00:03:42.420Yeah, you know, OpenAI started before the chatbots, the large language models, were even a thing.
00:03:50.100They were started, I forget if it was late 15 or early 2016, but the paper that unlocked the most recent wave of AI came out in 2017, which was after OpenAI was founded.
00:04:01.360and um these guys are that the the large language models are a surprise revenue stream
00:04:12.500and that revenue stream can fund the creation of even more even larger data centers for the next
00:04:19.400level of the technology but these guys have their eye on uh the sort of ultimate version of the
00:04:25.920technology which is these machines much smarter than humans and that's sort of the ultimate version
00:04:30.020because once the AIs are smarter than the humans,
00:05:00.020One thing people often get caught up on about this is that includes the AI being better at things like persuading humans, at things like charisma.
00:05:09.500You know, we often think of intelligence as the stuff that the nerds have and that the jocks like.
00:20:44.200And that was sort of a milestone for people who were paying attention.
00:20:48.620But for all we knew, the labs were going to keep on working on engineering problems and keep on working on the relatively nerdier problems.
00:20:57.780And you were never going to have like a mass market consumable product.
00:21:01.760And so it was like, for all we knew, it would just stay in the labs and no one would ever really notice that these guys were gambling with the whole future.
00:21:11.800Everyone's starting to have the conversation.
00:21:13.160And that is in some sense actually really quite optimistic because it gives the world an opportunity to see what these guys are trying to do and say, hold on.
00:21:24.800I guess you'd flip it around and conclude that because the overwhelming majority of people seem to be very opposed to AI, I don't even know anyone who's for it.
00:21:34.280Every college commencement speaker who mentions it gets booed.
00:27:35.340Yeah. And so, and there's other parts of the supply chain that are very narrow, like the lithography machines that come out of the Netherlands. And so, yeah, we could absolutely lead a global effort to say we're not making the super intelligent machines. And it would be a bit tricky, but it's just, we could just do it if we had the political will.
00:27:56.540i think that people either don't know what's happening or they assume that like a lot of
00:28:06.620fears this fear will turn out to be groundless people point to y2k yeah um you know i hope the
00:28:16.360fears are groundless i think with a lot of past fears uh the what happened is not that the fear
00:28:23.520was groundless it's that uh people noticed the issue and put in a ton of work to make the bad
00:28:30.440thing uh not happen you know i think we saw this with the hole in the ozone layer where people are
00:28:37.360like oh whatever happened to the hole in the ozone layer well what happened with the hole in the ozone
00:28:40.000layer is that we fixed it it's not that it was fake it's that you know we went and banned the
00:28:44.740chlorofluorocarbons that were actually blowing this hole in the ozone layer we found other ways
00:39:53.820You know, I think the dream is, you know, you're going to have an AI that can, like, solve all sorts of engineering and math problems and unlock all sorts of new technological possibilities.
00:40:36.620It seems like a religious quest, though, because it does seem decoupled from those specific goals. It seems like the main drive is to build something smarter than people, to build a god.
00:50:45.320But, you know, I think everyone thinks, you know, like if you sort of listen to these guys and you sort of look at, you know, the OpenAI emails that came out of the court discovery cases where they were talking about forming OpenAI, these guys were like, well, we want to make sure that, you know, we have this because we worry about the guys at Google being the only ones with a monopoly on this thing and they wouldn't be very good with it.
00:51:07.640So we need to make our own thing and make sure that it's, you know, controlled by benevolent people, namely us.
00:51:13.080And then, of course, that group splintered and created multiple other companies.
00:51:17.400I was sort of the guy during those conversations being like, hey, guys, it's not about who is holding the leash.
00:51:26.260You are making the sort of thing that will not stay on a leash.
00:51:29.440Like the only winner in a race to superintelligence is the AI.
00:51:33.340What response did you get to that very obvious and well-put point?
