Max Tegmark

Template:Short description Max Tegmark (born 5 May 1967Template:Better source) is a Swedish-American academic physicist, machine learning researcher, and published popular author.Template:Better source Originally a cosmologist—Tegmark was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012 for his contributions to that field—his work has moved toward a focus on AI, and he is a current professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is president of the independent Future of Life Institute,Template:Better source whose stated mission is to "steer transformative technologies away from extreme, large-scale risks and towards benefiting life." Toward the aim of its mitigating existential risks from AI, the Institute has received funding from Musk.Template:Update inline

Tegmark is also known for his book Life 3.0, which addresses what the world might look like as artificial intelligence continues to develop.Template:Citation needed lead He and his organizations are an academic proponent of risk-aware perspectives on AI, and Tegmark is a supporter of the effective altruism movement.Template:Better source

Early life

Template:Refimprove Max Erik Tegmark was born Max Erik ShapiroTemplate:RpTemplate:Better source in Stockholm, Sweden, on 5 May 1967,Template:Better source to Karin Tegmark and mathematician Harold S. Shapiro.Template:FullTemplate:Better source While studying at the University of California at Berkeley, he adopted his mother's surname Tegmark, as there were many Shapiros in astronomy, including one of his professors.Template:RpTemplate:FullTemplate:Better source While in high school, Tegmark and a friend, Magnus Bodin, created and sold a word processor, Teddy, written in machine code for the Swedish eight-bit computer ABC 80 as a summer project, which was marketed "in a very modest manner" by Liber Läromedel,Template:Better source and—per Tegman's autobiographical description—he also coded a 3D Tetris-like game called Frac.Template:RpTemplate:Better source

Tegmark left Sweden after receiving his B.A. in economics in 1989 at the Stockholm School of Economics, and an M.S.E in engineering physics from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 1990. He next studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his M.A. in 1992, and Ph.D. in 1994 under the supervision of Joseph Silk.Template:Third party inline

Career

Tegmark began an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving tenure in 2003. In 2004, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of physics.Template:Update inline

As of 2023, Tegmark was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Template:Better source and is president of the independent Future of Life Institute,Template:Better source which he co-founded with Anthony Aguirre, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Research

An earlier phase of Tegman's research focused on cosmology, wherein he combined theoretical and experimental work (the latter, often in collaboration) to constrain cosmological models and their free parameters. He has developed data analysis tools based on information theory and applied them to cosmic microwave background experiments such as COBE, QMAP, and WMAP, and to galaxy redshift surveys such as the Las Campanas Redshift Survey, the 2dF Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Tegmark, Daniel Eisenstein, and Wayne Hu, writing in The Astrophysical Journal in 1998, introducedTemplate:Or the idea of using baryon acoustic oscillations as a standard rulerTemplate:Jargon inline (here and following, see list of publications).Template:Better source His 2000 paper in Physical Review E, on quantum decoherence of neurons, concluded that decoherence is too rapid for Roger Penrose's orchestrated objective reduction ("quantum microtubule") model of consciousness to be viable. Working with Angelica de Oliveira-Costa and Andrew Hamilton, Tegmark and his collaborators reported, in Physical Review D in 2003, discoveryTemplate:Or of the anomalous multipole alignment in the WMAP data,Template:Jargon inline sometimes referred to as the "axis of evil".Template:Better source With Anthony Aguirre, he developedTemplate:Or what he described in their 2011 Physical Review D paper, as "A Cosmological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics". Tegmark also formulatedTemplate:Or "The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis", in a paper by that name published in Foundations of Physics in 2008, wherein he postulated the physical existance of all structures predicted mathematically.Template:Better sourceTemplate:Full

As of this date, Tegmark's research focuses on machine learning. In April 2024, Tegmark, and a team of 7—including MIT/CalTech trainees Ziming Liu, Yixuan Wang, and Sachin Vaidya, and CalTech mathematician Thomas Hou, MIT physicist Marin Soljačić, and Northeastern University physicist James Halverson and mathematician Fabian Ruehle—presented a multiyear effort on their development of a new class of neural networks, Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), which differ fundamentally from the current, most widely applied multilayer perceptron design of networks; theirs is a new application based on the Kolmogorov–Arnold representation theorem that had been rejected decades earlier as impossible to apply to machine learning.

As described in their organizational promotional materials, Tegmark led a research project at MIT, beginning in 2020, focused on the application of machine learning to the classification of news reports. They called the AI-driven news aggregator "Improving the News", and it involved early participants Khaled Shehada, Mindy Long, and Arun Wongprommoon (toward the initial aggregator), and Tim Woolley (on scaling).

To maintain and scale the work, Tegmark and his co-worker and wife, Meia Chita-Tegmark, founded the eponymous Improve the News Foundation (ITN) as an "apolitical" 501(c)(3) in October 2020, with the stated mission of "[e]mpower[ing] people to rise above controversies and understand the world in a nuanced way." The ITN product was rebranded as "Verity News" in 2023.

