He Comes Promising AI Freedom For All

Back when I first began covering technology in the early 2000s, my favorite thing to write about was open source software. I was young and idealistic, and the hardcore free software and open source zealots spoke to me. Code was meant to be by the people, for the people. Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen seemed like heroes. Microsoft and its proprietary code-fueled desktop monopoly seemed clearly evil. I enjoyed the energy and vitriol on both sides during the peak of these debates. Linux 4EVA!!, I would write on my all-too hard to use Debian machine.

The software religious wars kind of, sort of linger on but in much more muted forms than I remember.

Sad.

We, however, might have a proper tech revolutionary for this contemporary era in the form of Guillaume Verdon.

Some of you will know Verdon better as Beff Jezos, the X personality who built the e/acc or effective accelerationist movement into a countervailing force against the doomy, gloomy Effective Altruism movement, which, rather comically, managed to undermine itself without Verdon’s help by taking gobs of money from the anxiety-ridden villain SBF and wrapping itself in an uninspiring blanket of malaise.

Anyway, Verdon became and remains a thing both with e/acc and with his start-up Extropic, and the two are very much interlinked.

Extropic has shown early success with “thermodynamic computing.” It’s a form of computing that Verdon says harnesses the underlying properties of nature and probabilities in far better ways than traditional computers and in more practical ways (possibly) than quantum computers. Verdon used to work on quantum computers under Sergey Brin at Google, so he might even know what he’s talking about.

The revolutionary part of all this is that Verdon thinks Extropic will make cheaper, more energy efficient AI processing systems than the likes of Nvidia, OpenAI and Google. His AI computers will not require trillion dollar investments in data centers but rather will be affordable to the masses (possibly).

It’s very early days for Extropic, so much of this decentralized AI fervor is fueled by prognostication and hope.

Obviously, we get into all of this on the pod.

The show starts Extropic heavy and then veers into e/acc and decentralized AI territory. So, if thermodynamic computing is not your thing, go ahead and skip to the more philosophical stuff where you’ll find that Verdon is fun to listen to and something of an engineer philosopher.

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