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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

why do people not like Max Tegmark? he was kind of a rockstar at NeurIPS

That reflects kind of badly on NeurIPS if true. I first became aware of him over 10-15 years ago when he was pushing his "mathematical universe" idea, which is quite simply the most vapid and contentless idea I've ever seen in physics. (I don't think it's at all surprising that someone like him would be drawn to the AI community, or vice versa!)

He has some PhD students doing what seems to me to be reasonable work that gets published at NeurIPS. Somewhat speculative, of the flavor you’d expect from theoretical physicists doing AI work, but it’s at least speculation about concrete technologies that exist, not pure metaphysics. For example, there’s a recent paper proposing and validating in small models a possible mechanism to explain some power laws seen in NN scaling curves [1]. May turn out to be wrong, but doesn’t seem nutty to me. On the other hand, I’d guess these papers specifically are probably not what got him famous in AI circles. For that his general self-created role as AI futurist is probably more responsible [2]. I tend to avoid that kind of stuff, but staking out a debate position on questions like “how smart could AI get? Will it kill us all?” is the kind of stuff the general public likes to hear.

[1] https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/hash/5...

[2] e.g. https://munkdebates.com/debates/artificial-intelligence/

I think that paper is pretty weak, but at least in terms of content it's still night and day compared with the nature of Tegmark's clout-chasing in his physics days. But it's pretty grim if that's the kind of paper that made him popular at NeurIPS.

I like the guy, but I do think he's nutty over the level of multiverse he believes in.

My read is that some former fans strongly disagree with, and are thus disappointed by, Tegmark's recent enthusiasm for "AI will kill us all" arguments, & advocacy of strong/intrusive policies against AI progress.

I’m a huge fan in general, but some of his arguments are sloppier than others.

I think it's maybe that he kind of rebranded modal realism into his own concept.

His flavour of "modal realism" is rather different from those of David Lewis or Takashi Yagisawa – the way he intersected that with debates about mathematical Platonism – original and interesting

I doubt he's right, but novel wrongness is admirable in a way that same old wrongness

Well, he published a nonfiction book, the best part of which is the first chapter which consists of literally a fiction story.

He also has some serious problems with blinders, but they're the same blinders HN has so if I explain any further this post will get flagged, flogged, deleted, and downvoted. Ah well.

Tell me what they are. I won't do any of those things.

karma_pharmer cannot do that because others will

Can you write it somewhere else then link it?

I'm guessing it has something to do with the allegations in this article? https://expo.se/nyhet/elon-musk-funded-nonprofit-run-mit-pro...

But I have no idea whether those allegations are true or accurate–I just did a search trying to work out what people here were talking about, and this is the first thing that came up, and this is the first I've heard of this controversy

No, the allegations in that article are not accurate; I remember discussion of it at the time. The story there is that Nya Dagbladat applied for a grant from FLI, passed the first phase of the grant-award process, and was rejected during due diligence. Then after the rejection had already happened, espo.se ran the article you linked to, which made it sound like they had funded or were going to fund them, which they weren't.

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