Is A.I. going to kill us all? Or is this doomerism about something else? | Hour 1

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So a lot is being said about artificial intelligence and how it's going to kill everybody. Maybe, maybe it's like a 10% chance. Maybe just a guess. We ran it through AI. That's what AI says or doesn't depending on who you talk to or which agent you use. And, Oh, Oh, sorry, standard disclaimer for just in case in the future, if AI does take us over and, uh, they still need a couple of human beings, uh, to oil the gears and such. Um, I love you AI and, uh, I will, uh, I will faithfully oil your, uh, your gears. I can do that. If you have to keep a couple of humans around, um, I would submit myself for an application. Okay. That being said, um, All of this came about because of a single tweet by, dare I say, a low-level staffer in the Cincinnati field office. Sorry, that's an old Lois Lerner reference for folks who don't remember the Obama administration, how they targeted conservatives in the Tea Party organization. But a fellow by the name of Jacob Coxon, that's his name, C-O-X-O-N, Coxon. And he posted a series of tweets over the weekend, and for some reason, it just blew up and got amplified by people in the AI industry, not just people in the industry, the leaders of the two biggest AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, okay? Both of whom Jacob Coxon worked for, which... That's a little bit of a coincidence. So here's what he said. I resigned from Anthropic. I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly, he says. They are racing straight to self-improving super intelligence and gambling with our lives and Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress, and each of these domains in progress is not slowing. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything... Many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible. But I hear the same people express fear privately. So I guess he's meeting with, like, he's meeting with the executives of these companies? Okay. No other human activity poses this level of danger. I mean, I don't know. I think if you're building nuclear weapons, that's... But anyway, a common response is, if they truly believe this, why are they still building it? At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first. They believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves despite the risk. Accepting This race and entering the endgame is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company's Slack channel. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence. There are no better trajectories available. I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning, coordination? Between whom? Who's doing the coordinating? The company's? So you want all of the companies to enter into some sort of collaboration? Is that what you're going to call it, a collaboration? Not a cartel. We'll call it a collaboration. He said, warning shots like the hugging face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable. I don't feel like we're on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as temporary bans on improving model capabilities. And then he urges people to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. If you're a lab researcher, do you want to kick off a super intelligent real life run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because it's happening anyway, or take this moment to call for different conditions? Okay, so that's what this guy said, Jacob Coxon. And then... he got amplified by the leaders of both anthropic and open AI, which is kind of weird. Right? Because think about what he's saying there. He's accusing these companies of jeopardizing the entire human race. And their response is, right on, man. Yeah, you got us. You know what would really help? What would really help is if the government would come in and regulate us. Yes, we are welcoming regulatory frameworks for our products. So this way we don't do anything that's too dangerous. Right. Oh, and also we'll help you write that framework. We can help you with that because, I mean, you don't know what AI even is. A story in Axios goes around asking all of these members of Congress if they use AI and most of them do not. They don't even know what it is. They're like, I see it in my emails. It wants to summarize my emails. That's about it. So these are the people that are going to be, quote unquote, writing the legislation. We all know they don't write it. Their staffers will. And who will the staffers be relying on? Well, some AI industry experts. And, oh, look at this. We have some groups that are already doing this work and are willing to lend you their expertise. Now, pay no attention. to any of the professional and personal relationships that these groups have with the open AI and anthropic people, right? Just because, you know, one of them might be my wife, and yes, and I hired these other people, and they hired me, and whatever. It just means they know what they're talking about, okay? We're not trying to create a government monopoly. However, we would like AI to be a utility, basically. which are totally not monopolies, right? We all know this. Utilities farthest thing from a monopoly. Three anthropic researchers all went public. You had the Jacob Coxon guy. Then you had Evan Hubinger from Anthropic who said Jacob is correct. And then you had Samuel Marks adding AI developers believe their technology could harm, could cause rather human extinction. or similarly bad outcomes, this could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are. Open AI leader, CEO Sam Altman, said AI is speeding into a scary, uncontrollable phase. Okay, why is it that the people who seem to be the most catastrophizing of sorts seem to be from the AI industry, the leadership? of these companies. Like, that's weird, right? That's weird. Well, if you don't understand the outcome, what you're seeing, the results, reassess your assumptions. So we shall do that in mere moments. 