George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387

What possible ideas do you have for the w- 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, 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. The interesting thing about humanity is the diversity in it.

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-

With due respect. (laughs)

(laughs) I wish I was more weird.

The following is a conversation with George Hotz, his third time on this podcast. He's the founder of Comma.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 the goal of making it run on any device by any human easily and efficiently. 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. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's George Hotz. You mentioned something in a stream about the philosophical nature of time. So, uh, let's start with a wild question. Do you think time is an illusion?

You know-

(laughs)

... I sell phone calls, uh, to Comma for $1,000. Uh, and some guy called me, and, uh, like, you know, it's $1,000, so you can talk to me for, for 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, "Well, what do you mean time doesn't exist," right? Like, I think time is a useful model whether it exists or not, right? Like, does quantum physics exist? Well, it doesn't matter. I- i- 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 we construct of 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. Kolmogorov complexity is real.