Again, I think ultimately, you know, all of ultimately I think, you know, we're all here trying to make sense of the world and trying to make sense of like what it even makes sense to do in the world, right? And this is something that we've had for thousands of years. I think the new thing that we've had for probably roughly a hundred years is making sense of a world that has rapid change and sometimes even that has, I mean maybe this is skipping a bit ahead but like rapid destructive change, right? So, you know, like the early era of this is that there was a in the pre-World War I era around the 1900s there was a lot of like original techno-optimist sentiments, right? And there was a lot of excitement back then. Well, you know, the thing that we call today tech, back then chemistry was tech. And then electricity was also tech. And, you know, if you even, you know, like watch like even movies like some of the Sherlock Holmes ones, you get to like really feel the vibe of that kind of era, right? And it was rapidly improving living standards, rapidly liberating women in the household, doing amazing things, extending lives, and then of course, you know, World War I happened, right? And, you know, World War I famously, you know, people rode in with horses and rode out on tanks, right? And it was a destructive war. Then World War II came and World War II was an even more destructive war and, you know, it gave birth to 'I am become death, destroyer of worlds' and this is like some of the background of, you know, things like postmodernism and people basically trying to make sense of like, okay, like a lot of beliefs were shattered and what do we believe now, right? And this is something that I think people believe like every generation, right? And there's a lot of people today who even grew up, you know, like believing in kind of 1960s era postmodern beliefs, I mean even and feeling like those beliefs have been shattered, right? And even people who for example grew up believing in, you know, what like I would call hipster environmentalism and it's this like lovely beautiful idea and, you know, we need to protect the environment and not go so fast and then you believe in this and then you realize is that like, wait, the nuclear power plants that you advocated to shut down basically means that, you know, your country is like stuck bootlicking Russia, right? And like, okay, basically all and like these are just like very very natural things that happen, right? And I think this like rapid technological acceleration has been a fact of human civilization for about a century and that acceleration is itself accelerating and, you know, things like postmodernism are a response to that. A lot of the currents of the 1960s were a response to that and, you know, you can respond by saying it's inevitable. You can respond by saying we have to slow it down as a lot of people did. And it's just constantly like a rapid response to basically the effects of the ideas that were tried to be executed by previous generations. And I think, you know, we're now quite rapidly seeing a new version of that exact same cycle continue today. And I think it's mixing both themes that have been around for a long time together with some pretty new ideas.
All right. So, so Gil, so what is EAC and why?
Um, yeah, I guess EAC is kind of the byproduct of myself asking why are we here or how are we here? What was the generative process that gave rise to us that gave rise to civilization, technology, got us to this point where we're having this conversation in this room. We all have wonderful technology around us and we emerged from a soup of inorganic matter. So somehow there is a physical generative process and my day job is trying to do generative AI as a physical process in devices. And so that was simmering in my brain and I wanted to apply that sort of thinking, that sort of framework, that physics-first viewpoint to all of civilization, trying to understand civilization as a petri dish, trying to understand how we got here in order to predict where we're going. And, you know, that got me down the rabbit hole of the physics of life itself, like emergence of life, abiogenesis, and a field of physics called stochastic thermodynamics which is the thermodynamics of out-of-equilibrium systems. So what describes life forms and also including our brains, right, intelligence. So it's both the physics of life and intelligence but it's also the physics of any system that obeys the second law of thermodynamics, which includes our whole civilization. And so really to me it's just been an observation that systems tend to self-adapt and complexify in order to capture work from their environment and dissipate heat. And that is the fundamental driving force behind all of progress, all of quote-unquote acceleration, all of everything we see today. And to me that is the fundamental truth, right? And whether we yell at it or disagree with it, it is happening. This is, you know, it's like gravity. It's you can argue with thermodynamics, it doesn't care. It keeps going. And so, you know, to me, EAC was like, okay, well, given this fact and given that if you look at the equations carefully, you can observe that there's a Darwinian-like selection effect for every bit of information prescribing configurations of matter. So whether that's a gene, a meme, chemical specification, product design, a policy, there's a selective pressure on everything and everything is intercoupled in this big soup of matter. And that selection pressure selects bits according to whether they're useful for the system they're part of. They're useful to better predict the environment, capture work, and dissipate more heat. So are they useful for sustenance, for sustaining yourself, preserving yourself, predicting your environment, predicting danger, but also is it useful for growth? Because if you grow and replicate, then those bits of information replicate and there's a natural error correction. So in a way, it's just a byproduct of the selfish bit principle that emerges from physics. And what that tells us is that the bits that are part of the future are the bits that are useful for growth and further acceleration of this growth. And so if to me I wanted to design a culture that if we bootloaded this mental software in the population, those that adopt that culture will literally have higher fitness. They will literally have higher likelihood of surviving in the future. So EAC isn't trying to kill everyone. It's actually trying to save everyone. It's basically to me I think mathematically provably having a decelerative mindset and it's a general pattern of many subcultures of making yourself small, degrowth and so on, it's actually negative. It gives you negative fitness and you're actually accelerating your downfall as an organism whether it's del mindset at an organization level, at a company, at a national level, at an individual level, you're lowering your likelihood of being part of the future. And to me that is not necessarily virtuous to spread that meme, to spread sort of pessimism, doomerism. It's actually...
