Valuetainment - October 10, 2026


“We’re Going To Race Off A Cliff” – Why A Former OpenAI Researcher Wants AI Regulation

Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
OpenAI Nick Bostrom Leopold Dario
Mortgage Applications Hit LOW Since 1995 - Great Time to Buy!

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

202.93

Word count

1,790

Sentence count

132

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You brought up Leopold earlier.
00:00:01.540 Yeah.
00:00:02.580 Leopold got the sequencing right.
00:00:07.560 Got fired.
00:00:08.580 Story goes out.
00:00:09.760 Hey, here's my manifesto.
00:00:12.040 You know, when he wrote down, we talked about it earlier.
00:00:13.760 And in it, he says, it's not really such and such stocks that we have to worry about.
00:00:17.940 We have to put our money into this and this.
00:00:19.780 And it's the infrastructure that's going to make a lot of money.
00:00:21.820 And for the most part, he did well.
00:00:24.520 You know, people made a lot of money.
00:00:25.500 And then stories came out about how much of it was on margin and how much risk he was taking, four to one, two to one, three to one.
00:00:31.840 But his outcome was, I'm going to quit.
00:00:35.360 I'm going to write this paper.
00:00:36.720 It's going to go viral.
00:00:37.940 I'm going to start a firm.
00:00:39.340 I'm going to raise money.
00:00:40.500 I think GitHub guys got involved at the beginning.
00:00:42.600 He got some big names that got involved.
00:00:44.740 What's your financial next move?
00:00:47.340 What's your financial benefit of doing this?
00:00:49.140 There is no financial benefit.
00:00:50.580 So, Leopold, I think.
00:00:51.460 So, you have nothing new to launch in the next three to six months.
00:00:53.920 I'm not going to try and milk this.
00:00:55.300 I'm not doing anything.
00:00:56.300 I'm going to, one way I will exploit the crazy temporary fame of the situation
00:01:02.920 is through having, you know, conversations with lots of researchers I respect
00:01:07.360 that previously would have made less time for me,
00:01:09.300 and now I can talk more about the situation.
00:01:11.180 And there's work I intend to do.
00:01:12.420 There's lots of work, but I'm not trying to make any more money from this.
00:01:16.460 How much money did you leave on the table by doing this?
00:01:18.900 By leaving Anthropic.
00:01:19.940 By leaving Anthropic.
00:01:20.920 You know, I'm not going to say the exact detail, but seven figures.
00:01:24.080 Seven figures.
00:01:24.820 Yeah.
00:01:25.240 Okay, but let's go a little bit deeper.
00:01:27.540 If you would have stayed five years and you would have done your part,
00:01:29.480 you would have moved up potentially $50 million, $100 million?
00:01:32.880 Five years.
00:01:33.440 That's the problem.
00:01:34.000 So I'm thinking about that, and it's like it's not going to be the same in five years.
00:01:37.480 In five years, everything looks different.
00:01:39.620 Okay.
00:01:39.800 And I think the people that are talking about this,
00:01:41.600 they have these sums of money and these plans for the future,
00:01:43.620 and they're just not thinking about how crazy it's going to get.
00:01:45.360 So to you, one, you're not a socialist leftist, that you belong to this NGO,
00:01:52.720 that you're a pro-Bernie Sanders,
00:01:55.020 you're one, a capitalist, free market, libertarian,
00:01:57.360 you don't believe in the climate change
00:01:58.440 is gonna end the tech though,
00:01:59.840 you know, COVID handling wasn't right.
00:02:01.500 You know, you thought it was a little bit too much.
00:02:03.580 Okay, check.
00:02:04.520 Let's set that aside.
00:02:05.360 Number two, there is not a,
00:02:07.120 I'm about to announce a hedge fund private equity firm.
00:02:09.540 And this is why our private equity focuses on AI regulation
00:02:13.020 and da-da-da-da.
00:02:13.780 You're not gonna launch anything like that.
00:02:15.540 So how are you gonna make money?
00:02:17.560 How are you making money right now?
00:02:18.680 Luckily, I have this money from OpenAI, right?
00:02:20.460 And I think I will get a job.
00:02:21.560 I mean, I'm going to get a job doing,
00:02:22.720 some form of within the space within the space and i think the job will most likely be around
00:02:27.880 predicting where ai will go trying to share that writing with other people and also i really like
00:02:34.140 i said it sounds crazy it sounds cultish things are going to change so much in the next few years
00:02:39.880 unemployment is going to be a problem when we release when we can automate a lot of white collar
00:02:44.000 jobs you know i have enough money for a few years and i really don't know what the world looks like
00:02:51.060 If I'm wrong, I can get a job in a few years.
00:02:53.160 That'll be great.
00:02:53.920 But I don't think I'm wrong.
00:02:55.700 Got it.
00:02:56.220 So for you, if you're hedging of you being right or wrong,
00:02:59.800 if you're right, you have money and you want to do something
00:03:03.000 to make a difference the next 12, 24 months.
00:03:05.400 It sounds like that's your timeline.
00:03:06.620 You think five years is too late.
00:03:08.800 I don't think necessarily that the really bad thing happens,
00:03:11.340 but I think that the critical decisions,
00:03:13.400 the crucial decisions about whether we slow down or not,
00:03:15.480 they will happen in the next couple of years.
00:03:17.460 If we're going to slow down or not.
00:03:18.820 Exactly.
