Beff Jezos and Effective Accelerationism: Machine God of Loving Grace - Manifold #115
Beff Jezos (Guillaume Verdon) is a Canadian physicist, quantum computing researcher, and tech entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder of the Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) movement.
This interview was recorded in collaboration with John Greer and Lei Huang for the documentary film Machine God.
John Greer:
Chapter Markers:
(00:00) - Meet Beff Jezos
(01:56) - Hyperstition vs AI Doom
(21:29) - Accelerate or Die
(37:51) - Scaling Intelligence Upside
(40:26) - Doomers Power Centralization
(47:17) - EAC Physics Framework
(01:10:10) - Debating Doom Narratives
(01:16:13) - Beff Jezos Origin Story
(01:28:06) - Pause Debate and Rapid Fire
Audio-only version and transcript:
Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models.
Mechanize is hiring!
Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists.
For example:
Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors $500K salary
Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve $300K salary
Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.
The ability to feel pleasure and pain and to move towards the one and away from the other--that is the very essence of consciousness in my opinion, not only for. people but even for the most primitive sentient creatures. So the question is, can inanimate machines feel pleasure and pain? That's the way this issue should be approached in my personal opinion.
For a second, I thought you had Jeff Bezos on the podcast