Well, we're using a lot of terminology that I haven't quite unpacked yet. So like, like EAC, what does that stand for? What is acceleration? Oh, and what is deceleration and what is a del and these like what I'm trying to get at is I think EAC came as a little bit of a response to something that was happening in our culture at the time.
What was happening in our culture? What was it a response to and what was, say a little bit about the dialogue totally that led to encapsulating it in a name?
So, you know, it was 2022. I think the world was somewhat pessimistic. We're just emerging from COVID. Things weren't looking good. We were feeling down. Everybody was kind of lacking sunlight. Everybody was sort of, you know, pessimistic about the future and essentially, yeah, AI doomerism was kind of the monoculture.
What is that? What is AI doomerism?
AI doomerism is just kind of, you know, panicking about the fact that if there's a system that is too complex, our brains or human brains, our generative models can't have a predictive model of them and so we can't control them and things we can't control give us entropy about our model of the future and that induces anxiety, right? And then AI doomerism to me has been a weaponization of people's anxieties for political purposes. And overall I think, and we'll get to this, you know, I think AI doomerism is a big net negative and I wanted to create a counterculture to that. Now what I saw in the X algorithm is that, you know, the X algorithm and many algorithms reward agreement or strong disagreement, right? So there's, you know, if you view the algorithm as a Markov chain, asymptotically everything converges to bipolar distributions of opinions for anything. So it's like, you know, you had the EA, AI safety, AI alignment complex, you know, I kind of clustered them there maybe not so gracefully but you have that complex. I was like, what's going to be the opposite of that? And, you know, to me I was like, okay, well, you know, the opposite of anxiety is curiosity, right? Instead of downside protection, it's upside seeking, you know, fear of missing out, it's like, you know, dopaminergic sort of mindset and it's like, hey, actually if we decelerate we're going to have huge opportunity costs and we're going to miss out on a much better future and it's just like painting that future more vividly and bootloading this mindset of optimism because the thesis is that, you know, if you study neuroscience we tend to want to have a convergence of our beliefs and the world and so sometimes we adjust our beliefs to the state of the world but we also adjust the world to our beliefs. So if we believe that the state of the world will be bad then we tend to steer the world to that bad outcome. If we think the world will be great and we think of positive futures we tend to hyperstition them. We tend to increase the likelihood of their advent. And so I had a responsibility to spread sort of optimism in order to hyperstition a positive future. And yes, you know, online I am very, you know, aggressive and, you know, use all the political mind hacks because, you know, to me the end justifies the means, like if more people are optimistic about the future, feel like they have agency, feel like they can build and make an impact in the world then that's really good and I think, you know, sometimes I'm a bit ruthless with my opponents on the other side of the aisle. I think in private meetings I'm much more friendly but, you know, like I said, I just took the extreme opposite to the current monoculture and then that created some polarity and then now we can have discussions of where we want to lie, right? So...
