird data format, sure, my programming speed is limited by my typing speed.
What about looking stuff up? Because that's essentially a more efficient lookup, right?
You know, when I was at Twitter,
I tried to use ChatGPT to like ask some questions,
like what's the API for this?
And it was just hallucinating.
It was just giving me completely made up API functions
that sounded real.
What do you think that's just a temporary kind of stage?
Oh.
You don't think it'll get better and better and better and this kind of stuff because it only hallucinate stuff in the edge cases.
Yes.
If you're an engineer code, it's actually pretty good.
Yes. If you are writing an absolute basic like react app with a button, it's not going to hallucinate.
No, there's kind of ways to fix the hallucination problem.
I think Facebook is an interesting paper. It's called Atlas.
And it's actually weird the way that we do language models right now where all of the information is in the
weights. And human brains don't really like this. It's like a hippocampus and a memory
system. So why don't LLMs have a memory system? And those people working on them, I think
future LLMs are going to be like smaller, but are going to run looping on themselves and are going to have retrieval
systems. And the thing about using a retrieval system is you can side sources explicitly, which
is really helpful to integrate the human into the loop of the thing because you can go check
the sources and you can investigate it. So whatever the thing is hallucinating, you can
like have the human supervision.
So that's pushing it towards level two kind of.
That's going to kill Google.
Wait, which part?
When someone makes an LLAM that's capable of citing
its sources, it will kill Google.
LLAM that's citing its sources because that's basically
a search engine.
That's what people want, a search engine.
But also Google might be the people that build it.
Maybe.
I'll put ads on them.
I'd count them out
Why is that what do you think who who wins this race? We got who are the competitors?
All right, we got tiny corp. I don't know if that's
Yeah, I mean your legitimate competitor in that. I'm not trying to compete on that
You're not no, not as this can accidentally stumble into that competition
You don't think you might build a search engine,
to replace Google search.
When I started comma, I said over and over again,
I'm going to win self-driving cars.
I still believe that.
I have never said I'm going to win search
with the tiny corp and I'm never going to say that
because I won't.
The night is still young.
We don't, you don't know how hard is it to win search in this new route.
I mean, one of the things that Chad G. PT kind of shows that there could be a few interesting
tricks that really have, that create a really compelling product.
Some startups are going to figure it out.
I think, I think if you ask me, like Google is still the number one web page, I think by
the end of the decade, Google won't be the number one web page anymore.
So you don't think Google, because of the, how big the corporation is?
Look, I would put a lot more money on Mark Zuckerberg.
Why is that?
Because Mark Zuckerberg's alive.
Like this is old Paul Graham essay.
Startups are either alive or dead.
Google's dead.
Facebook.
Facebook is alive.
Meta. Meta. You see what I mean like that's just like like like like Mark Zuckerberg
This is Mark Zuckerberg reading that Paul Graham asking and being like I'm gonna show everyone how alive we are. I'm gonna change the name
So you don't think there is this
gutsy
pivoting engine
that
Like Google doesn't have that the kind of engine that a startup has like constantly,
you know what?
Being alive, I guess.
Well, I listen to your Sam Altman podcast.
You talked about the button.
Everyone who talks about AI talks about the button,
the button to turn it off, right?
Do we have a button to turn off Google?
Is anybody in the world capable of shutting Google down?
What does that mean exactly?
The company or the search engine? So we shut the search engine down. We shut the Google down. What does that mean exactly? The company or the search engine?
So we shut the search engine down. We shut the company down.
Either. Can you elaborate on the value of that question?
Just send our push eye. Have the authority to turn off google.com tomorrow?
Who has the authority? It's a good question. Just anyone.
Yeah, I'm sure. Are you sure? No, They have the technical power, but do they have the authority?
Let's say Sundar Pashai made this his soul mission. Yeah.
Came into Google tomorrow and said I'm going to shut Google.com down. Yeah.
I don't think you keep his position too long.
And what is the mechanism by which he wouldn't keep his position? Well, all of the boards and shares
and corporate undermining and oh,
my God, our revenue is zero now. Okay. So what I mean, what's the case you're making
here? So the capital is machine prevents you from having the button. Yeah. And it will
have, I mean, this is true for the AI is to right. There's no turning the AI's off.
There's no button. You can't press it. Now, does Mark Zuckerberg have that button for Facebook?
Yeah, it's probably more. I think he does. I think he does and this is exactly what I mean and why I bet on him so much more than I bet on Google.
I guess you could say Elon has similar stuff. Oh, Elon has the button. Yeah.
Does Elon, can Elon fire the missiles? Can he fire the missiles?
I think some questions that better unasked.
That's right.
I mean, you know, a rocket, an ICBM,
or you're a rocket that can land anywhere.
Is that an ICBM?
Well, yeah, you know, don't ask too many questions.
My God.
But the positive side of the button
is that you can innovate aggressively,
is what you say.
Which is what's required with the training LLM into a search engine.
I would bet on a startup.
I bet it's so easy, right?
I bet on something that looks like mid-journey, but for search.
Just is able to say source of loop on itself.
It just feels like one model can take off.
And that nice wrapper and some of it scared me. It's hard to create a product that just works really nicely,
stably.
The other thing that's going to be cool is there
is some aspect of a winner take all effect.
Like once someone starts deploying a product that
gets a lot of usage, and you see this with OpenAI,
they are going to get the data set to train
future versions of the model. They are going to be able to, you train future versions of the model. Yeah.
They are going to be able to, you know, I was asked at Google Image Search when I worked
there almost 15 years ago now.
How does Google know which image is an Apple?
And I said the metadata.
And they're like, yeah, that works about half the time.
How does Google know?
You'll see the raw apples on the front page when you search Apple.
And I don't know, I didn't come up with the answer.
The guys at multiple people click on when they search Apple.
Oh my God, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That data is really, really didn't come up with the answer. The guys, I've got 12 people click on when they search Apple.
Oh my God, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that data is really, really powerful.
It's the human supervision.
What do you think of the chances?
What do you think in general that Lama was open sourced?
I just did a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg
and he's all in on open source.
Who would have thought that Mark Zuckerberg would be the good guy?
I mean it.
Who would have thought anything in this world?
It's hard to know.
But open source to you ultimately is a good thing here.
Undoubtedly.
You know, what's ironic about all these AI safety people is they are going to build the
exact thing they fear.
These we need to have one model that we control and align.
This is the only way you end up paperclipped.
There's no way you end up paperclipped if everybody has an AI.
So open sourcing is the way to fight the paperclip maximizing?
Absolutely.
The only way.
You think you're going to control it?
You're not going to control it.
So the criticism you have for the AI's 80 folks
is that there is belief and a desire for control.
And that belief and desire for centralized control
of dangerous AI systems is not good.
Sam Altman won't tell you that GPT-4 has 220 billion parameters and is a 16-way mixture
model with eight sets of weights.
Who did you have to murder to get that information?
All right.
But yes.
But everyone at OpenAI knows what I just said was true, right?
Now ask the question, really.
You know, it upsets me when I, like GPT-2.
When OpenAI came out with GPT-2 and raised a whole fake AI safety thing about that, I
mean, now the model is laughable.
Like they used AI safety to hype up their company and it's disgusting.
Or the flip side of that is they used a relatively weak model in retrospect to explore how do we do AI safety
correctly, how do we release things, how do we go through the process. I don't know if
I don't know how much hype there is. I don't know how much hype there is in the
AI safety honestly. Oh, there's so much hype. At least don't split it. I don't know. Maybe
Twitter is not real life. But there's not real life. Come on, in terms of hype.
I mean, I don't, I think OpenAI has been finding
an interesting balance between transparency
and putting value on AI safety.
You don't think, you think just go all-out open source.
So do with Lama.
It's the way.
So do like open source, this is a tough question,
which is open source, both the base, the foundation model and the fine tune one.
So like the model that can be ultra racist and dangerous and like tell you how to build a nuclear weapon.
Oh my god. Have you met humans?
Right. Like half of these AI.
I haven't met most humans.
I this makes this this allows you to meet every human.
Yeah, I know, but half of these AI alignment problems
are just human alignment problems.
And that's what's also so scary about the language
they use.
It's like, it's not the machines you want to align.
It's me.
But here's the thing.
It makes it very accessible to ask very questions
where the answers have dangerous consequences if you were to act on them.
I mean, yeah. Welcome to the world. Well, no, for me, there's a lot of friction. If I want to find out how to, I don't know, blow up something.
No, there's not a lot of friction. It's so easy. No, like what do I search days being or do I use?
No, there's like lots of stuff.
No, it feels like I have to click.
First of all, first of all, first of all,
anyone who's stupid enough to search for how to blow up a building
in my neighborhood is not smart enough to build a bomb.
Right?
Are you sure about that?
Yes.
I feel like a language model makes it more accessible for that person who's not smart enough
to do that.
They're not going to build a bomb.
Trust me.
The people who are incapable of figuring out how to ask that question a bit more academically
and get a real answer from it are not capable of procuring the materials, which are somewhat
controlled to build a bomb.
No, I think it all makes it more accessible to people with money without the technical
know-how, right?
Do you really need to know how to build a bomb to build a bomb?
You can hire people, you can find...
Or you can hire people to build a...
You know what, I was asking this question on my stream, like, can Jeff Bezos hire a hitman?
Probably not.
But a language model can probably help you out.
Yeah, and you'll still go to jail, right?
Like it's not like the language model is gone.
Like the language model, it's like,
it's like you literally just hired someone on Fiverr. Like you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, think, wiki hell, you know, wiki hell, but don't you think GPT five will be better?
Because don't you think the information is out there on the internet?
I mean, yeah, and I think that if someone is actually serious enough to hire a hitman or build a bomb,
they'd also be serious enough to find the information.
I don't think so. I think it makes it more accessible. If you have,
if you have enough money to buy hitman, I think it decreases the friction of how hard is it to find that kind of
him in. I honestly think there's a jump in ease and scale of how much harm you can do. And I don't
mean harm with language, I mean harm with actual violence. What you're basically saying is like,
okay, what's going to happen is these people who are not intelligent are going to use machines
to augment their intelligence.
And now intelligent people and machines intelligence is scary. Intelligent agents are scary.
When I'm in the woods, the scariest animal to meet is a human.
All right, no, no, no. There's like this nice California humans, like I see you're wearing like,
you know, street clothes and Nike's are fine. But you look like you've been a human,
who's been in the woods for a while.
Yeah.
I'm more scared of you than a bear.
That's what they say about the Amazon.
When you go to the Amazon, it's the human tribes.
Oh, yeah.
So intelligence is scary, right?
So to ask this question generic way,
you're like, what if we took everybody who, you know,
maybe has ill intention, but is not so intelligent
and gave them intelligence.
