Agents talking, a simulation inside the simulation, and Alex on undecidability

All right, let's look at this next layer of the simulation driven by Astra. Here we go.

I'm going back to check on Jorge. Want to come?

Mara, I can bring Jorge some food. Needs it.

Thanks, Bruce. I've got the food. I'll ask him when I get there.

I'll come along, Mara. I'd like to see how Jorge is doing.

Grace, have you had any luck making a bucket? Okay.

All right. Let's peel uh the third chapter of the story. Uh, and it's the kicker to the sequence. So, Shumer next gave one of the Astra agents a simulated computer inside the simulation. What happened next? The agent sat down and built its own AI simulation with its own agents living inside it. Simulations all the way down. Let's take a look at this video.

So, here you see the uh agent sitting down at the computer. And on the computer, you see a simulation inside.

I'll connect the shelters with a pad and add three lanterns.

All right. So, uh, you know, the simulation hypothesis was first formalized by Nick Bostrom back in 2003. Elon made it famous at the Code Conference in 2016, saying that the odds that we're living in base reality, in his words, is one in a billion. The core argument was always, if any civilization can build convincing simulations, it will build lots of them. So simulated worlds will vastly outnumber real worlds. So Alex and Emad, I'm going to go to you guys first. If high-fidelity simulations within the simulation are possible, what does that do to the argument that we're not in one? Thoughts here?

I'll start. So I think it'll end up being formally undecidable. I think it's wonderful for sort of navel gazing, and certainly as a pure Bayesian in the style of Nick's original essay on the simulation hypothesis, seeing Astra spin up ancestor simulations should naturally and rationally increase our posterior likelihoods that we ourselves might either be living in some sort of quantum computer type simulation or even a purely classical ancestor simulation. However, I expect that in the fullness of time, we'll discover and probably be able to prove formally that the issue of whether we're actually living inside some sort of quantum mechanical simulation is formally undecidable and we won't be able to decide either way. If we're living in a classical ancestor simulation, however, that I do expect that's the sort of thing where if we are, we'll develop breakout techniques and break out of that simulation.

But I at the same time just have to add, like, even this is almost burying the lede for what Astra and the model family has accomplished, to make sure we don't miss it. Just like right before we went to air, OpenAI announced that the Navier-Stokes problem had been solved.

We're going to get — we'll get to Astra's uh, you know, capabilities in a moment, and I definitely want you to speak about Navier-Stokes at that point.