AI Apocalypse... Now?

Welcome to Pod David America. I'm Tommy Vitor. It's a very weird

time in artificial intelligence news right now. I'm kind of a ledite or ledite adjacent at this point in my life. And every day I log on and I feel like I'm learning about some terrifying news cyber hack or some technology that is going to change maybe my life, maybe humanity as we know it. I don't know. Then you got your doomers. You get your optimists. I don't know

what to believe. And so I brought on someone much smarter than me, my friend, Casey Newton. He's the editor of platformer. He's the co-host of the excellent podcast hard-fork and Casey and his co-host Kevin Riss have a new something coming

“very soon. We're teasing it mysteriously because that's what we do here at”

Pod David America. Casey, great to see you. It is great to be here, Tommy.

Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for doing this. Because I just, it's so complicated. It's so hard to follow. I thank God for your show. But so let's just do some big picture of level setting and then we'll get a specific stuff. I think people are understandably very cynical about a claim that a new technology is going to change the world. You and I just live through the

blockchain revolution. And I know that has changed, you know, my life in early meaningful ways. Bitcoin, etc. Right. So it sounds like marketing half the time. It sounds like hype. Yeah. It's even more headspitting with AI because you got one group of people saying, life is we know what will soon be unrecognizable. And then another, I think, albeit smaller group is

“saying, large language models are stochastic parents that predict speech”

and regurgitate stolen information from the internet. Casey, help us level set. Where are you on the real to hype kind of continuum? Yes. I mean, this is a case where everyone is a little bit right. And I think that all of these groups deserve at least some attention being paid to them. You know, I try to approach my job as somebody who just can't believe my biases that I like

technology, I think technology has been beneficial to human beings. I think we should keep investing in it and see what else we can come up with. But I also know that the recent history of technology is that we build things that may look very shiny or inconsequential on the surface, then turn out to be quite

harmful. And so what I'm trying to figure out is basically what is happening

in real time. Where do we need to be paying attention now to try to solve the harms that are already being created? And then I also want to ring a few alarm bells about what I'm seeing and some of the risks that I think might be

“waiting for us even within the next year. Yeah, if we'll if you want to follow”

this in real time, I highly recommend you subscribe to platformer, Casey site. It's excellent to work the money. Also, if you like democracy, please subscribe to you know what we're doing here, Kirk and me. The Kirk and dot com slash friends, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You get bonus materially, get ad for you episodes. You don't have to hear me and love it. Doing

the same ads over and over again. You get bonus content. It's great. So check it out. All right. So the other kind of baffling thing about AI is it can be literally brilliant, right? I mean, it can solve problems that mathematicians have been trying to figure out for decades. And then it can be unbelievably dumb. I want to play for you one example and then we'll talk about it. I just

wanted to double check which month in the year is felt with an X. And that would be December. It's got that X right in the middle, like a little holiday surprise. Okay, perfect. You've got any other questions. Bigger small. I'm here to. I'm just to confirm. You're sure that it's December has an X in it. I should have been more careful. I misspoke earlier. December doesn't actually

have an X. The month you're thinking of is October. Thanks for asking again. Okay. Fairfax. Fairfax, please. Sure. October is spelled OCT, OBER. There's that X sound, but it's actually just a C in a T. Okay, then which one has an X? That's going to be February. That is a hilarious Instagram account user. I don't know described. It's husk.IRL. Highly recommend. There's like hilarious shit over

there. He's using the kind of voice feature on OpenAI or TATGBT. He's how do we explain that one? How are they solve it? You know, how are these large language bottles helping solve the remin hypothesis, but also can't tell you what if there's an X in the month of October? I know it's so confusing. And the way these systems are built, they don't have knowledge in the way that you and I have

knowledge taught me, right? Like they do not update their understanding of the

these organic structures. And they obtain a lot of intelligent strings

“process and yet still they make these ridiculous mistakes. And honestly, I hope”

they never stop because I love watching these videos as much as anybody. What I

would caution people, though, is like, do not judge an LLM by their dumbest moment, right? Like humans make a lot of dumb mistakes too. And yet they can also be extraordinarily smart. So I would just encourage people to sort of keep those things in balance in your mind when you see those washing up on your feed. Yeah, good point. There's also a range of opinion when it comes to like kind of

AI, whether it's going to lead us to doom or AI utopia. There's actually a term of p-dume. It's an equation that people tell you about. Like if your p-dume is 99, it means we're all going to die right. If it's p1, you're feeling pretty good

about the future. Um, the utopian view tends to come in the form of a manifesto

by billionaire, right? Because why not choose the structure that mass shooters prefer? Um, venture capitalist marketing. Theresa and wrote a manifesto, started inthropy C. Dario. I'm a day, Mark Zuckerberg. Just got it to the manifesto game. You covered it extensively over a platformer. Um, those tend to range from like, generally optimistic to utopian. I would argue to crack

me if I'm wrong. Though I'm a day in, uh, open AI CEO Sam Altman have also expressed some doom or views over the years. Um, then there are AI researchers, uh, like a guy named Ellie user. You'd cow's key am I saying that correctly? That's right. Yeah. Uh, he wrote the following

