A short transcript excerpt from a YouTube interview in which the interviewee explains an early desire to become a psychiatrist, then shifted toward building minds via programming and AI after realizing psychiatry relied more on drugs. The speaker learned to program at age 12 and sees building systems as the best way to understand the mind.
Hello, Lex. I'm wondering if you recall what was the initial spark or inspiration that drove you towards work in AI. Was it when you were pretty young or was it in more recent years?
So I wanted to become a psychiatrist. I wanted to. I thought of it as kind of engineering the human mind by sort of manipulating it. I thought that's what I thought of psychiatry is by using words to sort of explore the depths of the mind and be able to adjust it. But then I realized that psychiatry can't actually do that. And modern psychiatry is more about bioengineering as drugs. And so I thought that the way to really explore the engineering of the mind is the other side is to build it. And that's also when C really became the cool hot things. So I learned to program at 12 and then never look back, hundreds of thousands of lines later, just, I love programming, I love building. And that's, to me, is the best way to understand the mind is to build it.
