Max Tegmark

“Max started promoting AI for Physics from 2012 — that was an extremely early, extremely forward-looking move. It's because he has very broad interests and can see connections between different things.”

“Anthropic's work, including sparse autoencoders and transcoders, is all based on this idea — being able to extract atomic concepts from superimposed internal representations. Members of the interpretability team like Samuel Marks and Wesker Nee — and an undergraduate I mentored at MIT — all ended up at Anthropic.”

“Max threw a 1989 paper at me by Thomas Poggio, who is a very famous professor at MIT. That paper argued that the Kolmogorov-Arnold theorem could not be turned into a real algorithm.”

“Freeman Dyson divides scientists into birds and frogs. Birds understand a little about many fields, see structural similarities across them, and can transfer methods from one domain to another.”

“"AI companies are sprinting toward a cliff. Despite acknowledging the great risks of artificial superintelligence, they continue racing to build it."”

“"In the last five months, I've seen the emergence of what I like to joke with my wife as the Bernie to Bannon coalition... Extremely unlikely bedfellows from across the whole political spectrum saying, 'This is crazy. This is absolutely nuts. Let's do something about it.'" — Max Tegmark, MIT”