

Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 17 - Deep Thought - r4vik
http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/24464587112/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-17-deep-thought

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playhard
Funniest part from the notes!

"And then there’s the probably apocryphal story about Columbus on the voyage
to the New World. Everybody thought that the world was much smaller than it
actually was and that they were going to China. When they were sailing for
what seemed like too long without hitting China, the crew wanted to turn back.
Columbus convinced them to postpone mutiny for 3 more days, and then they
finally landed on the new continent.

Eric Jonas: Which pretty much makes North America the biggest pivot ever"

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aswanson
I got a good chuckle out of this one as well: "We may end up creating a
supercomputer in the cloud that calls itself Zeus and throws down lightning
bolts at people." Thiel is hilarious.

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seats
I liked this part. What a great class, wish I could attend.

"PayPal, at Luke Nosek’s urging, became the first company in the history of
the world that had cryogenics as part of the employee benefits package. There
was a Tupperware-style party where the cryogenics company representatives made
the rounds trying to get people to sign up at $50k for neuro or $120k for full
body. Things were going well until they couldn’t print out the policies
because they couldn’t get their dot matrix printer to work. So maybe the way
get biotech to work well is actually to push harder on the AI front."

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idoh
The class is pretty easy to crash, you just show up and sit in the back, there
is plenty of room. Parking is pretty easy too.

04/02/2012 - 06/06/2012 Mon, Wed 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM at Annaud

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thesash
The initial discussion about the hugeness and strangeness of AI reminded me of
the godlike AIs in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos, which are so incredibly
advanced as to be pretty much beyond understanding in their native forms. The
friendly ones end up speaking in zen koans.

[http://www.seanparnell.com/Hyperion%20Cantos/Web%20Pages/Umm...](http://www.seanparnell.com/Hyperion%20Cantos/Web%20Pages/Ummon.htm)

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nu23
We need a higher resolution in our vocabulary when talking about technological
risks. Someone can be in favour of most forms of technology, and yet even when
dealing with technologies with _extinction risk_ , the word that comes up to
describe the opposition is 'Luddite'. Which is not to say that I am opposed to
AI research.

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comatose_kid
"The audience was split 50-50 on that. If it can accelerate—if it can more
than double every 18th months going forward—it would seem like you’d get
something like AI in just a few years. Yet most people thought AI was much
further away than biotech 2.0. "

Interesting leap - is a large number of transistors on a die enough to enable
an acceptable AI? I would have thought that more is necessary, and figuring
out when it will happen will not be easily determined by a model like Moore's
Law.

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seiji
Singularitards tend to forget "size of brain" isn't related to "usefulness of
brain." We don't have superintelligent elephants and whales running around.

Brains are slow, dumb things. They are just have freaky connectivity.

On a related note, it's hilarious modern GPUs aren't classified as weapons.

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Estragon
How do you weaponize a GPU?

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inportb
You could use it for cryptography or cryptanalysis, for example.