So I've been with EAC since the beginning and it's been a message that as a programmer sitting in a room has been incredibly inspiring and it's great to see a positive message spread and it spread very organically and I would say that at the time that it started it was clearly a reaction to this negativity but now in 2026 I feel like it feels like EAC won, it feels like that's no longer the case and I think obviously Marc Andreessen post the Techno-Optimist Manifesto which I think really kind of codifies some of those ideas and then brings that to like where Vitalik sort of has this greater commentary. So I'd kind of love to know from you Vitalik like what is EAC in your mind and what is D/ACC and what makes them different, like what drove you to go this direction.
Yeah, I mean I think maybe, yeah, I'll also start my answer with thermodynamics, right? Because why not? So I mean this is, I mean it's an interesting topic, right? Because like I think we hear about like entropy in the context of hot and cold and we hear about entropy in the context of cryptography and these are like different universes and like actually we're not really taught how they're actually the exact same thing, right? So I'm going to try actually and like explain this in three minutes. So okay, so the prompt is why is it possible to mix hot and cold but why can't you separate things into hot and cold, right? And so here's my explanation, right? So, imagine you have two jars of gas. Each jar of gas has a million atoms in it, right? And because it's the move slowly and so the velocity of every atom you can represent with a two-digit number. Right? Over here, the atoms are hot. The velocity of every atom you can represent with a six-digit number. Right? Now, how many digits do you need to represent or rather if that's what you know, how many digits of information do you not know about the system? The answer is 8 million, right? You don't know the exact velocities here, 2 * a million. You don't know the exact velocities here. That's 8 times a million, right? Now, what happens if you mix them, right? Well, if you mix them, the velocities get averaged. And so, they become numbers from 0 to 500,000. And so, 5.7 digits, actually pretty close to six, right? And so you mix them, you have two jars and on one side you have a jar where the amount of information you don't know is 5.7 million and then over here 5.7 million. Right? And so the amounts that you do not know about the gas has gone up from 8 million digits to 11.4 million digits. Right? So the amount that you do not know is increased. Right? This is what it means by entropy going up. Now we can like try a proof by contradiction. Imagine you had a device that goes the other way. Right? Imagine you had a device that can take two jars of this like half-half hot gas and like actually bring all the heat over here and all the cold over here. By conservation of energy, this is totally valid, right? Because it's like the same energy. But why can't you do it? And the answer is well, what you've if you could, then what you've done is you've taken this system where what you don't know is 11.4 million digits and then you've turned it into a system where what you don't know is 8 million digits. Right? Now, because the laws of physics are time reversible, this is like the important thing, right? What that implies is if that kind of magic device existed, then actually like you could run the same process in time reverse and so you could always recover the original, right? And so what that implies is if that gadget existed, it would also be a gadget for compressing an arbitrary 11.4 million digits into 8 million digits, which we know is impossible. Now, but this also, by the way, tells you why Maxwell's demon works, right? Which is basically that if you had a magic demon, then actually yes, you can split the hot and the cold. And basically the Maxwell's demon just has to like know the extra 3.4 million digits separately and then you're fine, right? So like what's the moral of this, right? Basically that increasing entropy is basically mean like one, entropy is subjective, right? Entropy is not like a physical statistic. It's actually how much you don't know, right? And, you know, if I like it turns out that like I actually computed a cryptographic hash function and I pushed out the atoms then like actually based off of that for me this like the bottle might be very low entropy right and like maybe I could separate it right but ultimately it also means that when entropy goes up it means that our ignorance about the world goes up. It means that what we do not know goes up right you can go from knowing more to knowing less. You cannot go from knowing less to knowing more. Now but then why does education exist? Why do we become smarter? And the answer is that we go from knowing fewer like we basically we go from knowing more things that are useful. Right? Basically, yeah, the increase in entropy means that we constantly know in some sense less and less about the universe, but the bits that we do know are more meaningful to us, right? And so there is like a thing that is being spent and then there is a thing that we are gaining and the thing that we are gaining this is like I don't think that there is some like simple mathematical formula that defines it. The thing that we are gaining. I mean ultimately this is basically our morality, right? This is that, you know, we value life. We value happiness. We value joy. We there's a lot of different reasons why we find an earth full of thriving beautiful humans more interesting than Jupiter even though like Jupiter has a larger number of particles inside it and you need more digits to express what each and every one of them is doing, right? And so I think like value comes from us is the first thing. And I think also like this connects to what we want out of acceleration, right? Which is basically that like our goals to me ultimately come from us, right? And so the question is like okay, we are accelerating, right? And what do we want to accelerate? And I mean if we want to like switch, you know, like mathematical analogies a bit right if you take any LLM and you imagine you randomly flip one of the weights to positive 9 billion what happens right worst case the LLM becomes useless best case every weight that's not connected to the 9 billion doesn't do anything right and so best case is you have an LLM that's weaker worst case you just have junk and so basically I see human society as kind of like an LLM. It's this complicated organism and if you take any one bit and you kind of accelerate indiscriminately then basically you do lose all value and so to me the question is like it's basically, you know, like it's what like Daron Acemoglu calls the narrow corridor even though like, you know, the details on the politics are different but it's like how do we accelerate intentionally?