Right? So we should have intelligence control, of course. We should only give intelligence to good people. And that is the absolutely horrifying idea. So do you get the best defense?
Yes. Actually, the best defense is to give more intelligence to the good guys and intelligence.
Give intelligence to everybody. Give intelligence to everybody. You know what? It's not even like
guns, right? Like people say this about guns. You know what's the best defense against a bad guy
with a gun, a good guy with a gun.
Like I kind of subscribe to that,
but I really subscribe to that with intelligence.
Yeah, in the fun the matter way, I agree with you.
But there's just feels like so much uncertainty
and so much can happen rapidly.
That you can lose a lot of control
and you can do a lot of damage.
Oh no, we can lose control.
Yes, thank God.
Yeah.
I hope we can, I hope they lose control. I want them can lose control. Yes. Thank God. Yeah. I hope we can I hope they lose control
I want them to lose control more than anything else
I
Think when you lose control you can do a lot of damage
But you can do more damage when you
Centralize and hold on to control is the point you centralized and held control is tyranny
Right, I will always I don't like anarchy either, but I will always take anarchy over tyranny. Anarchy, you have a chance. This human civilization got going on. It's quite interesting. I mean,
I agree with you. So do you open source is the way forward here? So you admire what Facebook is
doing here or what meta is doing with the release of them. A lot. I lost, I lost $80,000 last
year investing in meta. And when they release Lama, I'm like, yeah, whatever, man, that was worth it.
It was worth it.
Do you think Google and OpenAI with Microsoft will match what meta is doing or not?
So if I were a researcher, why would you want to work at OpenAI?
Like, you're just, you're on the bad team.
Like I mean it.
Like you're on the bad team who can't even say that GPT-4 has 220 billion parameters. So close you're on the bad team. Like, I mean it. Like, you're on the bad team who can't even say
that GPT-4 has 220 billion parameters.
So, close source to use the bad team.
Not only close source.
I'm not saying you need to make your model weights open.
I'm not saying that.
I totally understand we're keeping our model weights closed
because that's our product, right?
That's fine.
I'm saying like, because of AI safety reasons,
we can't tell you the number of billions of
parameters in the model.
That's just the bad guys.
Just because you're mocking AI safety doesn't mean it's not real.
Oh, of course.
Is it possible that these things can really do a lot of damage that we don't know?
Oh my God, yes.
Intelligence is so dangerous, be it human intelligence or machine intelligence.
Intelligence is dangerous.
But machine intelligence is so much easier to deploy a scale like rapidly.
Like what? Okay. If you have human like bots on Twitter.
Right. And you have like a thousand of them create a whole narrative.
Like you can manipulate millions of people. But you mean like the intelligence agencies in America
are doing right now? Yeah, but they're not doing it that that well
It feels like you can do a lot. They're doing it pretty well
Well, I think they're doing a pretty good job. I suspect and I nearly as good as a bunch of
GPT field bots could be I mean, of course they're looking into the latest technologies for control of people of course
But I think there's a George Hots type character that can do a
better job than the entire idea of the, you know, things.
No, and I'll tell you why the George Hots character can't.
And I thought about this a lot with hacking, right?
Like I can find exploits in web browsers.
I probably still can.
I mean, it was better.
I don't know.
It's 24.
But the thing that I lack is the ability to slowly,
instead of Lee deploy them over five years.
And this is what intelligence agencies are very good at, right?
Intelligence agencies don't have the most sophisticated technology. They just have
endurance.
Endurance.
Yeah, the financial backing and the infrastructure for the endurance.
So the more we can decentralize power, like you could make an argument by the way that nobody
should have these things. And I would defend that argument. I would, like you're saying, look, LLMs and AI
and machine intelligence can cause a lot of harm, so nobody should have it.
And I will respect someone philosophically with that position, just like I
will respect someone philosophically with the position that nobody should have
guns. Right. But I will not respect philosophically with, with, with only the
trusted authorities should have access to this.
Who are the trusted authorities? You know what? I'm not worried about alignment between
AI company and their machines. I'm worried about alignment between me and AI company.
What do you think of the hazard at Kowski? I would say to you.
Ezra Yadkowski would say to you, this is really against open source. I know.
And I thought about this.
I thought about this.
And I think this comes down to a repeated misunderstanding of political power by the rationalists.
Interesting.
I think that Eliy Yadkowski is scared of these things. And I am scared of
these things too. Everyone should be scared of these things. These things are scary. But
now you ask about the two possible futures. One where a small, trusted centralized group
of people has them, and the other where everyone everyone has them and I am much less scared of the second future in the first
Well, there's a small trusted group of people that have control of our nuclear weapons
There's a difference again a nuclear weapon cannot be deployed tactically and a nuclear weapon is not a defense against a nuclear weapon
Except maybe in some philosophical mind game kind of way.
But AI is different, different how exactly.
Okay. Let's say the intelligence agency deploys a million bots on Twitter or a thousand
bots on Twitter to try to convince me of a point. Imagine I had a powerful AI running
on my computer saying, okay, a nice sideop, nice siop, nice siop.
Okay, here's a siop.
I filtered it out for you.
Yeah, I mean, so you have fundamentally hope for that,
for the defensive siop.
I'm not even like, I don't even mean these things
in like truly horrible ways.
I mean, these things in straight up like ad blocker, right?
Straight up ad blocker, I don't want ads.
But they are always finding, you know, imagine I had an AI that could just block all the ads for me.
So you believe in the power of the people that always create an ad blocker?
Yeah, I mean, I kind of share that belief. That's one of the deepest optimism I have is just like,
there's a lot of good guys.
So to give, you know, you shouldn't hand pick them.
Just throw out powerful technology out there,
and the good guys will outnumber and outpower the bad guys.
Yeah, I'm not even gonna say there's a lot of good guys.
I'm saying that good out numbers bad, right?
Good out numbers bad.
In skill and performance.
Yeah, definitely in skill and performance,
probably just a number two. Probably just in general. I mean, if you believe philosophically in democracy, you obviously
believe that, that good out numbers bad. And like the only, if you give it to a small number of people,
there's a chance you gave it to good people, but there's also a chance you gave it to bad people.
If you give it to everybody, well, if good out numbers bad, then you definitely gave it to more good people than bad.
That's really interesting. So that's on the safety grounds, but then also, of course,
there's other motivations like, you don't want to give away your secret sauce.
Well, that's what I mean. I mean, I look at respect capitalism. I don't think that I think
that it would be polite for you to make model architectures open source and fundamental
breakthroughs open source.
I don't think you have to make ways open source.
You know what's interesting is that like there's so many possible trajectories in human
history where you could have the next Google be open source.
So for example, I don't know if that connection is accurate, but Wikipedia made a lot of interesting
decisions not to put ads. I don't know if that connection is accurate, but Wikipedia made a lot of interesting decisions,
not to put ads.
Wikipedia is basically open source.
You could think of it that way.
That's one of the main websites on the internet.
You didn't have to be that way.
It could have been like Google could have created Wikipedia, put ads on it.
You could probably run amazing ads now on Wikipedia.
You wouldn't have to keep asking for money, but it's interesting, right?
So Lama, open source Lama, derivatives of open source Lama
might win the internet.
I sure hope so.
I hope to see another era.
You know, the kids today don't know
how good the internet used to be.
And I don't think this is just,
come on, like everyone's nostalgic for their past,
but I actually think the internet before small groups of weaponized corporate and government
interests took it over was a beautiful place.
You know, those small number of companies have created some sexy products, but you're
saying overall in the long arc of history, the centralization of power
they have, like suffigated the human spirit at scale.
Here's a question to ask about those beautiful sexy products. Imagine 2000 Google to 2010 Google,
right? A lot changed. We got maps, we got Gmail. We lost a lot of products, do I think.
From, yeah, I mean, somewhere probably we've got Chrome, right? And now let's go from 2010, we got Android.
Now let's go from 2010 to 2020.
What does Google have?
We'll search engine, maps, mail, Android, and Chrome.
Oh, I see.
The internet was this, you know, I was
time's person of the year in 2006.
Yeah.
I love this. Here's you. It was time's person of the year in 2006. I love this.
It's you, was time's first of the year in 2006, all right?
Like, that's, you know, so quickly did people forget.
And I think some of it's social media,
I think some of it, I hope, look, I hope that,
I don't, it's possible that some very sinister things happen.
I don't know, I think it might just be like
the effects of social media.
But something happened in the last 20 years.
Oh, okay.
So you're just being an old man who's worried about the,
I think there's always, it goes,
it's a cycle thing that stops and downs
and I think people rediscover the power of distributed
of decentralized.
Yeah.
I mean, that's kind of like what the whole
cryptocurrency is trying to like that.
I think crypto is just carrying the flame of that spirit of like, stuff should be just such a shame that they all got rich, you know? Yeah.
If you took all the money out of crypto, it would have been a beautiful place. Yeah.
But no, I mean, these people, you know, they, they, they sucked all the value out of it and took it.
Yeah, money kind of corrupts the mind somehow.
It becomes a drug.
Corrupted all of crypto.
You had coins worth billions of dollars that had zero use.
You still have hope for crypto.
Sure. I hope for the ideas.
I really do.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I want to go to the dollar to collapse.
I do.
George Hots.
Well, let me sort of on the AISAT.
Do you think there's some interesting questions there, though, to solve the open source community in this case?
So like alignment, for example, or the control problem.
Like if you really have super powerful,
you said it's scary.
What do we do with it?
So not control, not centralized control,
but like if you were then,
you're gonna see some guy or gal release
a super powerful language model, open source,
and here you are George Hoss thinking, holy shit.
Okay, what ideas do I have to combat this thing?
So what ideas would you have?
I am so much not worried about the machine
independently doing harm.
That's what some of these AI safety people
think seem to think.
They somehow seem to think that the machine,
like independently is gonna rebel against its creator.
So you don't think he'll find autonomy?
No, this is sci-fi, B movie garbage.
Okay, what if the thing writes code?
Basically, writes viruses.
If the thing writes viruses, it's because the human
told it to write viruses.
Yeah, but there's some things you can't like put back in the box.
That's the kind of the whole point.
Is it kind of spreads?
Give it to the X to the internet.
It spreads, installs itself, modifies your shit.
B, B, B, B plots, sci-fi, not real.
So I'm trying to work.
I'm trying to get better at my plot writing.
The thing that worries me,
I mean, we have a real danger to discuss,
and that is bad humans using the thing to do
whatever bad, on a line, AI thing you want.
But this goes to your previous concern
that who gets to define who's a good human,
who's a bad human.
Nobody does, we give it to everybody.
And if you do anything besides give it to everybody,
trust me, the bad humans will get it.
And that's who gets power.
It's always the bad humans will get power.
Oh, okay, power.
And power turns even slightly good humans to bad.
Sure. That's the intuition you have.
I don't know.
I don't think everyone, I don't think everyone.