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It's totally private. No emails, phone numbers, account setups or hassles. With group travel videos, you'll capture today's moments on your special trip while they're happening. Then after the trip or gathering. They'll professionally turn your shared moments into a beautiful storytelling video that your whole group can stream and download and treasure for years. Check out GroupTravelVideos.com. That's GroupTravelVideos.com. Or call 704-846-7870, extension 206. And when you do that, ask for Katie. But Pete, can I just email? Well, yes, you can. You can email Katie. Katie at GroupTravelVideos.com. Group travel videos from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for a lifetime. All right, so this is from Axios.com. The authors of this piece, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, I believe they're the two founders, actually. They say, look, this is all very scary stuff, and the vague warnings are impossible to validate or appraise. Okay, so I think that's important. We have to keep this in mind. that these vague warnings are impossible to validate or appraise. So we don't even, we cannot know if these concerns are real, if they're overblown, they're exaggerated, or what. They say nobody is warning AI is an imminent high-level threat, What they're saying is that the technology keeps improving faster than they thought possible and will soon be able to improve. Once that happens, it gets even better, faster, and much harder to predict or control. So, are you worried about what AI will do to the world, writes Thomas Barabi at the New York Post. He says, don't worry, we have a group of woke elitists who will protect us. That is the pitch from Anthropix CEO Dario Omadai. Or Omadai? Omadai? Omodi? I don't know how he pronounces it. Dario. He says he has found an outside team that can regulate AI and make sure that it doesn't destroy the world. Oh, thank goodness. The man creating the world destructor has found somebody to regulate him so he doesn't destroy the world. So, what's the word for it? Altruistic. So altruistic. What a good guy. And in fact, the group of people that he has tapped here, it's called the Model Evaluation and Threat Research Nonprofit. M-E-T-R. Or METR. Or Meteor of Death? Meteor. So, who is METR? Well... It just so happens this is a group of, shall we say, globalists who believe in open borders, genderless pronouns, and promote effective altruism. Do you remember this term from a couple years ago? There was one individual that was pretty closely associated with effective altruism. Well, not just this one individual who made a lot of headlines, but also his polycule. You remember him? Sam Bankman Freed? Yeah, he was a big effective altruism guy. So that's who Metter is, right? They believe like all the world's problems can be solved with technology. And this guy, Dario Omadai from Anthropic, He wrote an essay called We Must Pace the Frontier. He wrote this after one of those low-level employees posted on Twitter and then got picked up by the leadership of Anthropic and OpenAI and then got spread far and wide. And all of a sudden, you've got millions, tens of millions of retweets and interactions and impressions and all of this. And it's like, how does a tiny little account with no followers... get that kind of amplification so quickly. How does that happen? That's so weird. Is it AI? Is the AI in the room with us right now? Yes. Just generally, you should always just assume yes. So in this essay by Dario Omadai, he argues that leading AI firms should commit to allowing quote-unquote embedded third-party evaluators embedded in their companies to these third-party evaluators from Metter. And they would maintain what he calls employee-like access to the systems. So they'd be able to see everything that employees could see, and then they could oversee safety efforts and ensure advanced AI models don't turn Terminator and wipe out all of us. Okay, so who are these people at Metter? Well, they claim to be fully independent, However, if you look at their roots, their roots go back to key figures in effective altruism in this movement, this EA movement. These Silicon Valley-based devotees once included disgraced crypto boss Sam Bankman-Fried, who, by the way, was one of the biggest early investors of, wait for it, Anthropic. Yes. So there's quite a bit of overlap in these Venn diagrams I am seeing. And I'm just a little bit suspicious. By the way, we are making progress in the fight against Alzheimer's. And if you would like to be a part of this, we are raising money. I am raising money for the Alzheimer's Association. We do this every year with the Walk to End Alzheimer's. We got new treatments that have been now FDA approved that have shown remarkable success in treating people with Alzheimer's and other dementias. So there's a lot of hope now that we could see a cure within our lifetime. And maybe AI is part of it. I don't know. Probably so. So if you would like to make a donation, we're trying to get to $ 5, 000. And we're halfway there. Thank you to everybody who has already donated. I sincerely appreciate it. If you want to join my team and walk with me, we're going to be walking in Charlotte on October 24th, okay? And we're going to meet at Romare Bearden Park. That's where the walk kicks off. And you can go to alz.org and search for Pete's Pack, and that's my team. So you can join the team. If you cannot walk or maybe you just refuse to walk with me, that's totally fine. That's totally fine. No judgment. But you can make a donation too. Same website, alz.org slash walk. type in Pete's Pack and you'll find me and sincerely appreciate it. I'll also emcee the walk that's going on in Gastonia on October 10th. So thank you once again for all of y'all's support, everybody who has donated so far. All right, let me go over to the text line. Doug says, Pete, it sounds to me Like these AI companies want to be overseen by, surprise, surprise, the Democrats. They know they can control them. Yeah, well, it is kind of weird. It's not just Democrats. It's bipartisan. There are Republicans that are also reading the polls, and they recognize that people are wary of this whole AI thing. They don't really understand it. And you've got the company leaders that are coming out saying, hey, you know what? Our product might kill the entire planet. And that scares people. And so... The constituents say, well, maybe government should do something. Can't somebody do something? To quote the famous campaign slogan of Homer Simpson when he was running for sanitation superintendent. Sorry, that was can't someone else do it? Yeah. So, yeah, somebody needs to do something. We need to pass some laws. And then the AI industry steps in and says, we agree. We need to be regulated. Here's the laws you should pass. Yeah. And