Max Tegmark
Swedish-American physicistWikipedia
61
MENTIONS
42
EPISODES
38
PODCASTS
Search complete. 61 mentions across 42 episodes found for "Max Tegmark".
Sep 24, 2026
Hannah RosenHOST
Did anything that you said seem to actually sort of bring a light bulb to the people in the room? Like, any moment where you felt, "Oh, they are getting this"?
Geoffrey HintonGUEST
So I think something that Max Tegmark, who founded the Future of Life Institute and has been talking about AI risk for a long time, I think something he said made an impression, which is that we should treat AI like we treat pharmaceutical drugs.
Geoffrey HintonGUEST
You don't allow people just to release drugs.
Geoffrey HintonGUEST
There's an agency called the FDA, and a company that wants to release a drug has to convince the FDA that it's safe or that it does more good than harm.
Geoffrey HintonGUEST
You have to convince the FDA that drug is safe.
Geoffrey HintonGUEST
Max Tegmark, who founded the Future of Life Institute, has pointed out that it's crazy we don't have something like the FDA for AI, where the AI companies, who are the ones who have the resources, have to do lots of tests and prove to this organization that their new chatbot is safe.
Geoffrey HintonGUEST
If they can't do that, they can't release it.
Geoffrey HintonGUEST
So that puts the onus on them to do the work, but on independent evaluators to decide whether it's safe or not.
Kilian KorthGUEST
And it's like, I think that the tribalist team mindset is like the death of conversation and progress in society because it closes the door to being wrong or being right.
Kilian KorthGUEST
I heard this physicist slash philosopher, Max Tegmark, say on a podcast one time, I'd rather have questions I couldn't answer than answers I can't question.
Kilian KorthGUEST
And that to me is a really good philosophy to live by when you think about ideas because ideas are just, they're just wisps of of dialogue that we have with ourselves and others.
Kilian KorthGUEST
And you shouldn't be attached to your ideas.
BethHOST
So let's jump into it.
BethHOST
[whooshing] Okay, Max Tegmark, he is one of the big AI names.
BethHOST
Three years ago, he was the guy that put out the letter that 33,000 of AI's scientists best around the world signed asking our world governments and presidents of the world to stop and put a halt on the AI development.
BethHOST
Even Elon Musk, everybody, all the big names you know signed this letter.
Sam HarrisHOST
Where, where on the spectrum of concern are you? I mean, I would put the most worried people o-over there with, um, Eliezer Yudkowsky and his, his recent coauthor, Nate Soares.
Sam HarrisHOST
Maybe Max Tegmark is over there.
Sam HarrisHOST
Nick Bostrom is not quite over there, but still on that side of the spectrum.
Sam HarrisHOST
And then all the way on the other side opposing them, you have the people who say that there's, there really is no real concern here, that, that it's all a hoax, that it's, um, you know, uh, any, any thought that artificial intelligence might get out of our control and destroy us, that is, um, a weird form of marketing being employed by the, the frontier labs.
Jensen HuangSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
2030 is not going to be the end of the world.
Harvey LevinHOST
Where does the truth lie? Joining us now is Max Tegmark.
Harvey LevinHOST
He is an AI researcher and professor at MIT.
Harvey LevinHOST
Be right back.
Harvey LevinHOST
And he's right.
Harvey LevinHOST
The, the, the warnings have been coming from inside the house, as we say, people who are actually working with AI, and they're the ones who are saying, "We need to be aware that this is a real danger." Um, but it is interesting to hear the [laughs] CEO of NVIDIA saying just the opposite.
Harvey LevinHOST
So where does the truth lie? Joining us now to hopefully get to the answer to that question is Max Tegmark.
Harvey LevinHOST
He is an AI researcher and professor at MIT, and he's joining us now.
Hrvoje MorićHOST
because people will poo-poo you for the biblical creation worldview, which I share as well.
Hrvoje MorićHOST
But John Lennox, in some of his work, he's been explaining how even some of the secular scientists, physicists, Max Tegmark, he says, who's not a Christian, who's recently been saying, He fears we are rapidly descending into a one-world government that's going to be totalitarian and technocratic.
Hrvoje MorićHOST
And basically, I think he even said he himself admits that it mirrors what the Bible talks about.
John Gideon HartnettGUEST
Yeah.
John Gideon HartnettGUEST
I mean, humans have always been evil rulers, you know.
John Gideon HartnettGUEST
Where's the good ones? They're pretty rare.
John Gideon HartnettGUEST
And so I think Max Tegmark was really on the money there, you know, and he hasn't quit in his attack against the build-out on AI, the rate and its potential misuse.
John Gideon HartnettGUEST
Yeah.
Jay DyerHOST
In Jason Lyle's book, he makes a really good argument at the beginning that information science points us in the direction of an intentional mind conveying information in the universe versus this idea that matter is meaningless.
Jay DyerHOST
But the problem is these people just like Max Tegmark, they make this move that, well, wait a minute.
Jay DyerHOST
If matter conveys information, we'll just say matter is information.
Jay DyerHOST
It just is math problems.
Joe AllenGUEST
It shows a degree of autonomy, a degree of kind of novelty.
Joe AllenGUEST
And it also shows how, if you have a company behaving in a reckless fashion like this, basically conducting what Max Tegmark calls a gain of function in software mode, that you And potentially really mischievous things can happen, if not malicious things.
Joe AllenGUEST
So, yeah.
Emily JashinskyHOST
Isn't that Joe also RSI? So now we're all talking about RSI now, recursive self-improvement.
Adam BeckerHOST
Um, and yeah, I've got my book, and that's not nothing.
Adam BeckerHOST
But, um, but, you know, you know, Bernie Sanders is off talking with, uh, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Max Tegmark and other, you know, members of the Rationalist and Effective Altruist communities.
Adam BeckerHOST
And, uh, and you've got other people from both sides of the aisle here in the US, uh, politicians right there in DC where you are talking about this, and they're, they're really not talking to anybody other than people who believe in some style of technological salvation.
Adam BeckerHOST
Either they think that the AI's gonna kill us all or the AI's gonna bring about a, a utopia, and either one's gonna happen real soon.
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