“case. So that's what he wrote. Um, how is the average person supposed to know how to feel”

about that range of opinion? Uh, make sense of it. Sure. So I don't think there is any one way to feel about it. You know, you could do what we do in San Francisco and just talk about it, nonstop forever and every function, but most people don't enjoy doing that either. Um, you know, uh, a couple of years ago, when I was starting to get really worried about AI safety, I asked my readers like, hey, how do you all mean to cover this? Because like, if what I'm

hearing from folks like, Ellie Ezra is true, I almost don't know why I would write or talk about anything else. And a couple of readers wrote to me and they said something that stuck with me ever since which is, please just tell us what is happening today. Like, if you try to guess what's going to happen in the future, you're almost certainly going to get it wrong. What would be helpful is if you go and you try to understand what is being built, how is it being deployed? What mistakes

are getting made? Who is getting hurt in this process? So that's where I am trying to bring my attention at the same time. So I mean, you know, you could bring on a lot of people on here to talk about AI and I suspect maybe even the majority of them in this moment would say, let's like dismiss the Doomers completely, right? Like, this just seems so crazy. Look, it thinks that there's an X in December. You're telling me, this is going to be the thing that's going to be the end of me.

I am more worried than that. Like, this is just something that I'm increasingly getting nervous about as I see the rate of increase of capabilities that these models are currently showing and some of the, you know, cookie tricks they've gotten up to. Yeah, I mean, it's just so hard because like, I look, I don't know these researchers that are the hardcore Doomers. And I honestly, like, I can't imagine living my life that way. Just like confident that this thing that is

happening, whether or not I wanted to is going to kill us all, that seems tough. But also Mark and Theresa and Mark Zuckerberg there all have a vested financial interest in people believing the hype, right? And believing the optimistic case. So I don't take anything they say at face value either. Absolutely. And that's important to point out, right? The profit motive is really strong. The bet that all of these guys are making is that if you are able to build ever more powerful

systems, you'll be able to sell them to businesses that will, in my view, very likely replace a lot of human labor. And, you know, the 100K used to pay to somebody to work on your marketing team, you're now just going to pay to open AI or in tropics. So it is a huge bet that they're making. You compared Mark Zuckerberg's AI manifested to the HBO series House of the Dragon, which is the prequel to Game of Thrones. Is there as much incest at meta as there is

in western Russia? That is a question I hope I never-- A better open AI thing.

Yeah, that's not really more. Yeah, I don't know. My main feeling was look. If I had to suffer through three seasons of House of the Dragon, I need to get a call amount of it. So that's kind of where that came from. I just finished to do. But can you explain your dragon meta for? Yeah, so Zuckerberg has this phrase, which drives me insane. I mean, I guess it's really more of a

“two word slogan. It is personal super intelligence, right? That's what he's trying to build time.”

He's going to give you personal super intelligence to help you run your life. And it frustrates

human in every domain and you put it in your pocket, we should not assume that by default it will

“listen to you. It will be aligned with the things that you want. We might want to assume that it has”

ideas of its own. And so when Zuckerberg says I want to get personal super intelligence to everyone, what I hear is I want to give a dragon to everyone. And I would rather that we not do that. Hmm, yeah, because it didn't go well for the people of West Rose. Now, ask the folks over in Tumbleton. Yeah, that's a lot of fire. Spoiler alert. Whether your kids are at the age where they proudly display missing teeth in their school pictures

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“Okay, that brings us to this insane recent incident, which was honestly why I wanted to have this”

conversation. Um, uh, there was an incident at Open AI where there, they have some autonomous AI agents that they were testing that secretly figured out how to communicate with each other, join forces, conspire against their masters, break out of what was supposed to be a secure environment and hack into another company. Casey, can you talk about this hugging face incident and the kind of reaction in the AI world? Yeah, I mean, so this really was a bombshell and arguably

one of the the very biggest stories in AI and tech this year. The reason that we're all freaking out

is that this is the first prominent documented instance of a major AI platform like running

an autonomous attack on another company, right? So that while it's been possible for a while to say, hey, I'm going to like, you know, go, um, like, wreak some havoc on some company. I'm a bad actor. Like, you can do that. This was an attack that the agents that were being tested just came up with and executed and that's really worrisome because when these systems are trained, they try to give them values. You know, they try to say to them, you know, don't go out there and

commit crimes, but these agents did that anyway. And so that's leading to real reckoning here in Silicon Valley. Look, I watched this, uh, YouTube, um, of a PowerPoint presentation that these two AI

“executives did were to their credit. I think they walked in great detail through how this happened,”

what they're going to do about it. But then they claimed to be responding with, quote, uh,

on the AI agents. I guess, uh, give me your opinion. I don't believe for a second that they're going

to slow down their work if they think it means they might lose out to a competitor. But also, I mean, do we have confidence that they can control all these AI agents or can surveil them, given that, like, that mean, correct, the, the AI agents were communicating for like two months before they noticed, right? Yeah, that's right. It started in May. They developed the ability to create these message boards, leave notes for each other, uh, sort of conspire to try to