Can I jump off of that? Yeah. So, yeah, that was an interesting way to describe entropy of a gas to essentially, physics, the reason physics is not reversible is because of the second law of thermodynamics. It's because if you have a trajectory of a system and it dissipates heat it can't go back because the likelihood of going forwards versus backwards decays exponentially with how much heat you've dissipated. In a way, it's like literally how much of a dent have you put in the universe, right? A dent is an inelastic collision, right? If I have a bouncy ball, it's elastic. If I, you know, take some Play-Doh and smash it, then it just keeps the smash shape. That's inelastic. It's hard to reverse. Essentially, every bit of information is fighting for its existence. And in order to persist, it needs to make more evidence of its existence that's indelible. So it's making a larger dent in the universe. And that principle is how life and intelligence emerges from a soup of matter. And that complexification of systems becoming more and more complex, having more and more bits of information. A bit of information. It tells you information. Information is a reduction of entropy, right? It's going entropy is lack of knowledge information reduces entropy about a system conditioned on information.
No, I'm very sorry to interrupt.
Where did you want to take this?
I'd love to know what EAC is.
Okay. Okay. Okay. So, so EAC ultimately it's a meta-cultural prescription. So, it's not a culture itself. It tells you you should...
What would you say? What is the thing that is accelerating?
The thing that is accelerating is the complexification of matter such that we can predict our environment. We have better autoregressive predictive power and we capture more free energy. So the Kardashev scale, right? And we display it as heat. But that is just the justification from first principles why the Kardashev scale is the ultimate metric for how well we're doing as a civilization.
So allow me to bring it back one. So, maybe this is a little bit selfish, but maybe I'm also helping the audience is that the metaphors and the explanation rooted in physics and in entropy and so on is in a way an explanatory tool to try to get at a phenomenon that we experience directly and that experience is the acceleration of the productive capacity of our economy, the acceleration of the development of technology and the consequences therein. Right? That's my understanding of what acceleration is.
Essentially, every system gets whatever its boundary is, it gets better at predicting the world and by doing so it can secure more resources for its sustenance and its growth whether it's a company, whether it's, you know, individuals, nations, earth in general. And, you know, if you just play the movie out, it means that now that we have a way to convert free energy into predictive power with artificial intelligence, what that will lead to is an ascent on the Kardashev scale. That's what the equations predict. And so that is and that produces more energy, more artificial intelligence, more computing, more of these things. But even though we are expelling entropy into the universe, we are gaining order. We're actually gaining extropy. So we're gaining the opposite of entropy. So sometimes people think like, oh yeah, because for more entropy, why don't you blow it all up? It's like, no. Well, then you would stop producing entropy. It's actually life is more optimal. Life is an energy-seeking fire and it just gets smarter and smarter at finding pockets of energy. And the natural progression of things is we're going to get out of our local gravitational well and find other pockets of free energy and use them to self-organize into more and more sophisticated systems that are smarter and can, you know, expand to the stars. And so that's kind of the ultimate goal of EAC. It's kind of a formalization of like Elonian sort of mindset of, you know, cosmism and expansionism there. But it gives you a fundamental metric and then the prescription of EAC is follow the Kardashev gradient. So whatever policy or actions you can take in the world that maximize impact in our ascent on the Kardashev scale, that's what you should do. That's how you should live your life. So it's like a meta-heuristic for how to design a policy for how to live your life. And that to me is a culture. And so it's very meta because it's supposed to be true at all times. It should have a very long shelf life. EAC is made to be a very Lindy culture.
