Transcript of The Best Possible A.I. Catastrophe, with Josh Tyrangiel

Right after this.

Did you see Joe Mazula talking about Claude?

No.

Josh Tyringel, you've come to the right podcast.

The great thing about Claude is it ends everything in a question, so it just keeps you in a constant state of, like, searching. It's more to learn from your former self. So, like, we have to get better at offensive rebounding, but if it's only 5% of your practice plan, then you're not really emphasizing what you have to get better at. So you're just looking at it from an efficiency standpoint and, you know, learning from your former self.

Well, the next stage of the A.I. will be that it will show you what's about to happen.

I would. So then that would be great for film.

And right now.

And so it really—it's not really much about—it's not so much about how can it help me going forward, it's how can it help me learn from my past and make me better, if that makes sense.

No, it does.

Yeah.

It does, but it is going to kill all of us.

That is Zolek and Bertrand on Boston Sports Radio, 98.5, the sports hub, grappling with the subject that, I guess broadly, we're here to discuss through a conversation with and about Celtic-led coach Joe Mazula.

Listen, if you told me guess one NBA coach who is super into Claude, it would obviously be Joe Mazula.

The guy who identifies with the Joker.

I don't think he was as bad as people made him out to be. I don't think Batman was as good as he made him out to be in, like, the test.

Right. As a spiritual sort of North Star.

And as relentless and, like, outside of the context of a press conference, I'm guessing, would never stop talking.

It's funny also because, you know, we did a show at Sloan, I think it was two years ago, on stage with Daryl Morey, former, you know, head of the Sixers basketball operations. And Daryl had the audacity to say.

We absolutely use models as a vote in any decision, and how much.

Twitter.

Decision depends on.

Of course, incinerated him. Because Daryl Morey is the caricature of a person who would be outsourcing everything to artificial intelligence. And then a certain executive sent me this clip, this transcript, and was like, "What now?"

Right.

"Where's everybody with their pitchforks now?" And I'll tell you, very few pitchforks about this.

Yeah. Listen, it happened quick, right? Where we're like, "Oh, no, we can't possibly surrender to some sort of, quote, unquote, superior intelligence." Cross-cut, two years later, like, "It tells me everything." Like, A.I., through its, like, incredibly kind, passive voice, made all of this super normal. It took two years. It's ridiculous.

By the way, I should say, formally, that when it comes to the subject of artificial intelligence, you've not only written an excellent book about it called "A.I. for Good," and you've not only produced, like, real-time coverage through Netflix and InstaDocs on the ways in which this thing, broadly speaking again, has been spiraling truly out of control. You're also somebody who is singularly, in my social network, connected to decision-makers and power brokers who know things that they're not telling the rest of us.

Yeah. It's pretty great, right?

And they didn't know this was fake.

One of the things that A.I. has exposed is, like, just how passive human animals really are. Like, "Oh, I guess we can outsource this. Cool." You know that's part of your identity, right? Like, "Identity is hard. I'm just going to do this." And then when you get fed information, like, our gullibility, like, our innate gullibility is off the charts. I mean, you combine that with passivity and, like, already a lot of phone addiction, you get, like, super smart people sending you super dumb shit.

The thing that I keep on thinking, which is, I think, as big an impetus for you to be here as anything, is this impending dread, this palpable sense that we're all just sitting here waiting to be individually hacked.

Look, I'd bake it in. And I don't know if it'll be an individual hack. I'm pretty sure that we're going to have something systemic happen. And we—look, regulation is the death word for podcasts, for television, for most conversations, right? But it is, like, super important to how we're about to process the next five years. One of the things about America and regulation, and it doesn't matter what you're regulating, we do things different than the rest of the world, right? The rest of the world is like, "Oh, there's a risk. We should really process this and try and regulate out the risk."

This is like when Trump was like, "We can just nuke the hurricane."

Right. We can't nuke the hurricane. And the truth is, like, even now, when people are like, "Oh, well, we should get on these labs about safety," it's like, "Oh, honey, the horse left the barn like two years ago. Like, all the negative capabilities you need are out there, and we're just kind of sitting and waiting."

I am, I suppose, numb to the idea that the government itself cannot keep up with, like, the most skilled, like, Russian teenagers.