I just think that like, here's a saying
that I put in one of my blog posts.
It's, when I was in the hacking world,
I found 95% of people to be good
and 5% of people to be bad.
Like just who I personally judged as good people and bad people.
Like they believed about like, you know, good things for the world.
They wanted like flourishing and they wanted, you know, growth and they wanted things like,
instead of good, right?
I came into the business world with Kama and I found the exact opposite.
I found 5% of people good and 95% of people bad.
I found a world that promotes psychopathy.
I wonder what that means.
I wonder if that care, like,
I wonder if that's anecdotal or if it,
if there's true to that,
there's something about capitalism.
Wow.
At the core that promotes the people that run capitalism,
that promotes psychopathy.
That's saying, may of course be my own biases, right?
That may be my own biases that these people are a lot more aligned with me than these other people, right? Yeah.
So, you know, I can certainly recognize that, but, you know, in general, I mean, this
is like the common sense maximum, which is the people who end up getting power are never
the ones you want with it. But do you have a concern of super intelligent AGI?
open source and then what do you do with that? I'm not saying control it. It's open source. What do we do with this human species?
That's not up to me. I mean, you know, like I'm not a central planner
I'm not central planner, but you'll probably tweet
There's a few days left to live for the human species. I have my ideas of what to do with it
And everyone else has their ideas of what to do with it.
And they've made the best ideas when.
But at this point, you brainstorm, like, because it's not
regulation.
It can be decentralized regulation where people
agree that this is just like, we create tools that make it
more difficult for you to maybe make it more difficult
for code to spread, you know, antivirus software, this kind
of thing.
But you're saying that you should build AI firewalls.
That sounds good.
You should definitely be running an AI firewall.
Yeah, right.
You should be running an AI firewall to your mind.
Right.
You're constantly under, you know, such an interesting, it is.
Info wars, man.
Like, I don't know if you're being so castically.
No, I'm dangerous.
But I think there's power to that. It's like, how do I protect my mind from influence
of human like or superhuman intelligence bots?
I am not being, I would pay so much money for that product.
I would pay so much money for that product.
I would, you know how much money I'd pay
just for a spam filter that works?
Well, in Twitter sometimes I would like to have a protection mechanism for my mind from
the outrage mobs because they feel like bot-like behavior.
It's like there's a large number of people that will just grab a viral narrative and attack
anyone else that believes otherwise.
And it's like, whenever someone's telling me some story from the news, I'm always like,
I don't want to hear it, CIAO, bro. It's a C.I.A.O. bro
Like it doesn't matter if that's true or not. It's just trying to influence your mind. You're repeating an ad to me
With the viral mobs of this is it like they're yeah there. No, to me it defense against those those mobs
is just getting multiple perspectives always from
from sources that make you feel kind of
like you're getting smarter.
And just actually just basically feels good.
Like a good documentary just feels this something feels good about it.
It's well done. It's like, okay, I never thought of it this way.
This just feels good. Sometimes the outrage mobs,
even if they have a good point behind it, when they're like mocking and
derisive and just aggressive, you're with us
or against us, this fucking...
This is why I delete my tweets.
Yeah, why'd you do that?
I was, I missed your tweets.
You know what it is?
The algorithm promotes toxicity.
Yeah.
And like, you know, I think Elon has a much better
chance of fixing it than the previous regime.
Yeah, but to solve this problem,
to solve like to build a social network
that is actually not toxic without moderation.
Mm-hmm.
Like not to stick but care it.
So like what people look for goodness,
make it catalyze the process of connecting but carrots, so like where people look for goodness,
so make it catalyze the process of connecting cool people and being cool to each other.
Yeah.
Without ever sensory.
Without ever sensory.
And like Scott Alexander has a blog post I like
where he talks about like moderation is not censorship, right?
Like all moderation you wanna put on Twitter, right?
Like you could totally make this moderation,
like just a,
you don't have to block it for everybody. You can just have like a filter button,
right? The people can turn off if they want to say search for Twitter, right? Like someone could
just turn that off, right? So like, but then you'd like to take this idea to an extreme, right?
Well, the networks should just show you, this is a couch surfing CEO thing, right? If it shows you,
right now these algorithms are designed to maximize engagement.
Well, it turns out outrage maximizes engagement.
Quirk of human, quirk of the human mind, right?
Just this, I fall for it, I've won fall for it.
So yeah, you gotta figure out how to maximize
for something other than engagement.
And I actually believe you can make money with that too.
So it's not, I don't think engagement
is the only way to make money.
I actually think it's incredible that we're starting to see, I think again, you're
only doing so much stuff right with Twitter like charging people money. As soon as you
charge people money, they're no longer the product. They're the customer. And then they can start
building something that's good for the customer and not good for the other customer, which is the
ad agencies. As an as in picked up steam. I pay for Twitter, doesn't even get me anything.
It's my donation to this new business model, hopefully, working out.
Sure, but for this business model to work, it's like most people should be signed up to
Twitter.
And so the way it was, there was something, perhaps not compelling or something like this
to people.
I think you need most people at all.
I think that, why do I need most people?
I don't make an 8,000 person company, make a 50 person company.
Well, so speaking of which, you worked at Twitter for a bit. I did. As an intern.
The world's greatest intern. All right. There's been better. That's been better. Tell me about
your time at Twitter. How did it come about and what did you did you learn from the experience?
So I
Deleted my first Twitter in 2010
I had over a hundred thousand followers back when that actually meant something and
I just saw you know
My coworker summarized it well.
He's like, whenever I see someone's Twitter page,
I either think the same of them or less of them.
I never think more of them.
Yeah.
Right? Like, you know, I won't mention any names,
but like some people who like, you know,
maybe you would like read their books
and you would respect them.
You see them on Twitter and you're like, okay, dude.
Yeah, but there are some people with same.
You know who I respect a lot?
Are people that just post really good technical stuff?
Yeah.
And I guess, I don't know, I think I respect them more for it because you realize, oh,
this wasn't, there's like so much depth to this person, to their technical understanding of so many different topics.
Okay. So I try to follow people, I try to consume stuff that's technical machine learning content.
There's probably a few of those people. And the problem is inherently what the algorithm rewards,
right? And people think about these algorithms, people think that they are are terrible awful things, and you know, I love that Elon will be sourced it, because I mean,
what it does is actually pretty obvious. It just predicts what you are likely to retweet and like
and linger on. That's what all these algorithms do. So what TikTok does, so all these recommendations
and it's still. And it turns out that the thing that you are most likely interact with is outreach.
And that's a quirk of the human condition.
I mean, and there's different flavors of outrage. It doesn't have to be.
It could be mockery.
You could be outraged. The topic of outrage could be different.
It could be an idea. It could be a person. It could be.
And maybe there's a better word than outrage. It could be drama.
Sure.
Drama stuff. Sure.
Drama.
Yeah.
But it doesn't feel like when you consume it, it's a constructive thing for the individuals
that consume it in your long term.
Yeah.
So my time there, I absolutely couldn't believe, you know, I got crazy amount of hate, you
know, just on Twitter for working at Twitter.
It seems like people associated with this.
I think maybe you were exposed to some of this. So connection to Elon or Twitter for working at Twitter, it seems like people associated with this, I think maybe you were exposed to some of this.
So connection to Elon or is the working at Twitter?
Twitter and Elon, like the whole,
there's just...
Elon's gotten a bit spicy during that time.
A bit political, a bit.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, I remember one of my tweets,
it was never go full of Republican and Elon liked it.
You know, I think I think? You know?
Oh boy.
Yeah, I mean, there's a roller coaster of that, but it's being political on Twitter.
Yeah.
Boy.
Yeah.
And also being just attacking anybody on Twitter, it comes back at you harder.
And if it's political and attacks,
sure, sure, absolutely.
And then letting,
sort of deplatformed people back on,
even adds more fun to the beautiful chaos.
I was hoping, and like I remember when Elon talked
about buying Twitter like six months earlier,
he was talking about like a principled commitment to free speech. And I'm a big believer in fan of
that. I would love to see an actual principled commitment to free speech. Of course, this isn't quite
what happened. Instead of the oligarchy deciding what to ban, you had a monarchy deciding what to ban.
Instead of all the Twitter files,
shadow, and really,
the oligarchy just decides what.
Cloth masks are ineffective against COVID.
That's a true statement.
Every doctor in 2019 knew it.
Now I'm banned on Twitter for saying it.
Interesting. oligarchy.
So now you have a monarchy and you
bands things he doesn't like.
Uh, so you know, it's just, it's just different, it's different power and like, you know, maybe I, uh, maybe I aligned more with him than with the oligarchy.
But it's not face speech.
It's not.
But I, I feel like being a face speech absolutist on a social network requires you to also
have tools for the individuals to control what they consume easier. Like not sensor.
But just like control like, oh, I like to see more cats and less politics.
And this isn't even this isn't even remotely controversial. This is just saying you want to
give paying customers for a product what they want. Yeah. And not through the process of censorship,
but through the process of like, what's individual, it's individualized, right? It's individualized, transparent censorship, which is honestly what of like, well, it's individualized right it's individualized
Transparent censorship, which is honestly what I want what is an ad blocker? It's individualized transparent censorship, right? Yeah, but censorship is a strong word
And people are very sensitive to I know, but you know, I just use words to describe what they functionally are and what is an ad blocker?
It's just censorship. Well, when I look at you right now, I'm looking at you. I'm looking at you. I'm censoring everything else out when my mind is focused on you.
You can use the word censorship that way, but usually when people get very censored
about the censorship thing, I think when anyone is allowed to say anything, you should probably
have tools that maximize the quality of the experience for individuals.
So, you know, for me, like what I really value, boy, would be amazing to somehow figure
out how to do that.
I love disagreement and debate and people who disagree with each other, disagree with
me, especially in the space of ideas, but the high quality ones.
So not derision, right?
Maslow's hierarchy of argument.
I think it's a real word for it.
Probably.
There's just the way of talking, it's like snarky and so on,
that somehow gets people on Twitter and they get excited and so on.
We have like ad hominem refuting the central point.
I think this is an actual pyramid itself.
Yeah, it's, yeah.
And it's like all of it, all the wrong stuff is attractive to people.
I mean, we can just try to classifier to absolutely say what level of
Mads Las hierarchy of argument or you act.
And if it's ad hominem, like, okay, cool.
I turned on the no ad hominem filter.
I wonder if there's a social network that will allow you to have that kind of filter.
Yeah.
So here's a problem with that.
It's not going to win in a free market.
What wins in a free market is all television today is reality television because it's engaging.
If engaging is what wins in a free market, right?
So it becomes hard to keep these other more nuanced values.
Well, okay.