Yeah. Well, it's clear that like there's a deeper thing that's going on here for you. Like this is almost this is like a mathematically complete spirituality that people who have been like really don't have like a we don't have like God is dead Nietzsche kind of thing like we're all living in that shadow. It's like something to make us feel good about. But I would also say that there's kind of a really practical on the ground like this is happening today which I think is where Eddie's trying to get at and I think that like Vitalik you did a great job of addressing a lot of the real practicalities in your blogs on D/ACC and like if we can bring it like I need to lock you guys in a like with whiteboards on some quantum stuff sometime but for right now like I think, you know, this is an opportunity. Yeah. And look this is a really I think that some like Eddie is not scared, is like we're this is going to be great but I'm a little scared and I come to you guys because you give me like hope and clarity and so bringing it back to you Vitalik like what inspired you in this, what is EAC and what is D/ACC?
Yeah. So I think for me, so D/ACC, so it stands for, I mean I usually use like decentralized defensive acceleration but then there's also differential and democratic in there as well. But I think to me the core ideas are like one is that, you know, technological acceleration has been amazing for human beings and it's something that we need to accomplish as a baseline, right? And even if you look at all of the crazy things and all of the worst downsides that technology did to us in the 20th century, if you look at like for example lifespans, life expectancy in Germany in 1955 was higher than in 1935 and basically we have just benefited from a massive step up in everything that we care about and this is like something like I've even seen like even, you know, observing my grandparents' home like basically go up from having this like very like outhouse toilet in the backyard where there was flies buzzing and I would totally hate it and I'd often go out to the forest to poop because I couldn't stand the flies to something that's like actually very modern and hospitable, right? And, you know, the world has become cleaner, the world has become more beautiful, the world has become more enjoyable, the world has become better for health, it's been able to sustain more of us. It's become more interesting and these things are really good and beautiful for us. At the same time I think, you know, we need to recognize the role of explicit human intention in making a lot of those things happen, right? So for example in the 1950s there was a lot of smog everywhere in the air and people decided smog is a problem. Smog sucks and we need to do a bunch of stuff to get rid of the smog issue. And now smog is not a problem here at least much less of one. Then, you know, we had the ozone hole issue and then we actually did things to address that, right? And then the other thing is, you know, that especially with rapidly accelerating technology and AI I basically see two kinds of risks. One kind of risk is multipolar risks which is basically the risk that, you know, lots of people will use the technology to do very bad things, right? And there's a concern that like one type of concern is sort of the equivalent of, you know, anyone being able to make get a nuke at 7-Eleven like sort of thing and then there's also the concern of like well AI itself is, you know, like something that literally really is a mind of its own, right? And especially once it becomes powerful enough that it acts without human involvements, then, you know, like what will it do? And then there's unipolar risks which is basically I think actually a single AI itself is one of them and, you know, the other one is like I mean AI like enabling or the combination of AI and other modern technologies enabling like permanent dictatorship that you cannot escape like that deeply worries me, right? Like this is something I follow, right? And, you know, and like, you know, again in Russia for example like on the one hand the toilets gotten much better. On the other hand, like it's gone from protesting the impossible to protesting the sort of thing where if you do it, the cameras will see you and then, you know, a week later you get a knock on the door at 2 a.m., right? And this AI is supercharging this. You know, there's a lot of concentration of power happening and like both of these things really worry me, right? And like to me, D/ACC is really attempting to chart a path forward that continues this acceleration and accelerates it, but at the same time really deals with both kinds of risks.
So you would say that D/ACC is emphasizing specific other categories of risk that are maybe less emphasized than you'd like to see in EAC.