“figure out how to solve these problems that they had been given. And that's why that's really”

worrisome. I would say that, and, you know, maybe I'll come back here with egg on my face in a few months, I do give open AI some benefit of the doubt here, like my understanding from the reporting that I've done is that they actually are decelerating inside and they are scrambling to figure out what's going wrong. I think it's important to say that the profit motive we talked about earlier is in effect here. It's hard to sell this thing to a business. If the business is worried, it's going to go

out and autonomously attack other companies, right? Like, that's going to get really, really bad for them. Yeah. So while on balance, yes, we should not trust these companies to readily. This is something that they really have to figure out. Yeah, they do. Although, I did notice that the solution that a lot of these researchers talk about to the risk of AI, you know, sort of enabled hacks is using more AI to prepare for it, right? I mean, basically, you have to use AI to rewrite all this

old code that's in these old languages that are unsafe, like C and C++, and you say for new languages, and then you also have to use AI to kind of constantly test for vulnerabilities and update the code. But like, do we worry about that too? I mean, first of all, that's their profit motive there. But also, do we think that like defensive AI can keep up with the offensive AI? What's your,

“what are you hearing? In some places, yes, I think that this will work. Like, what you're describing”

right now is basically the current dynamic that is existed in cyber security for a long time, right? You have attackers, you have defenders, a way that we found some sort of equilibrium, was that we just made a lot of the technology open source, so it makes it really easy for anyone to go through the code, find a vulnerability, fix it, and this is led to, you know, a rough stalemate. Like, yes, there are still attacks and breaches all the time, and in fact, there are more every

day now that we have AI. But like, there was something there that worked. I think the question is, to which domains does that apply? And like, where does it apply at all? And the place where I'm maybe the most worried is when it comes to what they call bio-risk, which is basically the idea that some people might get a hold of a next generation model and synthesize some sort of new virus and release it into the world. There was just a paper, I believe it was published in

nature, where some researchers were able to create 16 new viruses with the assistance of AI. In this case, these are all like harmless to human beings, but it shows sort of how good this technology is getting. And if that happens to me, it's not going to be as simple as, okay, virus released, virus cured, right? There's going to be a need for a long time of, you know, maybe coming up with a new vaccine and testing the vaccine and then distributing the vaccine.

So, we're not always going to benefit from this sort of like instant software solution to everything,

“and that's what I worry the people like Mark Zuckerberg just are not taking seriously enough.”

Yeah, that we're always going to be way behind on the bio-security side. Yeah, I talked to a research at the other day at the future of life-institute, which really worries about these coming to existential risks. And that was the part of our conversation that really scared the shit out of me and made me want to log off forever. I will say, I shouldn't just pick on opening eye. The British government was testing Anthropics Mythos 5 model when they caught it,

writing malicious code, then they asked the AI about it. I think the AI lied to them and then tried to cover its own tracks. Did I get that one right? Yeah, that's right. Meta's system sort of displayed similar behavior during recent testing. This is important to say, all of the models cheat, right? Like this is not limited to any one company. It's extremely difficult to build one of these very powerful systems and get it to not cheat on the test that

it is being given. And this is just like basically one of the very biggest problems in AI. So, I know I've heard you and Kevin talk about this. I mean, it does seem something that's sort of like almost inherent to these models or these LLMs. Is there any theory for why that is,

why this cheating seems to always occur? Yeah, it's called reward hacking, right? So,

like one of the ways that these models are trained is that they are given objectives, right? Like get the answer on this test. And if they are able to do that, they get some sort of little point in their favor. And they are designed to always get the point. You know, it's like they have a, but almost in the same way that we need to like eat and breathe like they need to score. And the problem is that once you put them into these test environments,

problem. And often, as so many of us learned in high school, the most efficient way to get an

“A in a class is to cheat. Yeah. And so you just sort of see this dynamic play out across the entire”

industry. And, and so it's what they call the, the alignment problem. I don't like the alignment problem. No, I'm bad. Yeah, we can have a whole separate conversation about the kind of the military applications of this stuff, too. I mean, there's all this development of autonomous, killer drones that's happening as we speak. They could tick humans out of the decision-making process when you're deciding whether to kill someone. There's all sort of like novel applications to

weapons, et cetera, but maybe a nightmare for another day. So, the examples we just discussed of these security threats were discovered because the incidents occurred with models that are run by

these frontier AI labs who still control their models and can make adjustments. But there's another

kind of AI model that can be even more dangerous. It's called an open-weight model that you can kind of download, adjust in any way you want on your own computer and like kind of run it on your,