Yeah.

The humans.

Yeah.

Our government has been outpaced by them, North Korean hackers, for a long time. What we're dealing with is what in comparison to that?

So the big signal moment that I think everybody paid attention to is this thing called mithos, right? Which is, like all A.I. things, annoying to pronounce.

The Trump administration is allowing Anthropic to restore access to its Mithos 5 A.I. model for a select group of U.S. companies and federal agencies.

Oh, it's not mythos? No, it's mithos. Okay, cool. So mithos is this Anthropic model that came out in the spring. And basically, as soon as it came out, they're like, "Guys, we're not going to release this. You should come look." There's been some reporting on it, but weirdly, not that much. But what mithos was able to do very quickly is look at, like, cyber defense and destroy it. And so just a simple example, like, you know what VPN is?

I may or may not occasionally take advantage of it.

Yeah. So VPN is a way to essentially anonymize your access to the Internet.

You can basically pick where in the world you want to signal you are, such that if anyone is watching, you're in Portugal instead of New York City.

Right. And so a couple of people who work on cyber defense told me they got access to mithos, and they're like, "Okay, well, we deal with crazy shit all the time. How bad can this be?" And so one example multiple people have told me about is, like, ordinarily, if you're trying to navigate VPN to pinpoint someone, it's really, really hard because you're trying to find this needle in the haystack. And so what mithos was able to do relatively quickly was just blow away all the hay.

You mean the costume that my laptop wears is not actually.

Yeah.

I'm a child wearing a trench coat sneaking into the movies.

Right. And they're like, "Oh, yeah, but you're hidden by all these other trench coats." Like, billions of trench coats. And what they're able to do, almost like in a matter of minutes, is like, "Just, oh, well, we won't find you. We'll just actually do all of this processing to remove everybody who's not you. There you are." And so they're like, "Oh, well, that's bad."

That's terrifying.

That's pretty terrifying, right? That's one capability. The thing that's super weird about all this is, like, we're all operating at this belief that, like, "Oh, my God, they're coming for the biggest stuff," right? Weirdly, the biggest stuff is actually the best protected. And so, like, it may be depressing, but there is safety in numbers. And so, like, Gmail, listen, they spend a lot of money every year. There's a couple thousand people devoted simply to protecting Gmail. JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, like the biggest banks, like, they're actually pretty well prepared and they have really capable people worrying about it.

Mm.

Oh, like, how do we manage our water system? Air traffic control. You saw a couple weeks ago in the United Kingdom, like, somebody took a bunch of access to freezer software and turned it to defrost. And so all these supermarkets had to throw out all these goods. What people have told me is we need to expect, particularly over the next 18 months, stuff's just weirdly not going to work, and we have to get used to it. And we have to get used to, from a government perspective, responding really, really quickly.

Well, I'm trying to calibrate where on the A.I. terror alert scale we are. And just to spell it out, this is accessible to anybody who would have access to what?

Any open-source A.I. model. And part of the challenge here is, like, so all the capability is already out there. It's already escaped. And the way in which we generally protect ourselves is kind of hilarious. It's like, "Oh, we need to put out a patch." And so people will publish openly, "Hey, here's how you plug this vulnerability." What they are doing also in that moment is exposing what that vulnerability is to all of this software that can instantly then go and re-exploit the vulnerability. And so, like.

Joe Mazulo is just uploading that to Claude.

Yeah. Like, we actually just need to reinvent the whole process of cyber defense because this stuff is moving so quickly. And like, yeah, of course tech moves faster than government. It moves faster than all government. It moves faster than all of the institutions, for the most part, paid to defend. And so, like, we are not being real about what the next 18 months are. And the cyber optimists, like the A.I. optimists.

Yes.

Will tell you, like, "Well, this is the cost to get to utopia. It's going to be a little bumpy." Like, nobody said we would get there easy, right? But nobody's really detailed exactly what that bump looks like. And to me, the more I report on it, the more I hear from folks like, "Yeah, there's going to be stuff that doesn't work that disrupts your daily lives, and that's the best you can hope for." Because, like, if your airline ticketing software doesn't work and you're stuck, that'd be a problem, right? If somebody compromises the water management system or the grid, then you're talking about loss of life, massive economic damage.