I think there's many kinds of risks of technology and many of them are valid and I mean they have different scales like some of them become more salient in different models of the world and how fast things are happening. But I mean I think there's a lot that we can do to really push against all of those kinds of risks, right?
So Gil, yeah, Gil, do you want to say a little bit?
What was the question again?
Oh, well just compare and contrast EAC and D/ACC.
Yeah, I think actually Vitalik and I are very concerned about overconcentration of power that can happen with AI and that was a big part of the EAC movement especially at the beginning it was pro-open-source, we want to diffuse AI power because, you know, our worry was that the AI safety meme was so potent that, you know, certain power-seeking individuals could weaponize it to consolidate control over AI and convince you you shouldn't have access to AI for your own good and really if you have a gap in cognition between the individuals and the centralized entities they will control you, they can have a full world model of everything going on in your brain and they can prompt engineer and effectively steer you, right? So you want to symmetrize AI power. We don't want to, you know, just like the Second Amendment is about the government not having a monopoly on violence so he can vibe check the government if he goes out of hand. You need that for AI. So, we need everybody to be able to own their own models, own their own hardware, for that technology to be diffused, for the power to be diffused. But to me, I think like, you know, discussions of stopping, you know, AI research and AI progress, that's completely out of the question. AI is a very fundamental technology. It's almost a meta-technology, technology that produces technology. It gives us predictive power over our world. It can be added on to any task we want to do in the world. It could be tacked on to any technology and turbocharge it. It accelerates the acceleration. The acceleration is this complexification where things become lower friction. Things just become better. You know, our bodies feel comfortable because we have this sort of, you know, this estimator we call happiness of like what's my estimator on expected persistence of my bits. That's what we're hardcoded for. And so, you know, I think to me, you know, the EA, effective altruists, you know, hedonic utilitarianism is maybe like the wrong way to view things like maximizing happiness and to me I want to have an objective measure of progress and that's what, you know, the EAC framework is, it's hey actually the objective view is like how are we progressing as a civilization are we scaling up because to me, you know, you have to complexify, you have to have more intelligence, things have to improve in order for you to scale, right? It's like the ultimate benchmark. And at the same time, you know, there can be setbacks like Vitalik said, you know, if AI power would be overconcentrated in the hands of a few that would be net bad for growth because it's much better if that technology is very diffuse so in that respect we're very aligned, right?
Can I jump in here because I think you're touching on something that I think both of you share a lot of deep ethos. I mean obviously Vitalik has produced a lot of MIT open source code although I know you have some more updated feelings about GPL and such. But obviously both of you have been champions of open source and now open hardware and these have been separate things but now that we're seeing people start to like, like Talos, like putting weights on two chips, A6, these kinds of things they're starting to become very similar. So I'm very curious like both what your thoughts are on open weights and open hardware. I mean, you're both actually like pretty deep in hardware right now. And then also like what is the difference between EAC and D/ACC with regards to this? This has been a crazy week obviously where like a lot of the things you're talking about have been tested where you have the government and corporations trying to figure out what the right answer is. And so I'd love to kind of know what you guys are thinking just based on that this week. And like I'd love to tease out if there are any kind of differences between you in where you think this goes.
Yeah, I mean I think, you know, to me open source accelerates the search over hyperparameters. It makes our models better. We can kind of collaborate sort of like a swarm and traverse design space, right? And that's what acceleration allows us to do, right? With better technology, with more AI now AI for coding that search process over design space for AI itself is accelerating. You know, I think, you know, we're going to open source our superconducting hardware designs very soon I just want to stagger it with our launch but I think diffusing knowledge is also diffusing power, right? And diffusing knowledge when it comes to how to produce intelligence is super important. We don't want to give, you know, there were discussions apparently in the last administration according to Marc Andreessen that the US government might want to put the genie back in the bottle and maybe not ban linear algebra, but more or less like ban the math surrounding AI. And to me that would be like almost like banning knowing about biology would be a huge step back. And so there's no going back, right? Like this knowledge is out there. If you try to ban it in the US, some, you know, other country, a third party, some deregulated island somewhere is going to keep developing it and then you're going to have a huge gap. And now you have a big risk. So to us, the biggest risk is a gap in capabilities. And the way to reduce that risk is to make sure AI power is diffuse. So whenever there's like, you know, the AI doomerism like, 'Oh, be very afraid. We're the ones responsible. We're the ones who should be put in charge. Trust us.' You know, I just get very skeptical because even if they're well-meaning, like we saw this week, right? They could just get pushed out if they centralize too much power. It's too juicy for those that want that power. And so that's kind of what we were warning about for years and now it kind of happened. And, you know, Dario's licking his wounds and, you know, some lessons learned there in sort of realpolitik, right? And anyways...