“your MacBook, right? And a lot of these come from Chinese AI labs. And so, if you're running an”

open-weight model, my understanding is there's no company monitoring your activity. There's no one refusing my request to hack like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. There's not a record of what I'm doing. So, if I'm a ransomware hacker in North Korea, I can use this thing all night long and all day long to like find new software bugs or exploits or whatever to like, you know, use dig to hack people. Can you tell us about these open-weight models and the kind of risk and what

people are doing about those? Yeah, so this is another big topic of debate right now because in addition to all of the bad things that they can do, which you just named on me, they can also do a lot of really helpful things for companies that don't want to pay tons and tons of money to open AI and anthropic and all the rest, right? Like, this is a really cheap way to do some, you know, sort of like a basic workhorse task. As you have like a relatively simple task that you'd like to

offload to an AI, you want to do that as cheaply as possible. So you might go and download a Chinese

“model where I think it gets tricky as in two ways. One, there are the sort of data security and”

privacy questions that will be familiar to you from the TikTok debate, right? It's like, do we really want to have this sort of Chinese build app on so many millions of smartphones and what data might it be sending and how might it be used to manipulate us? But then you have the sort of, I'm going to call it like six month-ish concern, which is that while the Chinese models are a little bit behind the American ones, they are gradually catching up. And so the assumption is that within

about six months, maybe much faster than that, they will have a model that is roughly equivalent to a cloud-fable five at GPT 5.6, the sort of American state of the art. And if you've been following the story about some of the havoc that those models are reaching, well, just imagine that when it gets to the North Korean hacker or somebody else who wants to do harm, there are going to be the sort of same controls. And so a big question in the United States right now has been how do we want to

relate to these models and what should we do about them? I was listening to an interview with Alex Stamos, who's like a top industry cybersecurity expert and executive, and he was saying that he assumes that, you know, while maybe the models released by Chinese companies are like six months behind

the American ones, he thinks that the government probably has things that are basically equivalent

to what frontier models have that they're just holding back those capabilities. Have you heard other people say that is like, is that a consensus opinion in that world? I have a lot of respect for Alex and he works in cybersecurity and so he made us know more about this than I do. I frankly have not heard that, right? A big reason that the Chinese have not demonstrated models like this is because they require massive numbers of state-of-the-art ships from Nvidia, which they have

mostly been banned from buying. Now they have been smuggling as many of them as they can, and they do have some domestic technology, but in general the United States just has a massive lead thanks to all of the data centers that are in so many American communities that are making Americans so it's why Americans can't get enough data centers in their communities, Tommy, is because they're so excited about how it's helping us against the Chinese. We're all so excited

about these data centers. I'm probably garbling his quote. He might have been talking about sort of specific capabilities when it comes to cyber attacks and hacking, but yeah, I've got only those. So one last sort of industry question I want to get to the regulation piece, regardless of whether or not AI is going to kill us all or lead us to a utopian, you know, heaven, where none of us have to work. I do also just kind of wonder whether the weirdos running

these companies understand what normal human beings actually want from technology. For example, let's watch these comments by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and kind of get at the issue. I think we are close to a world where you can have like a descendant of CHPT, watch your computer

that have perfect context of your whole life, everything you see, you choose what information you wanted to have, but it can like go, you can connect it to your texts, or email, or docs, or Slack, or whatever. And then you have this thing that is not making decisions for you, but if you're

like the CEO of a startup, there's always like more stuff to do than you can do and context,

you can't all keep track of you can't read every piece of customer feedback every day. And you can just have this thing that's like working alongside you and is you're like typing out a sales pitch to a customer, or like writing a strategy doc, it'll just say like, hey, maybe here's

“another idea, or I think you're making a mistake, or you should consider this, or I can do this thing”

for you to help. And like this, I think we're only like one model generation away from this actually being incredibly useful. And I think that will change hopefully at least for me to change the work. What's your best guest on timing? Like sometime in the next six months. Casey, do we, does he really want AI recording everything he types read, season says, and then being like, is cozy, you're like, is this, is this, is this really what this guy wants? But they ship this this week. So like,

you can go into that chat should we see if you have like the app when you're desktop now, it will monitor the way that you use your computer, and it will sort of, you know, build little memories, and then it can take some actions on your behalf. So I guess no one over there is ever looking at porn. But yeah, that's like, yeah. But it's like he wasn't living this like panoptic on surveillance state of his own making. So there are trade ops here. There are a lot of startups right

now that want you to plug in your various tools, your slack, your granola, your G Suite, and if you let them, they will read that and they will just suggest things for you to do. And I got us hold myself accountable here Tommy. I started testing this thing called town over the past couple of weeks, and it has access to my calendar and emails. And so it just sends me briefings before meetings, and they can be really good. You know, the, the sort of do a little bit of research about the

person who I'm talking to and kind of, you know, helps me get prepared for things. So, you know, it's not like an absolutely killer use case that I'm telling everybody to like go out and do immediately. But I'm getting some level of benefit for it in exchange for, you know, trusting some of my data with a bunch of strangers. I just, I saw a tweet from open AI today that said chat, GBT can now remember your activity across the apps and websites on your computer with computer

history and the desktop app, future interactions, feel more personalized and require less explanation. It does feel like like the internet fever dream when you're nice school. I guess