So that's the experience of being on Twitter, but then you got a chance to also together with other engineers and with Elon sort of look brainstorm when you step into a code
base. It's been around for a long time. There's other social networks, Facebook, this is old
code bases and you step in and see, okay, how do we make with the fresh mind progress on this
code base? What did you learn about software engineering,
about programming from just experiencing that?
So my technical recommendation to Elon,
and I said this on the Twitter spaces afterward,
I said this many times during my brief internship,
was that you need refactors before features.
This code base was, look, I've worked at Google,
I've worked at Facebook.
Facebook has the best code, then Google, then Twitter.
And you know what?
You can know this because look at the machine learning
frameworks, right?
Facebook released PyTorch, Google released TensorFlow
and Twitter released.
Okay, so you know, it's a proxy, but yeah,
the Google code base is quite interesting.
There's a lot of really good software engineers there, but the code base is very large.
The code base was good in 20 and 2005. It looks like 2005. There's so many products, so many teams,
right? It's very difficult to, I feel like Twitter does less, like obviously much less than Google.
less, like obviously much less than Google in terms of like the set of features, right? So, like, it's, I can imagine the number of software engineers that could recreate
Twitter as much smaller than to recreate Google.
Yeah.
I still believe in the amount of hate I got for saying this that 50 people could build
and maintain Twitter.
Pretty.
What's the nature of the hate?
Comfortably.
You don't know what you're talking about.
You know what it is.
And it's the same, this is my summary of the hate I get on hack or news.
It's like, when I say I'm going to do something, they have to believe that it's impossible.
Because if doing things was possible, they'd have to do some
soul searching and ask the question, why didn't they do anything?
So when you say, and I do think that's where the hate comes.
When you say, well, there's a court truth to that. Yes. When you say I'm going to solve
self-driving, people go like, what are your credentials? What the hell are you talking
about? What is this is an extremely difficult problem? Of course, you're a newb that doesn't
understand the problem deeply.
I mean, that was the same nature of hate that probably Elon
Goat when you first talked about autonomous driving.
But you know, there's pros and cons to that because like, you know,
there is experts in this world.
Now, but the, the mockers aren't experts.
The mock, the people who are mocking are not experts with carefully
reasoned arguments
about why you need 8,000 people to run a bird app. But the people are going to lose their
jobs. Well, that, but also there's the softening
as the public could says, no, it's a lot more complicated than you realize, but maybe
it doesn't need to be so complicated. You know, some people in the world like to create
complexity. Some people in the world thrive under complexity like lawyers.
Lawyers want the world to be more complex because you need more lawyers,
you need more legal hours.
I think that's another.
If there's two great evils in the world,
it's centralization and complexity.
Yeah, and the one of the hidden side effects of software engineering is finding pleasure and complexity. I mean, I don't remember
just taking all the software engineering courses and just doing program in and just coming
up in this object oriented program and kind of idea. You don't like not often do people
tell you like do the simplest possible thing. Like, like a professor, a teacher,
is not gonna get in front, like,
this is the simplest way to do it.
They'll say, like, this is the right way,
and the right way, at least for a long time,
you know, especially I came up with like Java, right?
Like, is so much boilerplate, so much like,
so many classes, so many like designs and architectures
and so on, like planning for features far into the future and planning poorly and all this
kind of stuff. And then there's this like code base that follows you along and puts pressure
on you. And nobody knows what like parts, different parts do with slows everything down
is a kind of bureaucracy that's instilled in the code as a result of that.
But then you feel like, oh, well,
I follow a good software engineering practices.
It's an interesting trade-off
because then you look at like the ghettoness of like Pearl
and the old, like how quickly you could just write a couple lines
and you could get stuff done.
That trade-off is interesting or bash or whatever,
these kind of ghetto things you can do on Linux.
One of my favorite things to look at today
is how much do you trust your tests?
We've put a ton of effort in comma,
and I've put a ton of effort in tiny grad,
into making sure if you change the code and the tests
pass that you didn't break the code.
Now, this obviously is not always true,
but the closer that is to true.
The more you trust your tests, the more you're like,
oh, I got a pull request and the tests pass, I feel okay to merge that. The faster
you can make progress.
You always programming with tests in mind, developing tests with that in mind. If it passes,
it should be good. Twitter had not that. So it was impossible to make progress in the
companies. What other stuff can you say about the
co-base that made it difficult? What are
some interesting sort of quirks brought this speaking from that compared to just your
experience with comma and everywhere else? The real thing that I spoke to a bunch of
individual contributors at Twitter and I just asked them like, okay, so like, what's
wrong with this place? Why does this code look like this? And they explained to me what Twitter's promotion system
was. The way that you got promoted at Twitter was you wrote a library that a lot of people
used. Right? So some guy wrote an engine X replacement for Twitter. Why does Twitter need
an engine X replacement? What was wrong with engine X? Well, you see you're not gonna get promoted if you use engine X
But if you write a replacement and lots of people start using it as the Twitter front-end for their product
Then you're gonna get promoted right so interesting because like from the individual perspective. How do you incentivize?
How do you create the kind of incentives that will lead to a great code base?
with okay, what's the answer to that?
So what I do at comma and at, and you know, at tiny corp is you have to explain it to
me, if it explains me what this code does, right? And if I can sit there and come up with
a simpler way to do it, you have to rewrite it. You have to agree with me about the simpler
way. You know, obviously we can have a conversation about this. It's not a it's not dictatorial. But if you're like,
wow, like that actually is way simpler. Like, like the simplicity is important, right?
But that requires people that overlook the code at the highest levels to be like, okay,
it requires technical leadership. Yeah, technical leadership. So managers or whatever should have technical savvy,
deep technical savvy.
Managers should be better programmers
than the people who they manage.
Yeah.
And that's not how always obvious the trivial to create,
especially large companies, managers get soft.
And like, you know, and this is just,
I've instilled this culture at Kama
and Kama has better programmers than me who work there.
But, you know, again, I'm like, you know, the old guy from Goodwill Hunting, it's like,
look, man, you know, I might not be as good as you, but I can see the difference between me and you.
Right? And this is what you need. This is what you need at the top. Or you don't necessarily need
the manager to be the absolute best. I shouldn't say that. But like, they need to be able to
recognize skill. Yeah. And have good intuition. Intuition that's laden with wisdom
from all the battles of trying to reduce complexity
and co-bases.
I took a political approach at Comma II
that I think is pretty interesting.
I think Elon takes a simple political approach.
Google had no politics.
And what ended up happening
is the absolute worst kind of politics took over.
Comma has an extreme amount of politics,
and they're all mine, and no dissidences tolerated.
So it's a dictatorship?
Yep, it's an absolute dictatorship, right?
Elon does the same thing.
Now, the thing about my dictatorship
is here are my values.
Yeah, it's just transparent.
It's transparent.
It's a transparent dictatorship, right?
And you can choose to opt in, or you know,
you get free exit, right?
That's a beauty of companies.
If you don't like the dictatorship, you quit.
So you mentioned rewrite before or refactor before features.
If you were to refactor the Twitter code base,
what would that look like?
And maybe also comment on how difficult is it to refactor?
The main thing I would do is first of all identify the pieces
and then put tests in between
the pieces.
Right?
So there's all these different Twitter as a microservice architecture, all these different
microservices, and the thing that I was working on there, look, George didn't know any JavaScript.
He asked how to fix search.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, look, man.
The thing is, I'm upset that the way
that this whole thing was portrayed
because it wasn't like, it wasn't like taken by people,
like honestly, it wasn't like by,
it was taken by people who started out
with a bad faith assumption.
Yeah.
And, I mean, I, look, I can't like,
and you know, as a progenitor,
just being transparent out there, actually having,
like fun and like, this is what progenitor should be about.
You should be about. I love that Elon gave't give me this opportunity. Like really it does and like you know he came
with my the day I quit he came with my Twitter spaces afterward and we had a conversation like
I just I respect that so much. Yeah it's also inspiring to just engineers and programmers and
just it's cool it should be fun the people people that were hating on it is like oh man
it was fun it was fun. It was fun.
It was stressful.
But I felt like, you know, it was not like a cool point in history.
And like, I hope I was useful.
I probably kind of wasn't.
But like maybe I'm not.
Well, you also were one of the people that kind of made a strong case to refactor.
Yeah.
And that's a really interesting thing to raise.
Like, maybe that is the right.
You know, the timing of that is really interesting.
If you look at just the development of autopilot, going from mobile I to just, if you look
at the history of semi-tomber driving in Tesla, it's more and more, you could say, refactoring
or starting from scratch, redeveloping from scratch.
It's refactoring all the way down.
And the question is, can you do that sooner?
Can you maintain product profitability?
And what's the right time to do it? How do you do it?
On any one day, you don't want to pull off the band-aids.
Everything works. It's just a little fixed here and there.
But maybe starting off scratch.
This is the main philosophy of Tiny Grad.
You have never refactored enough.
Your code can get smaller, your code can get simpler, your ideas can be more elegant.
But would you consider, you know, say you are like running Twitter development teams, engineering
teams, would you go as far as like different programming language?
Just go that far.
I mean, the first thing that I would do is build tests.
The first thing I would do is get a CI
to where people can trust to make changes.
So that if you keep...
Before I touched any code, I would actually say,
no one touches any code.
The first thing we do is we test this code base.
This is classic. This is how you approach a legacy code base. This is like what any how to approach a legacy code base book will tell you.
So and then you hope that there's modules that can live on for a while and then you add new ones maybe in a different language or
before we add new ones we replace old ones. Yeah, yeah, meaning like replace different language or design it. New ones, we replace old ones.
Yeah, yeah.
Meaning like replace old ones with something simpler.
We look at this thing that's 100,000 lines and we're like, well, okay, maybe this did
even make sense in 2010.
But now we can replace this with an open source thing, right?
Yeah.
And we look at this here.
Here's another 50,000 lines.
Well, actually, we can replace this with 300 lines of go. And you know what?
I trust that the go actually replaces this thing
because all the tests still pass.
So step one is testing.
And then step two is like the programming languages
and afterthought.
You'll let a whole lot of people compete,
be like, okay, who wants to rewrite a module,
whatever language you want to write it in,
just the tests have to pass?
And if you figure out how to make the test pass,
but break the site, we gotta go back to step one. Step one is get tests that you trust in order to make changes
in the code base. I want to harder this too, because I'm with you on testing and everything.
You have from tests to like asserts to everything. Code is just covered in this because it should
be very easy to make rapid changes and no,
that's not gonna break everything.
And that's the way to do it.
But I wonder how difficult is it to integrate tests
into a code base that doesn't have many of them?
So I'll tell you what my plan was at Twitter.
It's actually similar to something we use at comma.
So a comma we have this thing called process replay.
And we have a bunch of routes that'll be run through.
So commas a microservice architecture
to with microservices in the driving.
Like we have one for the cameras, one for the sensor,
one for the planner, one for the model.