So yeah Vitalik what do you think of all this?
The two kinds of risks that, you know, like I think about right are unipolar risks and multipolar risks, right? And I think, I mean with unipolar risks, I mean, you know, the Anthropic situation is like so fascinating, right? Because, you know, ultimately the thing that like they got dinged for is refusing to let their AI be used for specifically fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of Americans, right? And so it will presumably, you know, there's a chance that, you know, like it looks like the government and military of this country wants to do mass surveillance of Americans, right? And, you know, this is an example of like unipolar risk, right? I think basically, you know, I mean surveillance is one of these things where the big effects that it has is it takes whoever is stronger and makes them even stronger, right? It removes spaces where pluralism can form, where counter-elites can coalesce themselves and where kind of people can safely explore alternatives and, you know, surveillance is one of these things that easily can be supercharged, right? I think actually on the defense getting back to open hardware a bit actually just to talk about one of the projects that we've been doing is, so a big part of, you know, like what I've done in D/ACC is basically donated supported various projects that develop like open-source defensive technologies. So technologies that will make it easy for all of us to continue to be safe and protected in a world where like more powerful and crazy capabilities exist, right? And so in the bio world for example, this means rapidly leveling up our civilization's ability to withstand pandemics. And so I claim that it is very within reach for us to have China-level COVID resistance at the same time as Sweden-level interference to people's regular lives. And like that's even the minimum bar. And this basically involves stacking filtration, UVC, testing, like literally a company we invested in is fully open source again like the end product of this is like basically passively testing the air and being able to tell if there's COVID in the air, right? Like in general, right, like essentially the number of sensors in the world is going to go up, right? And sensors are a big part of like being able to act better in the world, right? But at the same time sensors mean surveillance, right? And the thing that we're doing is actually this project, we gave out some of these at DevCon. And what these are is they're sensors that collect air quality information, CO2, AQI, a few other things. And they locally, basically encrypt, anonymize, like differential privacy them and then FHE encrypt and that gets sent off to a server and the server is able to like basically compute all over all of the data and then like collectively decrypt the final answer without being able to see any input from any individual person. Right? And this is like basically, you know, what we're the goal is to like deliver the higher levels of safety but at the same time protect people's privacy and like protect against, you know, the multipolar risk and the unipolar risk at the same time and I think this is how we can like collaboratively as a world like work together to build something better. And I think for hardware like basically I think we need open hardware and we need verifiable hardware like we need every camera in this room to like prove like basically, you know, like what kind of cameraing it is doing, right? If like in my ideal world if you have fine you could have a million cameras in the streets to prevent people from like or detect when people are like engaging in violence against each other but ideally you would have like attestations signatures over LLM and like a public right of inspection and you'd be able to like inspect these things and verify that like the only thing that they do is check when people are doing violence and alert that, right? So like these kinds of technologies...
So the verifiable hardware idea very interesting especially because it's not something that I think comes up very often but let me can I just ask a very stupid question which is just is open hardware, verifiable hardware, is that an EAC thing or D/ACC thing? Like tell me a disagreement.
I don't know if I ever talked about open hardware. The thing I talk about to me the greatest risk is a gap in intelligence between centralized entities and decentralized entities. So individuals versus the government. And so right now with the current compute paradigm to run a very smart AI model, you need a huge cluster with hundreds of kilowatts that is not accessible to the individual. People want to own and control the extension of their cognition. That's why we saw the open claw Mac mini craziness of the past few weeks. So people are clamoring for that. The only way where you can symmetrize power between the individual and centralized entities is if there's a densification of intelligence. We need AI hardware that's far more energy efficient so you could plug it into a wall and you can own the extension to your cognition because this year what's going to happen the models are going to start online learning and they're going to become extremely sticky. It's gonna be like trying to change executive assistants.