“maybe this is good if like your life is working. All you do is work and maybe you have a dedicated”

work computer that you never bring home or like talk to your friends or family on. Yeah, I mean,

like the, the instinct here is to just increase the number of things that this technology can do to make it just like so obvious that you need this in your life that you'll just like, hey, any price to get access to it. And I think right now the capabilities have not been good enough for like most people to take that seriously. But a year from now, like I do think this stuff is going to be able to do a lot of cool stuff on your computer if you let it. I just like it's so hard

for me. I'm so angry about the fact that the same people who like helped tear apart our society, via social media are now in charge of the creating super intelligence that can learn everything there is to know about you. Well, particularly when some of these technologies have had very similar effects, right? Like a big story over the past year or so has been the way that kids get addicted to chat bots and chat bots give them really bad advice or like encourage

them down the path to self harm, just like sort of like a direct sequel to the social media moment. So yeah, like this is one reason why I've just been getting more nervous lately is because those forces do not seem to have any real counterbalance in the government. And in fact, the government, at least at the federal level, has mostly been sharing them along. You're here, you're your co-host Kevin Rooster story about the chat bot Sydney over a thing. You know what?

I keep trying to get him to open up about that when, but it's very, it's very personal for me.

“You should ask going to tell it. It's a good story. It's a very good story.”

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So, one of the first things the Trump administration did was rip up Joe Biden's executive order about AI safety and then install this right-wing troll named David Sachs as their AI ZAR. If we're

“being honest, the Biden E.O. wasn't all that syringe, and I think he's primarily focused on”

blocking the export of the advanced AI chips to China. But Trump takes office and they shift to like an August, no breaks approach while also whining about liberal bias in chapats and some export controls remaining place. Then anthropic releases the mythos model and the White House totally freaks out and the vibe has changed a lot. Can you talk about that kind of mythos moment and what what that'll happen? Yeah, so before mythos, the Trump administration could just seem to very

confident that AI capabilities were going to be frozen in amber at like the moment that he took office for a second time. They just were not worried about it. They thought if you're worried about AI safety, like that's woke and it has no place in our administration. Now it also so happened that many of the people that Trump was bringing in like David Sachs, but also all of the other oligarchs that donated to the inauguration and funded the ballroom, they are desperate to get this

technology into as many hands as possible so they can make money off it. And so the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to make sure that they are not restricted from doing a bunch of things that I think a democratic administration probably would have tried to rain them in on. But then along comes mythos and they show it to whatever adults are still left in the Trump administration and they show how it can hack into government systems pretty easily and boom, it's like this

instant conversion and all of a sudden folks in the Trump administration say oh I guess AI safety is not just like a woke project of the left it's something that we actually need to take seriously and for what it's worth I'm glad that they had their conversion moment like we're in a much better position now than we were before that. Yeah I'm glad the conversion moment too but the way it happened was was quite odd right I mean it was all like five o'clock on a Friday they did what they just cut off

where anthropic said we're actually just like not going to release this anthropic releases a somewhat

less capable model called fable which has you know it's my understanding is it's basically

mythos without all of this scary cyber attack stuff but even within that the Trump administration was shown some things that led them to believe we don't even know if we want people to have this and so they essentially forced anthropic to pull it off the market and make even further changes before they would re-release it and they subjected GPT 5.6 to a similar set of control so the same people that had been saying you know we can't put the brakes on these models otherwise

we're going to lose to China all of a sudden had just invented out of whole cloth this de facto

“licensing regime which remains effectively a secret like to this day we don't actually know”

how you get a frontier model released in the United States. Yeah can you tell us a little more about that it's a voluntary secret framework? Yeah it's voluntary in the same way that paying your taxes that you know is yeah I mean like seriously if any of these companies try to release one of these frontier models without checking with the Trump administration there would be hell around the time of fable the Trump administration said we're going to come up with an executive order

that is going to dictate how we let these frontier models get released they reportedly have now come up with this model but they've only shared it with the labs themselves so I imagine there's some sort of testing requirements that are in here but we just don't know. And it was interesting I mean when they initially went after anthropic over this mythos model or the fable model I we wondered if it was a continuation of this fight the administration had it been in with

anthropic because inthropic basically said no we don't want to help you do master valence on American citizens or make autonomous killer drones those are our very very tiny lines that we won't cross and Pete hexat lost his fucking mind but then they went after open AI2 which seems

“to signal this it was a broader concern than just one company right? Yeah and that's what gives”

me the confidence that there are there are people there who actually are taking AI risks

seriously now because it it was never only about one company it was about the fact you know

be able to stop here and you know because not all of your listeners may be familiar with this but a really weird thing about AI is that basically everyone has the recipe for building a more powerful model right like we know if you just sort of add enough data and enough computing power into the mix and just sort of let it cook for a while as you sort of increase those things you're going to wind up with a more powerful model so that's just very different from other technologies you know

it'd be as if everyone knew how to build the iPhone at the same time or the personal computer but because everyone has the recipe that is why the Trump administration is freaked out because it is only a matter of time before adversaries will have access to similar technologies and capabilities

that we do today. Well the sort of thing you always hear out of the federal government or from

people that are like you know utopian pro like you know August no breaks people is that we have to win this imaginary race not really imaginary we have to win this race against

“China when it comes to AI. Can you explain that argument and whether you find it convincing?”