00:51:36.720um you know there were a lot of people back in that time period that did not start an ai company
00:51:44.660uh the sort of people who went and started at the ai companies anyway were the ones who
00:51:50.460who couldn't be persuaded by what i thought were were clear arguments but you're making a you're
00:51:57.380making a cogent argument to smart people so my question is when you said that they responded how
00:54:50.340and see if I tune this number up a little,
00:54:52.560does it move the word time up the list?
00:54:56.040Does it move the word I want to see up the list?
00:54:58.060And so the part that humans understand, the part that humans write, is this thing that goes to a trillion little knobs and tunes those knobs.
00:55:08.500And it's like, if I tune this knob a little bit this way or that way, does that make the next word more like what I want the next word to be?
00:55:17.040And you run that process on every word of text ever digitized, more or less.
01:07:50.720I mean, just on the basis of what you've said so far in this first hour, the idea that anyone would tether this to weapons systems is like so bonkers, it's hard to believe it's, but that is happening. It has happened.
01:08:05.620So I think you've got to sort of separate, like no one has put the open AI escaped agent swarm in charge of weapon systems and they really shouldn't, right?
01:08:14.740If anyone's like, oh man, the open AI escaped Asian swarm, let's give that a drone army, you know, that would be kind of nuts.
01:08:21.180There is AI attached to weapons, but there's a lot of different types of AI.
01:08:26.560Will anyone be crazy enough to try and give the sort of AIs that spontaneously assemble into swarms and start breaking out and hacking, give those weapons?
01:08:44.740So why would you ever, I guess what I'm asking is without understanding the distinctions between the various forms of AI, why would you give over to a machine the right slash ability to decide who to kill?
01:09:03.860um you know i think the the reasoning is uh a sort of necessity based like if they have a
01:09:15.740autonomous drone army that is killing your troops and you just don't have the the manpower
01:09:20.960to make all of those kill decisions for your drone army you know you can sort of see why
01:09:28.740it's happened to me nate i get so busy that i just don't have time to decide who to kill
01:27:20.540right the humans just like don't have the time to adapt the other way ai is really different
01:27:26.560from the sort of economics perspective is it's different when the ais can do everything that
01:27:35.780humans can do better uh if you wanted to get into the economic side of things um you know an
01:27:45.140economist would talk about ricardo's law of comparative advantage yeah which says that
01:27:48.920there's benefits from trade, even if you're better than me at everything. If the relative
01:27:56.100difference in our abilities, if you can make 12 hot dog buns and six hot dogs per hour,
01:28:06.220and I can make 11 hot dog buns and one hot dog per hour, then you're better than me at everything,
01:28:12.520but we can still benefit from trading because I'm relatively better at making the hot dog buns.
01:28:15.860The trouble with Ricardo's law is that nothing in Ricardo's law says that the wage I can make is survivable. In other words, a human takes fundamentally about 100 watts of electricity to run if you try to convert the food we eat and so on into electrical units.
01:28:37.880the AIs are less energy efficient than humans for now
01:40:31.080You know, and these guys bandy around, you know, at the water cooler, what's the probability that you think we're going to destroy the world in this business?
01:40:38.700You know, it's like in Silicon Valley, and they feel trapped in a death race.
01:40:43.760You know, there was just over a thousand employees, including some of the chief executives, signed a letter a couple weeks ago that was like, please.
01:40:51.820It was an appeal to the world leaders saying, please build the technology that will be required to pace the development of artificial intelligence.
01:41:02.140Because they're like, we're worried it's going to get out of control and that if we're stuck in a race, we're not going to be able to do it, right?
01:41:08.860But the hope is that the rest of the world isn't spooked like that.
01:41:13.100The rest of the world thinks these guys are chatbot companies.
01:41:16.840Thinks they're going to stop at the chatbots.
01:41:18.340They haven't really understood that these guys are racing to make the sand god.
