From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I realised that games are a potent medium for crafting artificial experiences, offering an unparalleled avenue for exploration and learning. This realisation cemented my ambition to create games, driven by the belief in their profound capacity to encapsulate and convey experiences.
I believe my legacy will be BitTorrent and Tron. I'm building one of the financial infrastructure layers for the next generation. I hope our network will be used like SWIFT and that future generations settle their financial transactions on our blockchain layer. It's going to be very cool.
There are a lot of people who misuse social media and then they pay the price for it. These individuals and groups are hunting for people to make mistakes, take embarrassing videos and show the world.
What is worrying is not the rise of multinational corporations, but the rise of social media. Facebook has 2.5 billion participants and Russia was able to use Facebook as a device to penetrate and disrupt the American electoral process in 2016.
We've had an explosion of platforms that have atomized the delivery and consumption of music, and I'm really for that- it's democratized music. Previously, there were a lot of gatekeepers that controlled how you were supposed to listen to music… that's all gone now.
The concentration of power in technology corporations is a moral and political problem that we simply don't have a precedent for. More people use Facebook than speak English for example, so the implications of Facebook, as just one platform, are at the scale of language itself.
The cardinal rule in academic research is to base your assertions on citable evidence rather than conjecture. This principle sets Perplexity apart from ChatGPT, which has the freedom to generate content without such constraints. Perplexity, by design, is restricted to sourcing information directly from the web, eschewing any reliance on pre-existing knowledge within the model.
As humans, we've evolved in a world where the pace of change was slow. Our minds are not structured for the pace of rapid change that we're seeing and, increasingly, will experience. One way that we deal with the accelerating rate of change is by sort of riding on top of that tsunami of change rather than being crushed by it.
I think the democratisation of the image is probably one of the most important things that's happening right now. Everyone's a photographer now, everyone's got a camera, everyone's taking pictures. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean we have to be more critical about what we're looking at.
There's a considerable correlation between symbols and meaning—especially given how we train modern computer networks these days with unbelievable amounts of data and trillions of parameters. Each parameter is a number representing a probability, but with so many parameters, the answer you get—if you can't follow the vast number of steps—seems unpredictable, much like flipping a coin and not knowing heads or tails. But if you could view all the information, you could determine with certainty which side lands up—that's classical physics. Only in quantum physics does probability acquire a different meaning.
If you can rank oboists and there's one who's clearly the best in the world, anyone, anywhere, can access that person. So why would you listen to the third-best oboist who happens to live next door?
From a global point of view, we are currently in the middle of a technical revolution similar to what our grandparents experienced when everybody switched their horse carts for cars. The same is happening now and it is a phase of transition for many businesses.