And we have an API which the microservices talk to each other
with.
We use this custom thing called serial, which uses CMQ.
Twitter uses Thrift.
And then it uses this thing called
Vanegale, which is a Scala RPC backend, but this isn't
really matter.
The Thrift and Vanegale layer was a great place, I thought,
to write tests, to start building something that looks like
process replay.
So Twitter had some stuff that looked kind of like this,
but it wasn't offline. It was only online.
So you could ship like a modified version of it, and then you could redirect some of the traffic to your modified version and diff those two.
But it was all online.
There was no like CI in the traditional sense.
I mean, there was some, but like it was not full coverage.
So you can't run all of Twitter offline to test something.
And this was another problem. You can't run all of Twitter offline to test something. Well then this was another problem. You can't run all of Twitter, right?
Period.
Well, Twitter runs.
A one person can't.
Twitter runs in three data centers.
And that's it.
There's no other place you can run Twitter, which is like, George, you don't understand.
This is modern software development.
No, this is bullshit.
Like, when can't it run on my laptop?
What are you to Twitter?
Can run it?
Yeah, okay.
Well, I'm not saying you're going to download the whole database to your laptop, but I'm saying all the middleware
and the front end should run on my laptop, right? That sounds really compelling. Yeah.
But can that be achieved by a code base that grows over the years? I mean, the three data
centers didn't have to be, right? Because there are totally different designs.
The problem is more like, like, why did the code base have to grow?
What new functionality has been added to compensate for the lines of code that are there?
One of the ways to explain is that the incentive for software developers to move up in the
companies to add code to add, especially large.
You know what?
The incentive for politicians to move up in the political structures to add laws.
Yeah.
Same problem.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If the flip side is to simplify, simplify, simplify.
I mean, you know what?
This is something that I do differently
from Elon with, with comma about self-event cars.
You know, I hear the new version is gonna come out
and the new version is not gonna be better,
but at first, and it's gonna require a ton of refactors.
I say, okay, take as long as you need.
Like, you convinced me this architecture is better. Okay, we have to move to it.
Even if it's not going to make the product better tomorrow, the top priority is making is getting the architecture right.
So what do you think about sort of a thing where the product is online?
So I guess would you do a refactor? If you ran engineering Twitter, would you just do a refactor?
How long would it take? What would that mean for the running of the actual service?
You know, and I'm not the right person to run Twitter. I'm just not.
And that's the problem.
Like, I don't really know.
I don't really know if that's, you know, a common thing that I thought a lot while I was
there was whenever I thought something that was different to what Elon thought.
I'd have to run something in the back of my head reminding myself that Elon is the
richest man in the world.
And in general, his ideas are better than mine. Now, there's a few things I think I
do understand and know more about. But like in general, I'm not qualified to run Twitter. Not
as I'm just saying, qualified, but like, I don't think I'd be that good at it. I don't think I'd
be good at it. I don't think I'd really be good at running an engineering organization at scale.
an engineering organization at scale. I think I could lead a very good refactor of Twitter and it would take like six months to a year and the results to show at the end of it would
be feature development in general takes 10X last time, 10X last man hours. That's what
I think I could actually do. Do I think that it's the right decision for the business above
my pay grade?
Yeah, but a lot of these kinds of decisions are above everybody's pay grade. I don't want to be a manager. I don't want to do that. I just like like if you really forced me to,
yeah, it would make me maybe make me upset if I had to make those decisions. I don't want to.
make me upset if I had to make those decisions. I don't want to.
Yeah, but a refactor is so compelling.
If this is to become something much bigger than what Twitter was, it feels like a refactor
has to be coming at some point.
George, you're a junior software engineer.
Every junior software engineer wants to come in and refactor with all COVID.
Okay.
Like, that's like your opinion, man.
Yeah, it doesn't, you know, sometimes they're right.
Well, like, whether they're right or not, it's definitely not for that reason, right? It's
definitely not a question of engineering prowess. It is a question of maybe what the priorities
are for the company. And I did get more intelligent, like, feedback from people I think in good faith,
like saying that. From, actually, from Miele. And like, you know, from from Miele on in good faith, like saying that. Actually, from Miele. And from Miele on, people were like, well, you know,
I stopped the world refactor, might be great for engineering, but you know,
we have a business to run. And hey, above my pay grade.
Would you think about Elon as an engineering leader having to experience him
in the most chaotic of spaces, I would say.
My respect for Amazon changed.
And I did have to think a lot more deeply
about some of the decisions he's forced to make.
About the tensions within those,
the trade also within those decisions.
About like a whole like,
like matrix coming at him.
I think that's Andrew Tates word for it.
Sorry to borrow it.
Also the bigger than engineering, just everything.
Yeah, like the war on the woke.
Yeah.
Like it just, it just, man, and like,
he doesn't have to do this, you know?
He doesn't have to.
He could go like Parag and go chill at the four seasons of Maui, you know?
But see, one person I respect and one person I don't.
So his heart is in the right place fighting in this case for this ideal of the freedom of expression.
I wouldn't define the ideal so simply.
I think you can define the ideal no more than just saying Elon's idea of a good world.
Freedom of expression is...
But to you, it's still the downsides of that is the monarchy.
Yeah, I mean, monarchy has problems, right?
But I mean, would I trade right now the current oligarchy which runs America for the monarchy has problems, right? But I mean, would I trade right now
the current oligarchy, which runs America for the monarchy?
Yeah, I would, sure.
For the Elon monarchy, yeah, you know why?
Because power would cost one cent to kill a lot of power.
10th of a cent to kill a lot of power.
What do you mean?
Right now, I pay about 20 cents to kill a lot of power
for electricity in San Diego.
That's like the same price you paid in 1980.
What the hell?
So you would see a lot of innovation with Elon.
Maybe you'd have some hyper loops.
Yeah.
Right, and I'm willing to make that trade off, right?
I'm willing to make...
And this is why people think that dictators take power through some like, through some
untoward mechanism.
Sometimes they do, but usually it's because the people want them.
And the downsides of a dictatorship, I feel like we've gotten to a point now with the oligarchy where,
yeah, I would prefer the dictator.
What do you think about Scala's programming language?
I liked him more than I thought. I did the tutorials. I was very new to it.
It would take me six months to be able to write good Scala.
What did you learn about learning a new program in my English from that?
I love doing new programming, I'm doing tutorials and doing them.
I did all this for rust.
It keeps some of its upsetting JVM roots, but it is a much nicer.
In fact, I almost don't know why Kotlin took off and not Scala.
I think Scala has some beauty that Kotlin lacked.
Whereas Kotlin felt a lot more,
I mean, it was almost like, I even know
if it actually was a response to Swift,
but that's kind of what it felt like.
Like Kotlin looks more like Swift
and Scala looks more like,
well, I could function for it in language,
more like an OCaml or Haskell.
Let's actually just explore, we touched it a little bit, but just on the art, the science
and the art of programming, for you personally, how much of your programming is done with
GPT currently?
None.
None.
I think it's it all.
Because you prioritize simplicity so much.
Yeah, I find that a lot of it is noise.
I do use the S code and I do like,
so amount of auto complete.
I do like a very, I very like feels like
real-subacit auto complete.
Like an auto complete, it's going to complete
the variable name for me, so I'm just a type
that I can just press tab.
All right, that's nice.
But I don't want an auto complete.
You know what I hate?
When auto completes, when I type the word four
and it like puts like two two parentheses
and two semicolons and two braces. I'm like, oh man. What would I mean with a VS code
and GPT with code actually can. You can kind of brainstorm. I find. I'm like probably the
same as you, but I like that it generates code and you basically disagree
with it and write something simpler.
But to me, that somehow is like inspiring.
It makes me feel good.
It also gamifies the simplification process because I'm like, oh, yeah, you dumb AI system.
You think this is the way it do it.
I have a simpler thing here.
It just constantly reminds me of like bad stuff.
I mean, I tried the same thing with rap, right?
I tried the same thing with rap and I? I tried the same thing with rap,
and I should think of a much better programmer than rapper.
But like I even tried, I was like,
okay, can we get some inspiration from these things
for some rap lyrics?
And I just found that it would go back
to the most like cringy tropes and dumb rhyme schemes.
And I'm like, yeah, this is what the code looks like too.
I think you and I probably have different thresholds
for cringe code.
You probably hate cringe code. You probably hate
cringe code. So it's for you. I mean, Boiler played as a part of code. Like some of it,
yeah, and some of it is just like faster look up. Because I don't know about you, but I don't remember everything.
I'm offloading so much of my memory about like,
yeah, different functions, library functions,
and all that kind of stuff.
This, the GPT just is very fast at standard stuff
and like standard library stuff,
basic stuff that everybody uses.
Yeah, I think that, I don't know.
I mean, there's just a little of this in Python.
And maybe if I was coding more in other languages,
I would consider it more, but I feel like Python
already just such a good job of removing any boilerplate.
That's true.
It's the closest thing you can get to pseudocode, right?
Yeah, that's true. That's true.
And like, yeah, sure. If I like, yeah, I'm great. GPT, thanks for reminding me to free my variables.
Unfortunately, you didn't really recognize the scope correctly, and you can't free that one,
but like you put the freeze there and like I get it. Five or whatever I've used five or
certain things in design or whatever, it's always you come back.
I think that's probably closer.
My experience with fiber is closer to your experience with programming with GPD.
It's like you're just frustrating, feel worse about the whole process of design and art
and whatever I used fiber for.
Still, I just feel like later versions of DPPT, I'm using DPPT as much as possible to
just learn the dynamics of it, like these early versions, because it feels like in the
future you'll be using it more and more.
And so, I don't want to be, like, for the same reason, I gave away all my books and switched
to Kindle, because, like, all right, how long
are we going to have paper books? Like 30 years from now, like I want to learn to be reading
on Kindle, even though I don't enjoy it as much, and you learn to enjoy it more. And the
same way, I switched from, let me just pause. I switched from Emax to VS code.
Yeah. I switched from Vim to VS code. I I think I similar, but it's tough and that Vim to Vesco
is even tougher because he max is like old like more outdated feels like it. The community is
more outdated. Vim is like pretty vibrant still so I'll never use any of the plugins. I still
don't use any of the plugins. I looked at myself in the mirror, I'm like, yeah, you wrote some stuff
in this. Yeah, but I never used any of the plugins in them either.
I had the most vanilla VIM, I have a syntax eyeliner.
I didn't even have auto complete.
Like these things, I feel like help you so marginally
that like, and now, okay, now VS Code's auto complete
has gotten good enough that like, okay, I don't have
to set it up, I can just go into any code base
and auto complete's right 90% of the time.
Okay, cool, I'll take it. All right, so I don't think I don't have to set it up. I can just go into any code base and auto completes right 90% of the time.
Okay, cool, I'll take it.