00:03:19.140 And you think the next two years, there's still time to slow down to prevent the madness?
00:03:24.460 Yes.
00:03:24.720 Why is it specifically two years?
00:03:26.580 If you look at the pace of the improvement, the specific technology that is scary is when it can automate its own development.
00:03:34.680 So when the job of AI research gets automated.
00:03:38.600 And I think all the extrapolation suggests that that could quite likely come in the next few years.
00:03:42.660 This is the whole RSI thing, recursive self-improvement.
00:03:45.120 I think roughly around that time is the crucial time where the race will start, where China will lock in, and it'll be China versus the U.S.
00:03:53.940 Everyone will be taking it seriously.
00:03:55.140 There'll be, like, fear.
00:03:57.260 Opening an anthropic won't be sharing the models with the public anymore.
00:03:59.980 It will be internal, government-only, full-on race.
00:04:03.360 That's when the crucial decisions happen. 0.54
00:04:05.260 Like, whether we go into this race or not, I think that gets decided this decade.
00:04:08.780 Do you trust the government having this more than free market?
00:04:11.200 I don't trust, you know, any specific person or entity.
00:04:14.500 I just think right now the free market is not going to handle it well.
00:04:17.720 Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice.
00:04:22.340 I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community.
00:04:25.500 Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime.
00:04:29.840 I wonder if my out-of-office has a forever setting.
00:04:33.280 An IG private wealth advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business,
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00:04:47.240 And that's why.
00:04:52.360 Why do you think they're not going to handle it?
00:04:53.720 Yeah, that's a great question.
00:04:54.620 Because the motivation is going to be what?
00:04:55.680 Money.
00:04:56.180 I think actually if I talk about my personal motivation, right?
00:04:58.340 So there are people who I thought this was dangerous for a really long time, right?
00:05:02.860 Like before I even joined.
00:05:04.240 And when I joined OpenAI, I thought it was dangerous.
00:05:06.400 At what age did you think this was dangerous?
00:05:09.540 15, 16.
00:05:10.460 How old are you right now?
00:05:11.120 27?
00:05:11.700 Yeah.
00:05:12.380 So 15, 16?
00:05:14.060 Yeah.
00:05:14.600 So in 2015, you thought this was dangerous?
00:05:16.920 Yeah, there was a book called Super Intelligence by Nick Bostrom
00:05:19.040 that was quite influential.
00:05:20.340 I read it in school.
00:05:25.220 I think like, yeah, so this image of me having worked in AI
00:05:29.820 and then suddenly got scared is wrong.
00:05:31.620 I think I've always been scared.
00:05:33.140 But then it's like, why do you join a lab in the first place?
00:05:35.780 And there are other people who didn't join a lab, right?
00:05:38.600 They were also scared.
00:05:40.600 They maybe behaved more ethically.
00:05:41.680 they didn't join but then when they say this stuff no one listens right i joined the lab and
00:05:48.020 i got all sorts of things that they didn't you know like money and status and some like respect
00:05:52.240 for working there and then i quit and that's a selfish thing to do to say i'm going to work at
00:05:56.640 this technology and get the status from doing this even though i think it's dangerous but then it
00:06:01.080 also gives you the power to make change does that make sense like this uh you get power and i think
00:06:05.680 the same thing is like what dario is doing so you know anthropic have been scared and they said well
00:06:11.340 no one's listening to us we're gonna have to be a player enter and so dario's worked like they've
00:06:16.440 worked so hard in the last they've caught up to open ai it's very impressive anthropic have worked
00:06:20.500 like absolute dogs to like overtake and become the main player and they did that because they're like
00:06:25.380 we need the power and that's the free market right the free market incentivizes you
00:06:30.240 to get your own power your own wealth so you can make change the problem is that's gonna keep
00:06:36.200 happening. And people are going to keep doing this. It's the story of OpenAI. OpenAI did that
00:06:41.560 because they were scared of DeepMind. They were like, we're going to do it. Dario did it. He was
00:06:45.060 scared of OpenAI. He was like, I want the power. Even just like me, it's a small story, but why did
00:06:49.520 I work and help? It's for my own power. And if we let the free market determine in the next few
00:06:55.020 years, we're going to race off a cliff because everyone is looking out for their own money,
00:07:00.920 their own power. No one has the ability to sort of slow down a few years ahead. It's this like
00:07:06.180 race problem where everyone just like and I don't blame them right I don't blame if you're a 22
00:07:10.780 year old right now and you've done AI I don't blame you if you get a job at Anthropic and work
00:07:15.520 there because what else are you going to do if you're like how else are you going to try and
00:07:18.700 try and help so everyone is following their own incentives and that's why we need in this case
00:07:23.660 we need bigger regulation because yeah in any other technology I'm happy with this I think
00:07:27.980 innovation from competition is great everywhere except if the technology is this level of
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