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Sooo, Big Yud appeared on Lex Fridman for 3 hours, a few scattered thoughts:
Jesus Christ his mannerisms are weird. His face scrunches up and he shows all his teeth whenever he seems to be thinking especially hard about anything, I didn't remember him being this way in the public talks he gave a decade ago, so this must either only be happening in conversations, or something changed. He wasn't like this on the bankless podcast he did a while ago. It also became clear to me that Eliezer cannot become the public face of AI safety, his entire image, from the fedora, to the cheap shirt, facial expressions and flabby small arms oozes "I'm a crank" energy, even if I mostly agree with his arguments.
Eliezer also appears to very sincerely believe that we're all completely screwed beyond any chance of repair and all of humanity will die within 5 or 10 years. GPT4 was a much bigger jump in performance from GPT3 than he expected, and in fact he thought that the GPT series would saturate to a level lower than GPT4's current performance, so he doesn't trust his own model of how Deep Learning capabilities will evolve. He sees GPT4 as the beginning of the final stretch: AGI and SAI are in sight and will be achieved soon... followed by everyone dying. (in an incredible twist of fate, him being right would make Kurzweil's 2029 prediction for AGI almost bang on)
He gets emotional about what to tell the children, about physicists wasting their lives working on string theory, and I can see real desperation in his voice when he talks about what he thinks is really needed to get out of this (global cooperation about banning all GPU farms and large LLM training runs indefinitely, on the level of even stricter nuclear treaties). Whatever you might say about him, he's either fully sincere about everything or has acting ability that stretches the imagination.
Lex is also a fucking moron throughout the whole conversation, he can barely even interact with Yud's thought experiments of imagining yourself being someone trapped in a box, trying to exert control over the world outside yourself, and he brings up essentially worthless viewpoints throughout the whole discussion. You can see Eliezer trying to diplomatically offer suggested discussion routes, but Lex just doesn't know enough about the topic to provide any intelligent pushback or guide the audience through the actual AI safety arguments.
Eliezer also makes an interesting observation/prediction about when we'll finally decide that AIs are real people worthy of moral considerations: that point is when we'll be able to pair midjourney-like photorealistic video generation of attractive young women with chatGPT-like outputs and voice synthesis. At that point he predicts that millions of men will insist that their waifus are actual real people. I'm inclined to believe him, and I think we're only about a year or at most two away from this actually being a reality. So: AGI in 12 months. Hang on to your chairs people, the rocket engines of humanity are starting up, and the destination is unknown.
He's had a litany of health issues, including a long, fraught struggle to lose and keep off weight. Much of it probably genetic, and I suspect related to his Ashkenazi heritage.
And it's doubtful he lives a truly healthy lifestyle, although its not like he does actively unhealthy things, just spends most of his time indoors, on the computer, and never challenges or improves himself physically.
And he's basically living through his own worst nightmare right now.
Come on man, like half of America's sexiest actors are at least part Ashkanazim (though we can suspect their less appealing producers are to praise for that ranking). I get that Jews-as-a-whole are traditionally not reputed to be hot or healthy people (in spite of having incredible longevity!), and Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky does match a certain Jewish male phenotype, but that's hardly the reason he's lame, fat and wears fedora with a sleeveless shirt in 2023.
That said: he doesn't strike me as substantially uglier than e.g. LeCun. Again, maybe I just have low standards, this time for looks of intellectuals.
There's also IDF, 170 thousand fit Jews, and they are not all Mizrahim.
The stereotype of Ashkenazic Jews is of thin people, possibly weak and/or sickly but definitely not overweight or obese.
When I looked it up, I found this Powerful Take of an chapter summary for Oxford Academic Publishing's Jews and Their Foodways:
I don't know what to make of it, but in this context it's funny for sure.
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