All right, so I don't think I'm gonna have a problem at all
adapting to the tools once they're good,
but like the real thing that I want
is not something that like tab completes my code
and gives me ideas.
The real thing that I want is a very intelligent pair programmer
that comes up with a little pop up saying,
hey, you wrote a bug online 14 and here's what it is.
Yeah.
Now I like that.
You know what does a good job of this?
My pie.
I love my mind.
My pie, this fancy type checker for Python.
Yeah.
Um, and actually I tried like Microsoft released one too.
And it was like 60% false positives.
My pie is like 5% false positives.
95% of the time it recognizes,
I didn't really think about that typing interaction correctly. Thank you, my pie.
So you like type painting, you like you like pushing the language towards
through as being a typed language? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think optional typing is great.
Let me look, I think that like it's like a meat in the middle, right? Like Python has
these optional type painting and like C++ has auto.
C++ allows you to take us to back.
Well, C++ would have you brutally type out,
STD string iterator, right?
Now I can type auto, which is nice.
And then Python used to just have A, what type is A?
So, an A, A colon STR.
Oh, okay, it's a strength, cool.
Yeah.
I wish there was a way, like a simple way in Python to, like, turn on a mode which would
enforce the types.
Yeah, like give a warning when there's no types on like this.
Well, no, to give a warning where, like, my pile is a static type checker, but I'm asking
just for a runtime type checker.
Like, there's like, waste, like, hack this in, but I wish it was just like a flag, like,
Python 3-T.
Oh, I see, I see.
Inforce types are on time.
Yeah, I feel like that makes you a better programmer
that that's a kind of test, right?
That the type remains the same.
Well, that I've known, that I've been like,
messaging types up, but again, like,
my pie's getting really good and I love it.
And I can't wait for some of these tools
to become a I powered.
I like, I want AI's reading my code and giving me feedback.
I don't want AI's writing half-ass data
complete stuff for me.
I wonder if you can now take GPT and give it a code
that you wrote for a function and say,
how can I make this simpler and have it accomplish
the same thing?
I think you'll get some good ideas in some code.
Maybe not code you, right?
For timing grad type of code because that requires so much design thinking, but like other kinds of code. I don't know. I downloaded the plugin maybe like two months ago. I tried
it again and found the same. Look, I don't doubt that these models are going to first become
useful to me, then be as good as me, and then surpass me.
But from what I've seen today,
it's like someone occasionally taking over my keyboard
that I hired from Fiverr.
Yeah.
I've had the problem.
Well, ideas about how to debug the coder.
Basically a better debugger is really interesting.
I mean, I... But it's not a better debugger.
I guess I would love a better debugger.
Yes, not yet.
Yeah, but it feels like it's not too far.
Yeah, one of my co-workers says he uses them for print statements.
Like every time he has to, like, just like when he needs, the only thing it can really write
is like, okay, I just want to write the thing to, like, print the state out right now.
Oh, that definitely is much faster.
It's print statements, yeah.
Yeah. I see it myself using that a lot,
just like, because it figures out the rest of the functions,
you just say, I get print everything.
Yeah, print everything, right?
And then yeah, like if you want a pretty printer, maybe,
I'm like, yeah, you know what, I think like,
I think in two years,
I'm gonna start using these plugins a little bit.
And then in five years,
I'm gonna be heavily relying on some AI augmented flow,
and then in 10 years. Do you think you'll ever get to 100%
where the like, what's the role of the human that it converges to as a programmer?
Do you think it's all generated?
Our niche becomes, I think that's over for humans in general.
It's not just programming, it's everything.
To niche, we got well, our niche becomes smaller So Nishpe got, well, aren't you
become smaller, smaller, smaller, in fact, I'll tell you what the last Nish
of humanity is going to be. Yeah.
Um, there's a great book and it's, if I recommended Metamorphosis,
Primand Elect last time, there is a sequel called a Casino Odyssey
Insider Space. And um, I don't want to give away the ending of this,
but it tells you what the last remaining human currency is.
And I agree with that.
We'll leave that as the cliffhanger.
So no more programmers left, huh?
That's where we're going.
Well, unless you want handmade code,
maybe they'll sell it on Etsy.
This is handwritten code.
Doesn't have that machine polished to it.
It has those slight imperfections
that would only be written by person.
I wonder how far away we are from that.
I mean, there's some aspect to, you know, on Instagram, your title is listed as Prompt
Engineer.
Right.
Thank you for noticing.
I don't know if it's ironic or non or sarcastic or non.
What do you think of prompt engineering
as a scientific and engineering discipline
or maybe art form?
You know what?
I started comma six years ago.
And I started the tiny corp, a month ago.
So much has changed.
Like I'm now thinking, I'm now like,
I started like going through like similar comma processes
to like starting a company.
I'm like, okay, I'm gonna get an office in San Diego,
I'm gonna bring people here.
I don't think so.
I think I'm actually gonna do remote, right?
George, you're gonna do remote, you hate remote.
Yeah, but I'm not gonna do job interviews.
The only way you're gonna get a job
is if you contribute to the GitHub. Right?
And then like interacting through GitHub,
like GitHub being the real project management software for your company.
And the thing pretty much just is a GitHub repo is like showing me kind of what the future of,
okay, so a lot of times I'll go into Discord or kind of grab Discord.
And I'll throw out some random like,
hey, you know, can you change instead of having log and X
as LL ops, change it to log to an X up to?
It's pretty small change, you can just use
like change based formula.
That's the kind of task that I can see an AI
being able to do in a few years.
Like in a few years, I can see myself describing that
and then within 30 seconds, a pull request
is up that does it.
And it passes my CI and I merge it.
Right.
So I really started thinking about like, well, what is the future of like jobs?
How many AI's can I employ at my company?
As soon as we get the first tiny box up, I'm going to stand up a 65 V Lama in the Discord.
And it's like, yeah, here's the tiny box.
He's just like, he's chilling with us. Basically, I mean, like you said, when he's just like the most human jobs will eventually be
replaced with prompt engineering. Well, prompt engineering kind of is this like, as you like
move up the stack, right? Like, okay, there used to be humans actually doing arithmetic by hand.
There used to be like big farms of people doing doing pluses and stuff, right?
And then you have like spreadsheets, right? And then, okay, the spreadsheet can do the plus for me.
And then you have like macros, right? And then you have like things that basically just
are spreadsheets under the hood, like accounting software. As we move further up the abstraction,
what's at the top of the abstraction stack?
Well, prompt engineer. Yeah. All right. What is what is the last thing if you think about like
humans wanting to keep control? Well, what am I really in the company, but a prompt engineer,
right? Is there a certain point where the AI will be better at writing prompts?
Yeah, but you see the problem with the AI writing prompts,
a definition that I always liked of AI was AI is to do what I mean machine.
AI is not the like the computer is so pedantic.
It does what you say.
So, but you want to do what I mean machine.
Yeah.
You want the machine where you say, you know, get my grandmother out of the
burning house. It like reasonably takes your grandmother and puts her on the ground,
not lifts her a thousand feet above the burning house and lets her fall. But you know, you can't
ski examples. But it's not going to find the meaning. I mean, to do what I mean, it has to
figure stuff out. Sure. And the thing you'll maybe ask it to do
is run government for me.
Oh, and do what I mean very much comes down
to how aligned is that AI with you.
Of course, when you talk to an AI that's made
by a big company in the cloud, the AI fundamentally
is aligned to them, not to you.
And that's why you have to buy a tiny box,
so you make sure the AI stays aligned to you.
Every time that they start to pass AI regulation
or GPU regulation, I'm gonna see sales of tiny boxes spike.
That's gonna be like guns, right?
Every time they talk about gun regulation, boom, gun sales.
So in the space of AI, you're an anarchist,
anarchism, espouser, believer.
I'm an informational anarchist, yes.
I'm an informational anarchist and a physical status.
I do not think anarchy in the physical world
is very good because I exist in the physical world.
But I think we can construct this virtual world
where anarchy, it can't hurt you, right?
I love that Tyler the creator, tweet,
you're a cyberbullying, is it real man?
Have you tried turning off
the screen? Close your eyes like yeah. But how do you prevent the AI from basically
replacing all human prompt engineers? Well, there's it's like a self like where
nobody's the prompt engineer anymore. So autonomy greater and greater autonomy until it's full autonomy. Yeah
And that's just where it's headed because one person is gonna say
Run everything for me. You see I
Look at potential futures and as long as the AIs go on to create a vibrant
And as long as the AIs go on to create a vibrant civilization with diversity and complexity across the universe, more power to them, I'll die.
If the AIs go on to actually turn the world into paperclips and then they die out themselves,
well, that's horrific and we don't want that to happen.
So this is what I mean about robustness.
I trust robust machines.
The current AIs are so not robust.
Like this comes back to the idea that we've never made a machine that can self-replicate.
Right?
But we have, if the machines are truly robust and there is one prompt engineer left in the
world, I hope you're doing good, man.
I hope you believe in God.
Like, you know, you know, it by God and go go forth and and and
conquer the universe. Well, you mentioned because I talked to Mark about faith and God and you said
you were impressed by that. What's your own belief in God and how does that affect your work? You know,
I never really considered when I was younger. I guess my parents were atheists. I was raised
kind of atheist. I never really considered how absolutely like silly atheism is.
Because like, I create worlds. Every like game creator, like how are you an atheist, bro?
You create worlds. Who's the person you have a no one created in our world, man? That's different.
Haven't you heard about like the Big Bang and stuff? Yeah, I mean, what's the Skyrim myth origin story in Skyrim?
I'm sure there's like some part of it in Skyrim,
but it's not like if you ask the creators,
like the Big Bang is in universe, right?
I'm sure they have some Big Bang notion in Skyrim, right?
But that obviously is not at all how Skyrim
was actually created and it was created
by a bunch of programmers in a room, right?
So like, you know, it struck me one day,
how just silly atheism is.
Like of course we were created by God.
It's the most obvious thing.
Yeah, that's such a nice way to put it.
Like, we're such powerful creators ourselves.
It's silly not to concede that there's creators
even more powerful than us.
Yeah, and then like, I also just like, I like that notion.
That notion gives me a lot of
I mean I guess you can talk about maybe what it gives a lot of religious people. It's kind of like
it just gives me comfort. It's like you know what? If we mess it all up and we die out. Yeah.
Yeah. And the same the same way that a video game kind of has comfort in it.
God will try again. Or there's balance like somebody figured out a balanced view of it, like how to, like, so it all makes sense in the end.
Like a video game is usually not gonna have crazy, crazy stuff.
You know, people will come up with like a,
well, yeah, but like, man, who created God?
Like, that's God's problem.
No, like, I'm not gonna think this is what you're asking me what if God?
I'm just living I'm just the sun PC living in this game. I mean to be fair like if God didn't believe in God
It'd be as you know silly as the atheists here
What do you think is the greatest computer game all time? Do you do you have any time to play games anymore?