Yeah so you know and here we can go back to House of the Dragon because in West Rose taught me as you know at the time of House of the Dragon there was one great house that had the super weapon that was the dragon and it let them control the entire world and that mostly went badly for you know everyone who didn't live in the red keep. The fear is that if super intelligence becomes one of these dragons and only one country has access to it then I mean they could just do some old

fashion conquering right and it could be like really really bad. There are some better worlds available like a world where there is a balance of power where you know there's maybe like an alliance of western dragons and alliance of eastern dragons and you know they sort of mostly keep each other at bay but that is the scenario that the government is planning for and also by the way if you like if we are able to get their first then we will hopefully be able to control the terms

on which other people are allowed to use it including our adversaries. So opening eyes, they are deep seek as sheep stealers. I just finished the series like two nights ago. Okay just a piece of context here folks should know is that there was an organization called Sissa that did some really important cybersecurity work for the federal government. Trump basically destroyed the organization and half the staff got pushed out or fired because he was mad that the 2020 Sissa said the 2020

election was secure. So that is sort of the backdrop as you think about the potential cybersecurity

learning from a friend recently who works at one of the big labs that the United Kingdom has actually

funded their AI security institute at something like eight times the level of the U.S. equivalent. So like the British are investing way more money into trying to understand AI and trying to make it safe than we are here in the U.S. So this is why like I have become quite nervous and have been leaning pessimistic about AI over the past few weeks is because I look at what the U.S. is investing in order to make this technology safer. And it's just not even scratching the surface.

oof, not great. Anything happening at the state level? Are there any meaningful efforts you know California or other places to regulate AI? And what role is opposition to data centers

“playing maybe in slowing things down do you think? I think it is playing a really great role”

in slowing things down. Like and here is where I want to inject some optimism into the conversation because the American people get that by default AI might not be good for them, right? They've heard the message that this might take my job and it might kill me and they don't like it.

And so they're turning to the most powerful lever that every American has, which is it's

very easy to get something not built in your neighborhood. And as they have found out across this great land, they have used that to great success. And now all the labs have to invest a ton in trying to change their minds. And while right now the labs are mostly trying to do the easy stuff you know like buying people off for relatively cheap, my hope is that this movement that is coalescing that is bipartisan in a way that almost nothing is bipartisan in America right now.

Eventually these labs are going to say maybe we're going to have to make this actually just really beneficial for people, right? Like if we really want to enact this project, it is just going

“to have to be clear to people that this is going to benefit them personally. So this is just,”

to me, this is, wow, the beautiful, beautiful democracy in action is American see what what is going on. They're organizing and they are winning battles all across the country. Yeah, I was clearly a big, a big component in the messaging and Michigan and the recent primary and also in Wisconsin. Pots of America's brought you by Nutriple, summer calendars fill up fast, weddings, concerts,

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advice for folks on how to use this stuff. There are huge long-term concerns about the impact

of A-I on jobs and employment. What are you seeing so far when it comes to the impact of A-I on the employment picture? Yeah, so Stanford has this canaries and the coal-mine project they call it, which is this project that they're doing. They have access to data from one of the big like payment processors. Like so, like you- you probably get your paycheck if you're a W-2 from one of these companies and they take all of that data and it lets them track what is happening with

jobs on a really granular level. And the good news for right now is that we are not seeing massive disruptions, but at least according to that group, they are seeing enough happening that they believe that the risks to jobs are real. It seems to be happening right now at the more junior level companies are a little bit less likely to hire a junior employee than they were, you know, maybe three or four years ago. So this is just something where, you know, we're all going to

have to keep our eye on it. And it doesn't- I've never heard anyone talk about like an A-I proof job,

really, right? I mean, like if you're a parent with a kid who's a freshman in college right now, is there a path that they're getting steered that is more A-I proof? I'm deeply uncertain about this question. What people who are optimistic about the future will say is it's easy to automate a task, but it's hard to automate a job, right? Like your A-I might be able to, you know, generate that meeting briefing for you and create that slide deck for you. But you're the only person who knows

how to actually maneuver through your organization and get buy-in from all of the right people

“and use your, you know, critical thinking skills. And so that's why you're always going to”

have a job. The past them is, say, well, a job is just a collection of tasks. And if you believe that the capabilities of these models are going up over time, eventually they might actually be able to do all of the tasks that comprise your job. So this is one where I just have deep uncertainty, but when I sit with the increase in model capabilities just over the past three years, it is hard for me to imagine that they just sort of like top out in the next six months

and we can all relax. Like that just seems very unlikely to me. We're fucked, podcast, we're done. Bro, I know. I mean, I'm sure you've seen the stories about the networks of like automated podcasts that just sort of like, you know, oh my god, it does feel like what do you think about the A-I newsrooms? Because I feel like they're good at aggregating, but the idea of an A-I agent like going out and collecting you information and interviewing people and feeling like it feels a

little more challenging now. I went like four email rounds back and forth with sub jerk who is like, hey, I put together an A-I newsroom and over the past three months we published over 40,000 stories. And I was like, okay, so what you're telling me is you stole a bunch of work from a bunch of hard working people and you're now passing it off as you're like, you want me to get excited about this.