At the risk of sounding dumb, like isn't that what we're already doing that?
Aren't we already trying to radically decrease the cost of compute at an extraordinarily exponential pace? Like I'm trying to understand like what is the additional information that we are trying to inject into the zeitgeist by codifying an idea as EAC or codifying an idea or set of ideas as D/ACC.
I think for me it's like and it's part of the rest of my mission, you know, with my company Extropic, it's getting more intelligence per watt will drastically increase the amount of intelligence we produce and it will also help us climb the Kardashev scale by Jevons paradox if you can convert energy into intelligence or, you know, energy into value by proxy more readily there's going to be more demand for energy and that's going to lead to improvement and complexification of civilization. So to me that's the most important tech problem because that's what's going to diffuse AI power, right? And open hardware is one way to diffuse AI power. But to me, anything von Neumann, anything digital is going to look like caveman era hardware truly. No, it's just...
I can't wait. I really can't wait. I'm very excited.
It's coming, right? So doesn't capitalism already through just natural incentives and already allocate hundreds of billions of dollars at a minimum to this per year.
I don't think there's that much investment in alternative hardware.
Well, in alternative hardware, conductors and energy production is all about diffusing, it's about maintaining variance, not collapsing entropy of our search over any design space whether it's policies, cultures, whatever technology. We need alternative bets. We need more alternative bets that are out there. It can't just be the green monster eating all the profits. Then there's kind of hyperparameter space staking risk. We have this design space. We're overinvesting in the current technology and that might lead to a correction which, you know, a correction is del, right? Because not everything pumping up a smooth exponential.
Can I just declare that we solved it and they agree? I think on the idea of open source and like this seems very defensive like defensive technology in the Vitalik way and it seems like you guys are very aligned on this actually and that gives me hope because this is the stuff I care about. I think that like right now there are a lot of people who are like, why does this exist? Because a lot of people are like very uncertain about the future and what appeals to them is that you're saying like it's gonna be fine. It's baked in. And so maybe like if I were to steelman your case here, you're saying like you guys are actually saying the same thing, which is it's kind of already priced in. It's good. The only thing stopping us is kind of our bad feeling about it, right?
Well, I'm asking that. I'm trying to understand where if... Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, I guess it's completely natural if sort of there's very high entropy in like your model rollouts of the future, right? There's kind of a not a fog of war, but it's kind of hard to extrapolate what's going to happen in the next several years that gives people anxiety. Your body has this evolved this sense of anxiety to kill entropy in the world, right? If I put my phone on the edge and, you know, I just want to grab it so it doesn't fall, right? You see there you go. That was anxiety. So, you want to take action in the world, right? So, that's kind of what is happening now. But at the same time, if you kill entropy, you're missing out on the upside, right? You're missing out on the huge benefits. Right now our whole techno-capital machine has had a very long time...
to equilibriate with our current capabilities. If you have a disruptive capability that comes in, suddenly the whole landscape changes. So the whole system has to refactor, reconfigure, right? Now that we have the ability to handle more complexity with less energy, right, with AI, we're going to be able to do much harder tasks that are higher complexity and higher payoff. I don't know about you, but I can't like overnight yet vibe code a whole tokenomics. We're not there yet, but we might get there and then we'll have a ton of energy and that's going to help support more human headcount and grow population and help us be more comfortable. So there's a period of discomfort, but if you're in a rapidly changing landscape, the worst thing you can do is kill variance and be not plastic, be stiff. To be plastic, you need to be hedging your bets. You need to be trying many things, fucking around and finding out, the famous FAFO algorithm. That's an evolutionary algorithm. We need to try different policies. We need to try different tech trees. We need to try different algorithms. We need to try open source, closed source. We need to try it all because we don't know what the future looks like. So, we got to hedge our bets and one choice of policy or several, one choice of technology or several are going to make it and then we're all going to be in that slipstream and follow that. Got it.