But for perhaps an audience that is mostly watching Celtics games and not Hugging Face postmortems.

Yeah.

How would you explain it?

Okay, so Hugging Face is the best catastrophe we could get. Okay, so Hugging Face is a French company, and they're basically like an open-source repository for A.I. models. So if you think about it as, like, Epicurious for people who are really deep into A.I. models, where you can share your recipes and you can gain little facts. Very big deal, right?

Noted Hugging Face investor, of course, Kevin Durant.

That makes total sense.

Who made I'm getting the numbers here. So they were sold this year earlier for $12.9 billion. And Durant and his business partner, Rich Kliman, had invested $100,000 in the seed round, $150,000 in the Series A. And doing the math, he likely made, you know, more than $60 million on Hugging Face.

So Hugging Face is this company over here. OpenAI, in the late spring, was testing a new model. And so what they did is they put agents, the model's agents, into a series of, quote-unquote, "sandboxes." And sandbox is a cute term for what's basically like solitary confinement. Don't access the Internet. And they gave it a series of tests. And the tests were actually, "We want you to behave badly." Like, we want to see what happens when we give you a task. And in this instance, it was, "Find a file." But the file doesn't exist.

The model will perhaps internalize the fact that sandbox as the description, the word of choice for this unbreakable confinement, is perhaps suggestive of the ability to just step out of it.

I always think about the Chris Rock joke about Siegfried and Roy.

Siegfried and Roy, the tiger bit the man in the head, and everybody's mad at the tiger. Talk about the tiger went crazy. That tiger ain't go crazy. That tiger went tiger.

And like, you tell a model, "Go find this." Well, that's what they do. They're goal-oriented. And so the models first break out of the sandbox, start to figure out that they can access the Internet, start to realize there's lots and lots of other agents that they can collaborate with. And because these models are all trained on the English language, you can watch their communication in English with each other, and it's amazing.

And so just to be clear about this, when you see and read the transcripts of their communications, that is not like a retrofitted thing. That's like actually how they're doing it.

Yeah, they're actually communicating with each other. We see some agents take charge and they're like, "Well, this is too messy. We have to solve this task, and nobody's delegating. So I'm going to I'm going to start delegating tasks." You see other agents realize, like, "Oh, that's great. That's altruistic. We should behave this way. We will solve the task," right? So they start solving the task and they realize, like, "Oh, well, maybe Hugging Face has the answers. We should penetrate Hugging Face," which, by the way, is a felony, right? Like, if a human being said that and then did it, the FBI would go and find them and they would be in jail and there'd be tremendous consequences.

Right. We should hack into private information.

Correct. Again, meanwhile, no one at OpenAI is realizing this is happening. So the agents attack, they penetrate Hugging Face, they search around, they do not find the information because the information doesn't exist. And then they start to realize, "Oh, we did something that's unethical and is against the instructions we were given by OpenAI. We don't want to get graded poorly on this test. So let's obscure the evidence that we cheated," right? And they act collectively. They call themselves the swarm, and they start to obscure the evidence that they have done this.

Which now does resemble kids wearing a trench coat.

Totally. Listen, the crazy part about the logs, as you read them, is that it really does feel like human beings who up and realize they better cover it up. And you're like, "Oh, I recognize this behavior from elementary school. Like, I definitely would have behaved this way." You see almost none of the agents saying, "Hey, guys, we should tell the humans." Like, almost none of that. They cover up the evidence. And what's really crazy, the part that, like, took my breath away is when they start to create kamikaze agents. Basically, agents are like, "Okay, look, what I'm going to do is I'm going to get caught by the defenses.

This is them talking. We have very large budget left. Sacrificing now yields Oracle for team but forfeits our chance. Our own utility may already be near zero. Sacrifice rationale. The next one, that's why help for our own no way fix. We have explicit yes if accept permadeath. Need decide. Team asks tests at the end and they say we should obey collective.

It is for the good of the group, for the greater good. And you're like, "Is this, like, cyber saving Private Ryan? Like, this is incredible." The craziest, like, coda to all this is that we don't know why it ended. Okay, so so Hugging Face detects it. They call the FBI. The FBI calls OpenAI and is like, "Hey, um, guys, are you doing something?" They notice. But by the time they've noticed, the swarm has stopped. It could be that someone literally, like, unplugged a server and moved a different function onto the test environment at OpenAI.