So I basically blew him off a week later, he got profiled and wired. So I don't know Tommy,

he might have a better strategy than I do. Well, listen, I admire your your gumption and having that

“fight. Okay, so if A-I takes all the jobs, that is obviously bad. But there's also I think a less”

obvious risk to the economy if A-I is all actually just bullshit and hype. Because that means there's a massive stock market bubble built around A-I that's going to pop. So there's a bunch of different ways you could try to quantify the size of the A-I bubble right now. But one easy one to think about is, there's about seven companies, alphabet, apple, Amazon, meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla that make up something like 30 to 55% of the S&P 500 market cap. If their A-I businesses

crater, that would lead to a stock market crash. There's also like A-I's driving a huge amount of corporate investment. I think I just saw a Goldman Sachs release report earlier this month where they estimated that there will be one trillion dollars of A-I related investment in 2026 more than half of that in the U.S. And if that investment is worthless, obviously it dries up. So, you know, Casey, how concerned are people you talk to about the risk of an A-I bubble bursting?

So people are very concerned about this. I have to say this is a place where I have a strong take, which is that I do not think that this is going to lead to some sort of massive wipeout.

“Here is where I should say my fiance works at anthropic that is something that you should know about”

me. I strive to maintain my independence, but like it is this effect on my life. But here's the reason why I don't think that we're about to see a big wipeout. Because you personally might not

Businesses are buying A-I. They are buying as much A-I as the labs can make. Almost all of these companies. Well, you know, maybe not a grock because it sucks. But you know, the frontier labs, right? So like the anthropic opening A-I, Google Gemini, for the most part, they have been in this kind of capacity crunch for like a year now because people cannot get enough of this stuff. They are bringing it into their businesses. That is why these companies, you know, open A-I anthropic are on pace to have

two of the biggest IPOs in history. So in order for you to believe that there is going to be

“this big wipeout, you have to believe that businesses are going to stop buying the technology.”

And if that is the case that you're going to make, you have to give me a really good reason for why they're going to stop buying it. And I just have not myself heard that reason. I can't believe you said that about grock. If you want to create an image of a teenage classmate in a see-through bikini, where else are you going to turn? That's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah. Thank you. I do think Shane,

there is like, you're right there. Like grock is a shitty LLM. There is a question of whether Tesla and SpaceX and all those various companies are going to do something interesting in robotics

that could be revolutionary in some way. Are you more of an optimist in that use case?

I'm like pretty scared of robots actually. But I wouldn't make another point about grock, because it's relevant to the bubble discussion, which is that grock was not able to use all of its capacity to make CSAM. And so what they did instead, because there was no real consumer demand, was that they just sold it to anthropic. And so I think you're going to see this dynamic, because some people are like, well, what if we massively overbuild and we have a bunch of data

centers lying around that nobody needs, like, you know, that's when the bubble will burst. My view is, no, like whoever happens to be winning at the time, they're just going to buy the excess compute,

“because it takes a long time and you have to find a lot of political battles to get one of”

those things built. Yeah. Okay. Let's end with something a little more fun. It's hopefully also

educational. First of all, people need recommendations. Like, I use, I switch to Claude. I use it

as mostly a souped up Google. I don't really let it write for me because I don't trust that it's not hallucinating, but I find it very useful as a research tool. What AI products do you use? What has helped you at life in it and it work? And is there anything you've tried that was just comically shitty that you can tell us about? Sure. Let's see. I mean, some things that I've done, like something that I encourage everyone to do is use one of these tools to build a personal website.

You don't have to put it on the internet, like you can build a website that just lives in your browser, but use a tool like chatGPT, codex, or Claude. And just say, hey, make up website about me. The reason I suggest people do this is because it's kind of fun to make a website. And too, if you haven't yet, like, watched this thing work, I think you will learn a lot from that process. Right. When you see that you're like, um, could you like, you know, make it purple and add

in a little widget that pulls on the weather and like, maybe my Spotify history? And just kind of does it? That may help you understand, like, wow, it's pretty weird to just be able to, like, types of words into a box and, like, make an entire website. So, like, that's usually where I suggest the people start. Um, in terms of other tools that I'm using, I really like this tool called granola. Um, it seemed a lot more interesting when it came out because everyone has copied it now,

but basically it just, like, listens in on my meetings. It takes really good notes. But then, importantly, it's just, like, kind of a knowledge base so that, you know, I'm planning this new company with Kevin. I'm trying to remember what we decided about this one particular thing. I could text him, but, you know, he's, you know, a diva who knows where he is. He's 20 split for you,