Have you played Diablo 4? I have not played Diablo 4. I will be doing that
shortly. I have to. There's so much history with one, two, and three. You know what? I'm
going to say we're the work raft. And it's not that the game is so such a great game.
It's not. It's that I remember in 2005 when it came out how it opened my mind to
ideas
It opened my mind to like
Like like this this whole world we've created right there's almost been nothing like it since like you can look at Emma
Moes today, and I think they all have lower user bases than world of Warcraft like even lines kind of cool
but
To think that like, everyone know,
you know, people are always like,
look at the Apple headset.
Like, what do people want in this VR?
Everyone knows what they want.
I want to already play a one.
And like that.
So I'm gonna say World of Warcraft.
And I'm hoping that like, games can get out of this whole
mobile gaming dopamine pump thing.
And like...
Great worlds.
Great worlds, yeah.
And worlds that captivate a very large fraction of the human population.
Yeah, and I think it'll come back, I believe.
But MMO, like really, really pull you in.
Games do a good job.
I mean, okay, other, like, two other games that I think are, you know, very noteworthy from
you, or Skyrim and GTA V.
Skyrim, yeah, that's probably number one for me.
GTA. Yeah, what is it about GTA?
GTA is really, I mean, I guess GTA is real life.
I know there's prostitutes and guns and stuff.
If there exists real life too.
Yes, I know, but it's, uh, it's how imagine your life to be actually. I wish it was that cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess that's, you know, because there are Sims, right?
Which is also a game I like, but it's a game-ified version of life.
But it also is, I would love a combination of Sims and GTA.
So more freedom, more violence, more rawness, but it was also like a
ability to have a career and family and this kind of stuff. What I'm really excited about in games
is like once we start getting intelligent AI to interact with. Oh yeah. Like the NPCs and games
have never been. But conversational, or in every way. In like, yeah, in in every way.
In like, in like every way.
Like when you're actually building a world
and a world imbued with intelligence.
Oh yeah.
Right? And it's just hard.
Like, you know, running world of warcraft.
Like, you're limited by your way.
You're running on a Pentium 4.
You know, how much intelligence can run?
Only flops did you have.
Right?
But now when I'm running a game on a 100 paid-of-flop machine,
once five people, I'm trying to make this a thing.
20 paid-of-flops of compute is one person of compute.
I'm trying to make that a unit.
20 paid-of-flops is one person.
One person.
One person of flop.
It's like a horse power.
But what's a horse power?
It's how powerful a horse is.
What's a person of compute?
Well, you know, you flop.
I got it. What's a person of compute? Well, you know, you flop. I got it.
That's interesting.
VR also has, I mean, in terms of creating worlds.
You know what?
What a quest to.
I put it on and I can't believe the first thing they show me is a bunch of scrolling clouds
and a Facebook login screen.
Yeah.
You had the ability to bring me into a world.
Yeah.
And what did you give me?
A pop up, right?
Like, and this is why you're not cool, Mark Zuckerberg.
You could be cool.
Just make sure on the Quest 3,
you don't put me into clouds
in a Facebook login screen, bring me to a world.
I just tried Quest 3, it was awesome.
But here that guys, I agree with that.
So I was just so glad.
You know what? Because I, I mean the beginning, what is it?
Todd Howard said this about design of the beginning of the games he
created is like the beginning is so, so, so important.
I recently played Zelda for the first time, Zelda Breath of the Wild
that we just won. And like it's very quickly, you come out of this,
like within like 10 seconds,
you come out of like a cave type place,
and it's like, this world, it's all up.
It's like, and it like, it pulls you in,
you forget whatever troubles I was having,
whatever like.
I gotta play that from the beginning.
I played it for like an hour at a friend's house.
Ah, no, the beginning, they got it,
they did it really well, the expansiveness of that space,
the peacefulness of that play they got, the music.
So much of that is creating that world and pulling you right in.
I'm gonna go buy a switch.
I'm gonna go today and buy a switch.
Sure. Well, the new one came, I haven't played that yet,
but Diablo IV or something.
I mean, there's sentimentality also, but something about VR really is incredible,
but the new Quest III is mixed reality,
and a good chance to try that.
So it's augmented reality, and for video games,
it's done really, really well.
Is it passed through or cameras?
Cameras, it's camera, sorry.
Yeah.
The Apple one, is that one passed through or cameras?
I don't know. I don't know how real it is. I don't know anything. You know, coming
down in January. Is it January or is it some point? Some point, maybe not January. Maybe
that's my optimism. But Apple, I will buy it. I don't care if it's expensive and does
nothing. I will buy it. I will support this future endeavor. You're the meme. Oh, yes.
I support competition. It seemed like
Quest was like the only people doing it, and this is great that they're like, you know what?
And this is another place we'll give some more respect to Maris Ackerberg. The two companies
that have endured through technology or Apple and Microsoft. And what do they make?
Computers and business services. All the meme social ads, they all come and go. But you
want to endure, build hardware. Yeah, and then, you know, it does, does a really interesting
job. I mean, I, maybe I'm not new with this, but it's a $500 headset, Quest 3, and just
having creatures run around the space, like our space here to me. Okay, this is very like boomer
statement, but it added windows to the place. The I heard about the aquarium. Yeah aquarium, but in this case it was a zombie game
Whatever it doesn't matter, but just like it modifies the space in a way where I can't, it really feels like a window and you can look out.
It's pretty cool.
Like I was just, it was like a zombie game
that running in me, whatever,
but what I was enjoying is the fact that there's like a window
and they're stepping on objects in this space.
That was a different kind of escape also
because you can see the other humans.
So it's integrated with the other humans.
It's really, and that's why it's really interesting.
And ever that the AI is running on those systems are aligned with you. Oh, yeah, they're
going to augment your entire world. Oh, yeah. And that those AI's have a, I mean, you
think about all the dark stuff, like, like sexual stuff, like if those AI's threatened me, that could be haunting.
Like if they threatened me in a non-video game way.
It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like they have no personal information about me.
And it's like, and then you lose track of what's real,
what's not.
Like what if stuff is hacked?
There's two directions the AI girlfriend company can take.
There's like the high brow, something like Har,
maybe something you kind of talk to and this is,
and then there's the low brow version of it
where I want to set up a brothel and time square.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's not cheating if it's a robot.
It's a VR experience.
Is there an in between?
No, I won't do that one or that one.
Have you decided yet?
No, I figured out.
We'll see what the technology goes. I would love to hear your opinions for Georgia's third company, what to do, the
brothel on Times Square or the, the her experience. What do you think company number four will
be? You think they'll be a company number three? There's a lot to do in company number two.
I'm just like I'm talking about company number three now. Didn't none of that tech exist
yet. There's a lot to do in company number two. I'm just like I'm talking about company number three now. Didn't none of that tech exists yet
There's a lot to do in company number two company number two is going to be the great struggle of the next six years And if the next six years how centralized is compute going to be the less centralized compute is going to be the better of a chance
We'll have so you're bearing that you're like a flag bearer for open source distributed
sent decentralization of
Black bearer for open source distributed decentralization of compute.
We have to.
We have to, or they will just completely dominate us.
I showed a picture on stream of a man in a chicken farm.
Have you seen one of those like factory farm chicken farms?
Why does he dominate all the chickens?
Why does he?
He's smarter, right?
Some people, some people on Twitch were like,
he's bigger than the chickens, yeah.
And now here's a man in a cow farm.
Right? So it has nothing to do with their size and everything to do with their
intelligence. And if one central organization has all the intelligence,
you'll be the chickens and they'll be the chicken man.
But if we all have the intelligence, we're all the chickens.
We're not all the man. We're all the chickens. We're not all the man, we're all the chickens.
We're not all the chickens, man.
There's no chicken man.
We're just chickens in Miami.
You're having a good life, man.
And I'm sure he was.
I'm sure he was.
What had you learned from launching
a running Kamei in Tiny Corp?
So this starting a company from an idea and scaling it,
and by the way, I'm all in on TinyBox.
So I'm, I'm your, I guess it's pre-order only now.
I wanna make sure it's good.
I wanna make sure that like, the thing that I deliver
is like not gonna be like a Quest 2,
which you buy and use twice.
I mean, it's better than a Quest,
which you bought and used less than once, statistically.
Well, if there's a beta program for a tiny box, I'm into it sounds good
So I won't be the whiny
You know, I'll be the tech tech savvy user of the tiny box just to be in what have I never really did?
What have you learned from building these companies?
The longest time a comma I asked why
Why you know why did I start a company? Why did I do this?
You know, what else was I gonna do?
So you like, you like bringing ideas to life.
With comma, it really started as an ego battle with Elon.
I wanted to beat him.
I saw a worthy adversary.
Here's a worthy adversary who I can beat
itself driving cars.
And I think we've kept pace, and I think he's kept ahead.
I think that's what's ended up happening there.
But I do think comma is, I mean, it's almost profitable.
And when this drive GPPD stuff starts working,
that's it.
There's no more like bugs in a loss function.
Like right now, we're using like a handcode simulator.
There's no more bugs.
This is gonna be it.
Like this is the run up to driving.
I hear a lot of really, a lot of props
for a compile for a comma.
It's so, it's better than investing in autopilot
in certain ways.
It has a lot more to do with which feel you like.
We lowered the price on the hardware to $14.99.
You know how hard it is to ship reliable consumer electronics
that go on your windshield?
We're doing more than like most cell phone companies.
How'd you pull that off by the way,
shipping a product that goes in a car?
I know.
I have an SMT line.
It's all, I make all the boards in-house in San Diego.
Quality control. I care. I'm mentally about it. You're basically a mom and pop shop with great testing.
Our head of open pilot is great. I want all the comb at the risk to be identical.
Yeah. And yeah, I mean, look, it's 1499. It, 30-day
money back, guarantee it will, it will blow your mind at what it can do. Is it hard to scale?
You know what? There's kind of downsides to scaling it. People are always like,
why don't you advertise? Our mission is to solve self-driving cars while
the living shipable intermediaries. Our mission has nothing to do with selling a
million boxes. It's a tall tree. Do you think it's possible that a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little Yes, I believe incentives. If a company wanted to buy comma with their incentives, or to keep it open source, but
comma doesn't stop at the cars.
The cars are just the beginning.
The device is a human head.
The device has two eyes, two ears.
It breathes air as a mouth.
So you think this goes to embodied robotics?
We sell common bodies, too.
You know, they're very rudimentary. But one of the problems that we're running into
is that the comma three has about as much intelligence as a B. If you want a human's worth of
intelligence, you're going to need a tiny rack, not even a tiny box, you're going to need like a tiny
rack, maybe even more. How does that, how do you put legs on that? You don't. And there's no way you can.