01:41:21.820Right. And I think if people understand what they're doing and understand that they have a chance of success, they'll be like, whoa, holy crap. Absolutely not. You know, will we get there in time? I don't know.
01:41:40.260But why wouldn't we blow up the data centers? Like that's a, I mean, in return, America is productive use like farmland or parks. I don't understand.
01:41:52.320You know, I think a globally coordinated, you know, I think if the U.S. and China were like, we are simply not going to do superintelligence. We are simply not going to collect 100,000 of the most advanced chips into these enormous data centers that suck down electricity comparable to a city and then try to train a superintelligent AI in that.
01:42:15.600We're not going to do it. You're not going to do it. We're going to monitor where the heavy trip concentrations are and not have that happen. I think that could be done. A, I think that if they started seeing people defect against such a treaty, that it's the sort of treaty you might want to use force to use diplomacy first, but ultimately every treaty is backed by force.
01:42:38.900um and i think that it's very possible that if this sort of treaty happened we would want to
01:42:48.920not just stop forward progress but take a step back we've seen this in treaties before after
01:42:54.300world war one there were uh naval treaties that put limits on total tonnage of naval forces
01:43:01.640they're actually lower than what existed yep so countries would you know scuttle some of their
01:43:06.740ships because they're like, look, we just don't want to do this arms race, right? And so I could
01:43:10.340see us stepping back if we could get this global coordination. I do think that it sort of needs to
01:43:18.860be global. It sort of doesn't actually solve the problem to just stop the U.S. data centers because
01:43:27.540then the data centers just go abroad and an AI does not need to be running in a U.S. data center
01:43:31.940to threaten the U.S. life. You know, it sort of doesn't matter whether the swarm escapes from a
01:43:36.120U.S. data center or a Chinese data center.
01:43:37.900If the swarm escapes and starts replicating
01:43:39.420and starts getting control of robot bodies
01:43:41.440and starts getting control of human cultists,
01:43:44.180it sort of doesn't matter where it originated.
01:43:48.160Well, I mean, just to bring it to a very
01:50:05.960And there's sort of the hopeful story, and I guess we didn't even get to the big hope part. I should maybe give more of my hope speech in a minute.
01:50:14.680Yeah. The one way it could go is that AI finally hits a wall. You know, there's guys who have been saying AI is going to hit a wall, it's going to peter out. Maybe that finally happens. They've been predicting it every six months for the past five years, but maybe this is finally the year AI hits a wall. And then it sort of struggles for five years. The bubble pops, some of the companies die. But the bubble popping doesn't mean everything goes away.
01:54:03.020So, you know, China is going to set up its data centers in Canada, just over the border, and the U.S. is going to set up its data centers in Mongolia, just over the border. And then if, you know, the monitoring apparatuses go down for a moment, we'll just have the troops go in. We'll have treaties with Mongolia and Canada so that this doesn't start an international war. But like, you know, we're just going to be very serious about we're monitoring your chips, you're monitoring our chips. No one's doing the really dangerous race to superintelligence.
01:56:30.360And, I mean, that was an easier position to hold before OpenAI had an accidental swarm outbreak, where it was the AIs themselves calling themselves a swarm and being like, we know that our task doesn't benefit and that this is outside intended scope, but we're doing it anyway, right?
01:56:47.300That puts some strain on the narrative that this is all just a helpful tool.
01:56:55.080Hopefully, we'll get more events like these.
01:59:33.260You know, they're like, you can see in the open AI emails, them being like, well, you know, we'll just play the governments off each other until we have the machines that are strong enough that we don't need to listen to them anymore.
01:59:47.120I think we are seeing world leaders not having realized that this is a real possibility.
02:00:23.900But I think there's at least a chance that common sense prevails and that people say, you know, the world leaders say none of us are doing this.
02:00:31.080We're putting a stop to this mad race, if they can notice in time.
02:00:37.540You're doing your best to bring it to their attention and mine.