Future of Life Institute

Under Tegmark's founding leadership, the Future of Life Institute has pursued a stated mission to "steer transformative technologies away from extreme, large-scale risks and towards benefiting life." It has subsequently aimed, as variously described, at dedicating itself to "research aimed at 'mitigate[ing] existential risks facing humanity'... specifically those related to our ongoing progress towards AI... approach[ing] human capabilities", and more generally to researching "issues... related to the challenges technology presents... to ultimately develop a more optimistic vision for how humanity can take control of the future." A co-founding faculty member was University of California, Santa Cruz professor Anthony Aguirre, and its board-level leadership has included Elon Musk, Skype- and Kazaa-founder Jaan Tallinn, as well as celebrities (Alan Alda and Morgan Freeman), and individual graduate students (including his wife, Meia Chita-Tegmark, then a Boston University PhD-student). Tegmark and the organization are academic proponents of approaches and views that are aware and wrestle with the potential risks associated with the development of AI; the Institute has received substantial funding from Musk.

Controversy

In 2023, Tegmark was the focus of a controversy when he was alleged to have signed a letter of intent on behalf of the Future of Life Institute for a $100,000 grant—ultimately rejected—to far-right media outlet Nya Dagbladet, an outlet for which Tegmark's brother wrote, an allegation to which the Institute formally responded. Tegmark later said that the Institute "ultimately decided to reject it because of what our subsequent due diligence uncovered", that they rejected it long before the media became involved, and that the institute "finds Nazi, neo-Nazi or pro-Nazi groups or ideologies despicable and would never knowingly support them". An official statement from the Future of Life Institute further expands on this: "FLI finds groups or ideologies espousing antisemitism, white supremacy, or racism despicable and would never knowingly support any such group".

Awards and recognition

Tegmark was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012 for, according to the citation, "his contributions to cosmology, including precision measurements from cosmic microwave background and galaxy clustering data, tests of inflation and gravitation theories, and the development of a new technology for low-frequency radio interferometry".

He was awarded the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science's Gold Medal in 2019 for, according to the citation, "his contributions to our understanding of humanity's place in the cosmos and the opportunities and risks associated with artificial intelligence. He has courageously tackled these existential questions in his research and, in a commendable way, succeeded in communicating the issues to a wider public."

In 2023, Time named Tegmark one of the 100 most influential people in AI.

Published works

Books

• Template:Full In this work, Tegmark suggests that his theory is simple in its having no free parameters at all, and that in structures complex enough to contain self-aware substructures (SASs), these SASs will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically "real" world.

Tegmark's "mathematical universe" hypothesis has been criticized by mathematical physicist Edward Frenkel (and other scientists)Template:Weasel words inline as being both overly speculative and unscientific in nature—Frenkel characterizing it as closer to "science fiction and mysticism" than "the realm of science."

• Template:Full

Media activities

• In 2006, Tegmark was one of fifty scientists interviewed by New Scientist about their predictions for the future. His prediction: "In 50 years, you may be able to buy T-shirts on which are printed equations describing the unified laws of our universes."
• Tegmark appears in the 2007 documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives in which he is interviewed by Mark Oliver Everett, son of the founder of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, Hugh Everett.
• Tegmark also appears in "Who's Afraid of a Big Black Hole?", "What Time is It?", "To Infinity and Beyond", "Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?", "What is Reality?" and "Which Universe Are We In?", all part of the BBC's Horizon scientific series of programmes.
• He appears in several episodes of Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, an American documentary television series on science which first aired in the United States on December 1, 2009. The series is hosted by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku.
• Tegmark was interviewed by Morgan Freeman in seasons 2 and 3 of Through the Wormhole in 2011–2012.
• Tegmark participated in the episode "Zooming Out" of BBC World Service's The Forum, which first aired on BBC Radio 4 on 26 April 2014.
• In 2014, Tegmark co-authored an op-ed in The Huffington Post with Stephen Hawking, Frank Wilczek and Stuart Russell on the movie Transcendence.
• In 2014, "The Perpetual Earth Program," a play based on Tegmark's book Our Mathematical Universe, was mounted in New York City as part of the Planet Connections Theatre Festival.
• In 2014, he featured in The Principle, a documentary examining the Copernican Principle.
• In 2015, Tegmark participated in an episode of Sam Harris' the Waking Up podcast entitled "The Multiverse & You (& You & You & You...)" where they discussed topics such as artificial intelligence and the mathematical universe hypothesis.
• In 2017, Tegmark gave a talk entitled "Effective altruism, existential risk & existential hope" at the world's largest annual conference of the effective altruism movement.
• In 2017, Tegmark participated in an episode of Sam Harris' the Waking Up podcast entitled "The Future of Intelligence" where they discussed topics such as artificial intelligence and definitions of life.
• In 2018, Tegmark took part in a conversation with podcaster Lex Fridman about Artificial General Intelligence as part of a MIT course on AGI. He was the first guest on the Lex Fridman podcast. He was interviewed again on the Lex Fridman podcast in 2021 and in 2023.
• Tegmark is interviewed in the 2018 documentary on artificial intelligence, Do You Trust This Computer?.

Personal life

Template:Refimprove section Tegmark married astrophysicist Angelica de Oliveira-Costa in 1997, and divorced in 2009. They have two sons.Template:Third party inline On August 5, 2012, Tegmark married Meia Chita.Template:Third party inline

Tegmark's brother is the journalist Template:Ill, who has written for the far-right, populist Swedish newspaper Nya Dagbladet.

See also

• List of astronomers
• List of physicists