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Jeff Bezos quote, Dec 14, 2023

Founder and Executive Chair, Amazon · Dec 14, 2023 · Interview, Lex Fridman Podcast #405: Jeff Bezos

The human brain does remarkable things and it does it on about 20 watts of power. And the AI techniques we use today use many kilowatts of power to do equivalent tasks.

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Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from Jeff Bezos

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But what’s interesting is that just scaling things up, and I put just in quotes because it’s actually hard to scale things up, but just scaling things up also appears to pay huge dividends.Dec 14, 2023· Interview
I think we humans have a lot of ways of we can make ourselves go extinct. These things may help us not do that, so they may actually save us.Dec 14, 2023· Interview
It’s interesting to me that large language models in their current form are not inventions, they’re discoveries. The telescope was an invention, but looking through it at Jupiter, knowing that it had moons, was a discovery.Dec 14, 2023· Interview
So even in the face of all this uncertainty, my own view is that these powerful tools are much more likely to help us and save us even than they are to on balance hurt us and destroy us.Dec 14, 2023· Interview

On the same topics

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An AI with more real layers can actually be “smarter” in the conventional sense of the term.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
For 100 steps in a row, the AI can shoot delicate subtle ideas from layer to layer at the speed of light. Then there’s one step where it has to encode them into twenty-six glyphs invented by Phoenician turquoise miners in 1800 BC. Then it has to re-encode the Phoenician glyphs into delicate subtle lightspeed ideas before it can do anything else.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post
It is important to not confuse massive steps in inference-time scaling, a dynamic which should be fairly predictable, with being the outputs of RSI, which is highly uncertain.Nathan LambertSep 19, 2026· Post
If you have five hours, you’re probably going to do a lot better. The AI models are pretty similar.Noam BrownSep 17, 2026· Interview
About this quote
Said by
Jeff Bezos, Founder and Executive Chair, Amazon
Where
Lex Fridman Podcast #405: Jeff Bezos
Topics
Energy, Research
Company
Amazon
Source
lexfridman.com/jeff-bezos-transcript/

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