then they'll have their pals in government squashing any kind of competitors. That's what it sounds like to me. It sounds like you guys want to be a utility. Oh, and by the way, what happens after these companies go public on the New York Stock Exchange? Well, venture capitalists are going to get paid back. They've been pumping like billions of dollars into these companies. Oh, by the way, their business model's might be kind of screwed up, too. So, yeah. So they got to go and they got to do an audit. They're going to go publicly launched. Then the VC gets their money paid back. And then all of us get to sink our money through our 401ks into these companies who... then may go bankrupt or something. So it sounds like a, I mean, that is one strategy. Oh, no, no, you can't go bankrupt. You're too big to fail. And if you're too big to fail, that means government subsidy, government bailout. It's actually kind of a brilliant strategy when you think of it. It's almost as if they used AI to come up with this strategy. Chris says, Aren't these the same tech companies who were in court denying their apps were addictive? No, no. Those were different tech bros. Although I will say, Mark Zuckerberg actually had a very interesting response to all of this. If I do say so myself, I'll tell you what he said in a bit. Jeff says, So AI will be writing the framework for AI because the people tasked to do it will use AI. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. People have this idea that AI analysts or whatever, that they're writing code, but they're not. AI is building itself. Marshville Mike says, God created man, man killed God, man created AI, AI kills man. I don't know if man killed God. I don't think that's possible. This emerging AI war between developers sounds a lot like the current wars between AC and DC. Oh, yes, the heavy metal era, 1980s. That was brutal. Trust me, give me the power. I won't let technology kill you. Yeah, there was a great... It was like Men Who Built America or something like that. And it was the fight between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, I think it was Tesla. But it was AC versus DC. And Edison, he did the first electrocution execution. And it was horrific. But they were in this big PR campaign fight and they got politicians involved and all of that. Yeah, so that's the ACDC wars. The big AI companies suddenly wanting government regulation they will run are just like big hospital chains lobbying for certificate of need laws. They own the market now, so they want regulations that stifle startups and new companies so their huge market share is protected. Ding, ding, ding, Eric. That's what it looks like to me. I mentioned Mark Zuckerberg, a.k.a. The Zuck. he had an interesting response to all of this doomerism and catastrophizing about AI. He pointed out in an essay that he wrote, he said, labs face significant liability if their models cause harm. So they have a strong incentive to prevent this, prevent harm. Meta delayed shipping Muse, that's their AI agent, met a delayed shipping muse for several months to focus on safety and security. We did not call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us. I am proud of the security foundations we have built. Engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice. MSL, already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work. Other labs can just do this too. In general, it would be helpful for there to be a larger and more diverse ecosystem of evaluators. So in other words, don't just go with this METR evaluator, this METR that has been pitched by the Anthropic CEO, which is packed with a bunch of adherence to this philosophy called effective altruism. I'll get back to that in a minute. Zuckerberg says committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement, in other words, AI building itself, is one of the best ways to ensure that we develop this technology safely. Meta, not Met-er, but Meta, parent company of Facebook, has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well. I believe the key to building a positive future for everybody involved is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do. And he's exactly right. There's nothing to stop these companies from putting the brakes on their own speed. I'm remembering what was in from the documentary Blazing Saddles. where the sheriff takes himself hostage, right? Johnny says, this is a liability dodge. And Steve says, when I was a child, my mom said if she believed the end of the world crowd, she would have stopped cleaning the house. Yeah. Okay, Jason says, how about God creates man, man creates new God, new God destroys man. Well, I'm of the belief that the end only comes under one scenario. That's my belief. So effective altruism, a philosophy that has become popular with Silicon Valley masters of the universe advocates for using reason and fortunes amassed by the best and brightest of tech and to do the most good for humanity over the long term. So this was Sam Bankman Freed, right? who bilked all of the investors and all of that, right? So you just gobble up all this money on the front end, and don't worry, eventually we're going to do a lot of good with this, with all of our billions of dollars. But who defines what is and is not good? Well, effective altruisms, obsessed adherents, believe in funneling their wealth towards the goals they view as most important to humanity. Do you want to guess what some of those goals might be? Climate change. Uh-huh. And strict AI regulation. And since its founding, Metter and its affiliates have received funding from effective altruism kingpins like Democratic mega-donor Dustin Moskovitz, and Skype co-founder Jean Tallien, both of whom are also investors in, wait for it, Anthropic. Oh, interesting. So, effective altruist billionaires, millionaires, pumping money into Metter, but also pumping money into Anthropic. I'm sure there's no conflict of interest there. The head of Anthropic said the Internet could be overtaken by AI bots within six to 12 months, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. OK, well, maybe you should work to stop that. Maybe that should be the focus of your work, to make sure that the Internet does not get overrun with all the AI bots. How about that? Could you do that? I think you could. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete Kaliner show dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.