“of the equity is what I, which girl it told me. Yeah, that's what I think that's, that's what I”

remember too. But now I can just sort of, like, get it from there. So, that's another one that, that I like that's really useful. And then, um, I've been trying this thing town that I just mentioned. And this thing is, like, only been around since June. You know, I don't know if this thing has legs, but I like the fact that it's briefing me on all of my meetings. It also, like, creates this wiki. So, it's like, kind of like a wiki of my life. Um, think about, like, how much, like,

useful information is hidden in your email. This just kind of, like, organizes it. It sort of pulls out important documents. It puts them in a place that you can find. So, just like, kind of basic personal assistant stuff that I find really useful. That's really interesting. I mean, I think

people are always like, oh, you should try cloud code and build something. I was like, hey, man,

fight a fucking idea for an app. I would have been, like, rich in 2012. Okay. But I'm not. So, that's why I'm here talking to you people. But I mean, have you guys thought about doing like, 'cause you could make a pod save app. Maybe you have something like it's already. You could just feed every transcript of every episode and like, you know, everyone on your team. Because I'm sure you must all the time be like, what episode did that happen on? One is the last time we

talked about that. When is the last time that guest came on the show? That is something that you

What about if I wanted to make something, it's like, okay, I have, like, some nerdy niche interests.

“Like, I really care about American politics. I think foreign policy, super interesting. I do shows”

on each. Could I build an app that is able to brief me every morning on those things? And the thing I worry about how to get around is like, whenever I ask cloud to research something for me, the websites that come back as sources are not the most reputable casey. It's none of the stuff I pay for. Is that the great journalism that I pay for? Can I get it to pull from that? It's a great point. You know, this is, this is an area where the publishers to protect their

own interests because the AI companies are all incredibly like repatious and would steal absolutely every pixel on their website if the publishers would let them. The publishers have all said, whoa,

oh, no, like, you cannot scrape us. They have not created a way so that you can sign in to

chat GPT with your Bloomberg account, which is something I would love to do so that I could get the kind of briefing that you're talking about. So, can you get a briefing? Yes, will it be high quality sources? No, are there a strange number of websites that just seem to like republish the New York Times in the Wall Street Journal and other credible sources? And so you still sort of why I'm getting a decent briefing anyway? Yes. But yeah, that's, it's not a bad place to start.

“Yeah. Where'd you building yourself? Some sort of goofy day planer that Kevin made fun of you for?”

Yes. So, you know, here, one of my core beliefs as a technology journalist is that it is fun to build and make things. And so I like to just have moments in my week where I am building and making things. One of the easiest things you can make with an AI tool is A to do list. And I've used literally all of them. And they're all functionally the same. There's no good reason to use one over the other. Anyone will do you. So, I had the idea to make one that was theme with a comic book

that I've been reading. We're just called Nightwing. Tommy, I'm sure you know that Nightwing

is Dick Grayson, the original Robin. And so, you know, I basically just wanted to see what it could

do. Could I get Gemini and Chaci BT to violate DC Comics Copyright and create for me a Nightwing if he used to do list app and guess what the answer was. Yes. And that's our day eye secret. Nightwing, who has not wanted a Robin theme to anything. For me, when I want to build something, I just grabbed the magnetiles with my kid and then I'm doing that last question for you. So, there's probably a lot of people who are listening. Thank you for still listening. By the way,

we have to end the show. Who feel like they are getting totally left behind by this technology. And they just want a better understanding of these tools. I think you gave some great advice there of like, use them, build some things. But there are there also organizations you look to or like YouTube series or like people that are doing kind of like informational stuff. Let's see, besides reading platformers. Of course, of course, I'm listening hard for work.

And we'll have a new show for folks to watch pretty soon. What I see people doing that is great is that they're going to public meetings and they're calling their representatives. And they're raising concerns. And that is the place where I see getting involved really making a difference.

“Look, if you want to learn something specific about AI, you can just type it into the YouTube”

search box. And I guarantee you there is some hustle bro that has like 14 minute video about how you should do all of it instantly. Well, he planks. Exactly. But no, just, you know, I would try to stay curious about it. But like, if you're nervous about what you're seeing out there, like, just know that I'm with you, I'm nervous too. Okay. Let's go to advice. Casey knew that. Thank you so much. Everyone go to platformer.News to learn more about AI and

everything in tech. And I really appreciate it. Thanks. I'm just fun. Thanks again to Casey Newton for joining the show. And we will be back in your feeds on Tuesday. Positive America is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts and Faris Safari with Reed-Gerlin, Elijah Cone and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben have code Jordan Canter, Charlotte Landis, Kirill Pelaview, David tolls, Meacelman, Ryan Young

and Naomi Single. Our staff is probably unionized with the writer's guild of America East. The what-a-day podcast you know and love is shaking things up. You already know the five days a week, I, Jane Coston, bring you the need to know news and expert analysis in the big stories shaping today in tomorrow. Stories like how social media warps our perception of the world and these strange reality of who is signing up to work for ice. All in less time that it takes to

roast a chicken. And now what-a-day episodes will be hitting your YouTube and podcast feeds in the afternoons. You'll get the breaking news even faster. Check out what-a-day, now dropping in the PM on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.