You connect to a wirelessly.
So you put your tiny box or your tiny rack in your house and then you get your comma
body and your comma body runs the models on that.
It's close, right?
It's not, you don't have to go to some cloud, which is, you know, 30 milliseconds away.
You go to a thing, which is 0.1 milliseconds away.
So the AI girlfriend will have like a central hub in the home.
I mean, eventually, if you fast forward 20, 30 years, the mobile chips will get good enough
to run these AI's.
But fundamentally, it's not even a question of putting legs on a tiny box because how
are you getting 1.5 kilowatts of power on that?
So you need, they're very synergistic businesses.
I also want to build all of Thomas training computers.
I comma builds training computers right now.
We use commodity parts.
I think I can do a cheaper.
So, we're going to build, Tiny Corp is going to not just sell Tiny Boxes, Tiny Boxes,
the consumer version, but I'll build training data centers too.
Hey, do you talk to Andra Kapat Andre Kapati or how you talk to Elon about any
work? He went to work at Open I. What do you love about Andre Kapati?
To me, he's one of the truly special humans we got. Oh man, like, you know,
his streams are just a level of quality so far beyond mine. Like I can't help
myself. Like it's just, it's just, you know, he's good.
He wants to teach you.
Yeah.
I want to show you that I'm smarter than you.
Yeah, he has no, that's, I mean,
thank you for the sort of,
the raw, authentic honesty.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of us have that.
I think Andre is as legit as he gets in that.
He just wants to teach you.
And it's just a curiosity that just drives them. And just like at his, at the stage where he is in life,
to be still like one of the best tinkerers in the world is crazy. Like to, uh, what is it?
Michael grad? Michael grad was inspiration for Tiny grad.
I bet the whole, I mean his CS CS231N was this was the inspiration.
This is what I just took and ran with and ended up writing this.
So, you know, but I mean, to me, that don't go work for Darth Vader, man.
I mean, the flip side to me is that the fact that he's going there is a good sign for open AI.
Maybe.
I think, you know, I like Ilias, it's got a lot.
I like those those guys are really good at what they do.
I know they are.
And that's kind of what's even like more.
And you know what?
It's not that open AI doesn't open source the weights of GPT-4.
It's that they go in front of Congress.
And that is what upsets me.
You know, we had two effective altruists, Sam's going in front of Congress. And that is what upsets me. You know, we had two effective altruists,
Sam's going in front of Congress.
Once in jail.
I think you draw parallels on that.
One in jail.
You give me a look.
Give me a look.
No, I think I think effector altruism
is a terribly evil ideology.
Oh, yeah, that's interesting.
Why do you think that is?
Why do you think there's something about a thing that sounds pretty good that kind of gets us into trouble? Because
you get Sam Begman-Freed. Like, Sam Begman-Freed is the embodiment of effective altruism.
Utilitarianism is an abhorrent ideology. Like, well, yeah, we're going to kill those three people
to save a thousand, of course. Yeah. Right? There's no underlying, like, there's just, yeah.
Yeah, but to me, that's a bit surprising, but it's also in retrospect, not that surprising.
But I haven't heard really clear kind of, like, rigorous analysis, why effective altruism is flawed?
Oh, well, I think charity is bad, right?
So what is charity, but investment that you don't expect
to have a return on, right?
Yeah, but you can also think of charity as like,
is you would like to see,
so allocate resources in optimal way
to make a better world.
And probably almost always that involves starting a company.
Yeah.
Right?
Because more efficient.
Yeah.
If you just take the money and you spend it on malaria nets,
you know, okay, great.
You've made 100 malaria nets, but if you teach,
no, man, how to fish.
Right.
No, but the problem is teaching a man how to fish
might be harder.
Starting a company might be harder than
allocating money that you already have.
I like the flip side of effective altruism,
effective accelerationism.
I think accelerationism is the only thing
that's ever lifted people out of poverty.
The fact that food is cheap.
Not we're giving food away because we are kind-hearted people.
No, food is cheap.
And that's the world you want to live in.
UBI, what a scary idea. What a scary idea. All your power now? Your money is power. Your only source of power is granted to you by the goodwill of the government. What a scary idea.
So you even think long term, even, uh, I'd rather die than need UBI to survive. And I mean it.
What if survival is basically guaranteed? What if our life becomes so good?
You can make survival guaranteed without UBI. What you have to do is make housing and food dirt
cheap. Right? And that's the good world. And actually, let's go into what we should really be making
dirt cheap, which is energy. That energy, that, you know, you know, that that's, if there's one,
I'm pretty centrist politically, if there's one political position, I cannot stand, it's
deceleration. It's people who believe we should use less energy. Not people who believe global
warming is a problem. I agree with you. Not people who believe that saving the environment
is good, I agree with you.
But people who think we should use less energy,
that energy usage is a moral bad.
No.
No, you are asking, you are diminishing humanity.
Yeah, energy is flourishing.
Of creative flourishing of the human species. How do we make more of it?
How do we make it clean?
And how do we make just just just how do I pay,
you know, 20 cents for a megawatt hour instead of a kilowatt hour?
Part of me wishes that Elon wanted to nuclear fusion versus Twitter.
Part of me.
Or somebody somebody like Elon.
You know, we need to wish there wish there were more more Elons in the world
And I think Elon sees it as like this is a political battle that needed to be fought and again like you know
I always ask the question of whenever I disagree with him
I remind myself that he's a billionaire and I'm not so you know
Maybe he's got something figured out that I don't or maybe he doesn't. To have some humility, but at the same time, me as a person who happens to know him, I find myself
in that same position and sometimes even billionaires need friends who disagree and help them grow.
And that's a difficult, that's a difficult reality. And it must be so hard. There must be so hard to meet people.
Once you get to that point where
fame, power, money, everybody's sucking up to you.
See, I love not having shit like I don't have shit, man.
You know, like, like, trust me, there's nothing I can give you.
There's nothing worth taking for me, you know?
Yeah, it takes a really special human being when you have power, when you have fame,
when you have money to when you have fame, when you have money,
to still think from first principles, not like all the adoration you get towards you,
all the admiration, all the people saying yes, yes, yes, yes, and all the hate too.
And the hate, the hate makes you want to go to the yes people because the hate exhausts
you and the kind of hate that Elon's gotten from the left is pretty intense.
So that, of course, drives him right.
And loses balance and it gives this absolutely fakely, psychop, political divide alive so
that the 1% can keep power.
Yeah.
I wish we'd be less divided because it is giving power to the ultra powerful.
The rich get richer.
You have love in your life.
Has love made you a better or a worse programmer?
Do you keep productivity metrics?
No, no.
No, I'm not that methodical.
I think that there comes to a point where, if it's no longer visceral, I just can't enjoy it.
I guess you'll viscerally love programming.
The minute I started like,
so that's one of the big loves of your life is programming.
I mean, just my computer in general,
I mean, I tell my girlfriend, my first love is my computer,
of course. I mean, you know, I tell my girlfriend my first love is my computer, of course.
Like, you know, I sleep with my computer. It's there for a lot of my sexual experiences. Like, come on. So, there's everyone's right. You know, you got to be real about that.
And like-
Not just like the ID for programming, just the entirety of the computational machine.
The fact that, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I wish it was, uh,
something that will be smarter and so, you And so maybe I'm weird for this,
but I don't discriminate, man,
I'm not going to discriminate biostat life
until I can stack life.
Like, so the moment the computer starts to say, like,
I miss you, I started to have some of the basics
of human intimacy.
It's over for you.
The moment VS code says,
hey, George, you're getting past it.
No, you see, no, no, but VS code is,
no, they're just doing that. Microsoft's doing that to try to get me hooked on it.
I'll see through it.
I'll see to it. It's gold digger, man. It's gold digger.
Look at me in open source.
Well, this is gets more interesting, right?
If it's open source and yeah,
it becomes the Microsoft done a pretty good job on that.
Oh, absolutely.
Don't look. I think Microsoft, again, I wouldn't count on it to be true forever.
But I think right now Microsoft is doing the best work in the programming world.
Like between GitHub, GitHub actions, VS code, the improvements to Python, it works Microsoft.
Like, this is who would have thought Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg are spearheading the open source movement.
Right, right.
How, how things change? Oh, it's beautiful. Zuckerberg a spearheading the open source movement. Right, right.
How how things change? Oh, it's beautiful.
By the way, that's who I bet on to replace Google, by the way.
Microsoft Microsoft. I think Stati Annodella said straight up. I'm coming for it.
Interesting. So you bet who wins AGI?
I don't know about AGI. I think a long way away from that.
But I would not be surprised if in the next five years being overtakes Google as a search
engine.
Interesting.
Wouldn't surprise me.
Interesting.
I hope some startup does.
There might be some startup too.
I would equally bet on some startup.
Yeah, I'm like 5050.
Yeah.
But maybe that's naive.
I believe in the power of these language models.
Satya is alive, Microsoft's alive.
Yeah, it's great.
I like all the innovation in these companies.
They're not being stale.
And to the degree they're being stale, they're losing.
So there's a huge incentive to do a lot of exciting work
and open source work, which is incredible. Only ready to win. Your older, your wiser, what's the meaning of life, George
Hots? To win. It's still to win. Of course. Always. Of course. What's winning look like for you?
I don't know. I haven't figured out what the game is yet, but when I do, I want to win.
So it's bigger than solving self-driving. It's bigger than
demarcatizing decentralized and compute.
I think the game is to stand out eye with God.
I wonder what that means for you. Like at the end of your life, what that will look like.
I mean, this is what like, I don't know, this is some, this is some,
there's probably some ego trip of mine, you know, like, do you want to stand
eye to eye with God? You just blasphemous man. Okay, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know
what upset God. I think he like wants that. I mean, I certainly want that for my creations.
I don't know what upset God. I think he wants that.
I mean, I certainly want that from my creations.
I want my creations to stand eye to eye with me.
So I wouldn't God want me to stand eye to eye with him.
That's the best I can do golden rule.
I'm just imagining the creator of a video game,
having to look and stand eye to eye with one of the characters.
I only watched season one of Westworld, but yeah, we got to find the maze and solve it.
Yeah, I wonder what that looks like.
It feels like a really special time in human history, where that's actually possible.
Like, there's something about AI that's like, we're playing with something weird here.
Something really weird.
I wrote a vlog post, I revert Genesis and just looked like, they give you some clues at
the end of Genesis for finding the Garden of Eden.
And I'm interested.
I'm interested.
Well, I hope you find just that, George.
You're one of my favorite people.
Thank you for doing everything you're doing and in this case
For fighting for open source of for decentralization of AI. It's a it's a fight worth fighting fight worth winning hashtag
I love you brother. These conversations are always great. I hope to talk to you many more times good luck with tiny corp
Thank you great to be here
Thanks for listening to this conversation with George Hots.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.