Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT

Adam Brown is a founder and lead of BlueShift with is cracking maths and reasoning at Google DeepMind and a theoretical physicist at Stanford.

We discuss: destroying the light cone with vacuum decay, holographic principle, mining black holes, & what it would take to train LLMs that can make Einstein level conceptual breakthroughs.

Stupefying, entertaining, & terrifying.

Enjoy!

Watch on YouTube, read the transcript, listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite platform.

Sponsors

- Deepmind, Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI, partner with Scale for high quality data to fuel post-training Publicly available data is running out - to keep developing smarter and smarter models, labs will need to rely on Scale’s data foundry, which combines subject matter experts with AI models to generate fresh data and break through the data wall. Learn more at scale.ai/dwarkesh.

- Jane Street is looking to hire their next generation of leaders. Their deep learning team is looking for ML researchers, FPGA programmers, and CUDA programmers. Summer internships are open for just a few more weeks. If you want to stand out, take a crack at their new Kaggle competition. To learn more, go to janestreet.com/dwarkesh.

- This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Changing the laws of physics

(00:26:05) - Why is our universe the way it is

(00:37:30) - Making Einstein level AGI

(01:00:31) - Physics stagnation and particle colliders

(01:11:10) - Hitchhiking

(01:29:00) - Nagasaki

(01:36:19) - Adam’s career

(01:43:25) - Mining black holes

(01:59:42) - The holographic principle

(02:23:25) - Philosophy of infinities

(02:31:42) - Engineering constraints for future civilizations

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com