Guillaume Verdon is standing Before me with a recent type of computer system in my hands – according to him, the equipment is so crucial for the future of humanity that he asked me not to reveal our exact location, for fear that his headquarters may become the target of industrial espionage.
I can tell you: we are in the office in a compact ride from Boston, and the chip arrived from the foundry just a few days ago. He is sitting on the circuit board around the Substantial Mac width. The silicon of pink itself is dotted with an exotic set of components: not transistors of ordinary semiconductor, or superconducting elements of the quantum system, but a radically guts of a recent paradigm called thermodynamic calculations.
Like his quantum cousin, thermodynamic calculations promise to go beyond binary restrictions 1 and 0. But while quantum calculation is determined – through extreme cryogenic cooling – to minimize random thermodynamic fluctuations that occur in electronic elements, this recent paradigm is aimed at harness These very fluctuations.
Engineers pursue both paradigms in the race to speed up past ordinary silicon systems and satisfy the hungry demand for processing power in the AI era. But Verdon – with his startup, extravet – is not just a participant in this race. It is also one of the most shameless noise in the AI era. He is much better known as his online alter ego, based in Beff Jezos, the founding prophet of ideology called effective acceleration.
Known as “E/ACC” for compact, effective acceleration is a disregarding rejection of effective altruism, a movement that has convinced many technically focused people that the development of artificial general intelligence – unless it is crusted and unthreatening – is almost some existential threat to humanity. “EA is like this:” I believe in dwarfs, and the burden of proof lies at you to overthrow me. ” Based on post Beff from 2022
Wrote an existential risk of AI, he wrote Another post This year, “it is an informative time that causes depression in our most talented and clever people, killing our productive benefits towards a greater, more prosperous future.” Another common goal of his mockery is the AI ethics movement, which criticizes large language models, full of prejudices and blind places of their architects. Because Beff Beff continued to distribute the Gospel of E/ACC online, he quickly became a rally shout among some members of the technological elite, with outstanding characters, such as Marc Andreessen and Garry Tan, temporarily adding “E/ACC” to their user names.
Effective acceleration is perhaps best perceived as the most technical mane of the wider Zeitgeist: the belief that American policy is broken and that caution, excessive regulation and wake up ideology stop the country. This ethos helped Donald Trump back to the White House, with Elon Musk, the hero of the E/ACC movement, at his side. Like Trump 2.0, effective acceleration promises not to stop the American Renaissance and an unlimited view of work needed to get there. In both cases, the details are blurred.
But under the sharp resolution of the laboratory microscope, the details of the new Verdon system are, if nothing more, visible: a square series has several dozen microns width. These elements, the promised Verdon, will be used to generate “programmable randomness” – a system in which probability can be controlled to obtain useful calculations. He says that in combination with a classic computer they will ensure a very effective way of modeling uncertainty, a key task in all advanced calculations, from modeling weather and financial markets to artificial intelligence. (Some academic laboratories have already built prototype thermodynamic equipment, including simple Neural network– technology at the basis of newfangled machine learning.)