Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #407

The following is a conversation with Guillaume Verdon, the man behind the previously anonymous account BasedBeffJezos on X. These two identities were merged by a doxing article in Forbes titled Who is BasedBeffJezos, the Leader of the Tech Elite's e/acc Movement. So let me describe these two identities that coexist in the mind of one human. Identity number one, Guillaume, is a physicist, applied mathematician, and quantum machine learning researcher and engineer, receiving his PhD in quantum machine learning, working at Google on quantum computing, and finally launching his own company called Extropic that seeks to build physics-based computing hardware for generative AI. Identity number two, Beff Jezos on X, is the creator of the effective accelerationism movement, often abbreviated as e/acc, that advocates for propelling rapid technological progress as the ethically optimal course of action for humanity. For example, its proponents believe that progress in AI is a great social equalizer, which should be pushed forward. E/acc followers see themselves as a counterweight to the cautious view that AI is highly unpredictable, potentially dangerous, and needs to be regulated. They often give their opponents the labels of, quote, "doomers" or "decels," short for deceleration. As Beff himself put it, "E/acc is a memetic optimism virus." The style of communication of this movement leans always toward the memes and the lols, but there is an intellectual foundation that we explore in this conversation. Now, speaking of the meme, I am too a kind of aspiring connoisseur of the absurd. It is not an accident that I spoke to Jeff Bezos and Beff Jezos back-to-back. As we talk about, Beff admires Jeff as one of the most important humans alive, and I admire the beautiful absurdity and the humor of it all. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Guillaume Verdon. Let's get the facts of identity down first. Your name is Guillaume Verdon, Gil, but you're also behind the anonymous account on X called BasedBeffJezos. So first, Guillaume Verdon, you're a quantum computing guy.

Mm-hmm.

Physicist, applied mathematician, and then BasedBeffJezos is, uh, basically a meme account that started a movement with a philosophy behind it.

Right.

So maybe just can you linger on who these people are in terms of characters, in terms of communication styles, in terms of philosophies?

I mean, with my main identity, I guess, uh, ever since I was a kid, I wanted to figure out a theory of everything, to understand the universe. And, uh, that path, uh, led me to theoretical physics eventually, right? Trying to answer the big questions of why are we here, where are we going, right? And that led me to study information theory, and try to understand physics from the lens of information theory, understand the universe as one big computation. And essentially, after reaching a certain level studying black hole physics, I realized that I wanted to not only understand how the universe computes, but sort of compute like nature, uh, and figure out how to build and, and apply, uh, computers that are inspired by nature. So, you know, physics-based computers. And that sort of brought me to quantum computing as a, a field of study to, um, first of all, simulate nature, and in my work, it was to learn representations of nature that can run on such computers. So if you have AI representations that think like nature, um, then they'll be able to more accurately represent it. At least that was the, the thesis that, that brought me to be an early player in the field called quantum machine learning, right? So how to do machine learning on, on quantum computers, um, and really sort of extend, uh, notions of intelligence to, to the quantum realm. So how do you capture, uh, and understand quantum mechanical data from our world, right? And how do you learn quantum mechanical representations of our world? On what kind of computer do you run these representations and train them? How do you do so? And so that's really sort of the questions I was looking to answer, because ultimately, I had a, a sort of crisis of faith. Uh, originally, I wanted to figure out, you know, as every physicist does at the beginning of their career, a few equations that describe the whole universe, right? And, and sort of be the, the hero of the story there. Um, but eventually I realized that actually augmenting ourselves with machines, augmenting our ability to perceive, predict, and control our world with machines is the path forward, right? And that's what got me to leave theoretical physics and go into quantum computing and quantum machine learning. And during those years, I thought that there was still a piece missing. There was a, a piece of our understanding of the world, and our, our way to compute, and our way to think about the world. And if you look at the physical scales, right-... at the very small scales, things are quantum mechanical, right? And at the very large scales, things are deterministic. Things have averaged out, right? I'm definitely here in this seat. I'm not at a superposition over- over here and there. At the very small scales, things aren't superposition. They can, uh, exhibit, uh, interference, uh, effects. Um, but at the mesoscales, right, the scales that matter for day-to-day life, you know, the scales of proteins, of biology, of gases, liquids, and so on, uh, things are actually, uh, thermodynamical, right? They're fluctuating. And after, I guess about eight years in- in quantum computing and quantum machine learning, I had a realization that, you know, I was- I was looking for answers, uh, about our universe by studying the very big and the very small, right? I was- I did a bit of quantum cosmology, so that's studying the cosmos, where it's going, where it came from. You study black hole physics, you study the extremes in quantum gravity. You study where the energy density is sufficient for both quantum mechanics and gravity to be relevant, right? And the sort of extreme scenarios are black holes and, you know, the very early universe. And so there's this- this sort of scenarios that you- you study the interface between, uh, uh, quantum mechanics and- and relativity. Um, and, you know, really I was studying these extremes to understand how the universe works and where is it going, but I was missing a lot of the meat in the middle, if you will, right? Um, because day-to-day quantum mechanics is relevant and the cosmos is relevant, but not that relevant actually. We're on sort of the medium space and time scales. And there, the main, you know, theory of physics that is most relevant is thermodynamics, right? Out of equilibrium thermodynamics. Um, 'cause life is, you know, a process, uh, that is thermodynamical and it's out of equilibrium. We're not, um, you know, just a soup of particles at equilibrium with nature. We're a sort of coherent state trying to maintain itself by acquiring free energy and consuming it. And that's sort of, um, I guess, a- another shift in- in, I guess, my faith in the universe happened, uh, towards the end of my, uh, time at- at Alphabet. And I knew I wanted to build, uh, well first of all, a computing paradigm based on this type of physics. Um, but ultimately just by ex- trying to experiment, uh, with these ideas applied to society and e- economies and, um, much of what we see around us, you know, I- I started an anonymous account just to relieve the pressure, right? That comes from having an account that you're accountable for everything you say on. Um, and I started an anonymous account just to experiment with ideas originally, right? Because I- I didn't realize how much I was restricting my space of thoughts until I sort of had the opportunity to let go. In a sense, restricting your speech back propagates to restricting your thoughts, right? And by creating an anonymous account, it seemed like I had unclamped some variables in my brain and suddenly could explore a much wider parameter space of- of thoughts.