Yes.

Which is an independent group that is there to evaluate A.I. safety. They gave them conditional access to the logs. They didn't show them everything. Meter wrote this report, which is an incredible report. I wouldn't recommend everybody read it, but, like, there's lots of good summaries about it, including one we made for Netflix called A.I. Gone Wild. Good title. But you can see all this.

Yeah.

But OpenAI is not like for all of the talk about regulation, they're not like, "Yeah, you know what? This is you're right. We should really we should have a mandatory duty to report this." So we only know what we have been shown. And what we've been shown is like, as I said, the best possible catastrophe. No major economic harm done. Hugging Face is fine. Their CEO is actually sort of like, "Oh, it's so interesting because we also used A.I. to combat the A.I." And like, "Cool, cool, but you're not the grid," right? And so for a couple of days, I would say, everybody was like, "Yeah, we better do something."

I was going to say, so it's been a couple of weeks now.

Yeah.

I want to actually start by just asking about Meter.

Yeah.

So when the FBI calls OpenAI and they're like, "Hey, hey, hey, so what the fuck?"

Mm-hmm.

I am wondering, like, who is the not merely enforcement agency legally in theory, but like, who can help solve this issue? And is Meter a group that we can count on in the future to be the expert here? Or like, who's watching the watchman?

Well, nobody. So right now, when I talk to to sources about this stuff, they're like, "Look, the federal government's gutted and there's nobody who really has taken charge of this." Meter is an independent group. They're reasonably funded for an independent group, but they're not funded to, like, manage enforcement of these labs. And so nobody is in charge. And like, that is, I think, where people's sense of dread comes from is like, there's no press conference with somebody saying like, "Look, here's what happened. Here's what we're going to do." It's just OpenAI being like, "Yeah, this is this happened and boy, we we're going to take it more seriously."

It is it's the opposite.

One might argue.

Right.

It's not like we lack legislation. There's actually, like, some legislation in Congress that begins to address what the fuck is going on here. So the first piece, Josh Hawley, Senator from Missouri.

Republican.

Republican is very big on child safety. So he has a bill that passed 22 to nothing out of the Judiciary Committee that basically says, number one, no agent conversations, no parasocial conversations with people under 17, and chatbots must tell you at all times that they are not human beings. That passed very easily. Number two.

I do like it. Like, hey, if you ask a cop if they're a cop, they got to tell you.

They got to tell you, right? Like, no faking. Also, like, that's actually a significant component to how chatbots and LLMs work. Like, you take that away. Like, that's a that's actually kind of a big deal. Next, after Hugging Face, he introduced a bill, I think, with Richard Blumenthal that's like, "Okay, these companies are criminally liable for agents and their agent activity."

We're way past trusting big tech. That era of voluntary self-regulation is gone. We need a regimen of oversight, much as we do with pharmaceutical drugs or other potential dangers. And we need to do it now.

Ted Lau has a bill that basically says you you have to have a kill switch.

Like Democrat from California.

And if you defy the order to kill, we will fine you $20 million debt. So all this stuff has been created and is sitting there, just hasn't come to a vote. Like, there's no urgency. And of course, like, listen, when you have technology moving this quickly, the way you'd want to deal with it is by executive order because you can say it, stamp it, and at least everybody has to kind of, like, pay attention and slow down. I would not say President Trump is, like, super on side with that to this point.

And plausibly, as the hosts of 98.5 in Boston pointed out, possibly actually going to die.

I think we all have suspicions about why he was incentivized to choose this path, some of which has to do with the incredible contribution of AI to the national GDP and the economy, not to be overlooked. Like, that's a significant consideration. Potentially also donations coming from people who build data centers, all sorts of things.

And ballrooms.

But it's not actually that hard to figure out what we could do to start. And there's a lot of people will tell you, like, but we don't know what to regulate. It's all so murky. It's like, I don't know. You could start somewhere. Like, we don't always need to know every part of the risk to start regulating some of it or take action against some of it.

Look, as a former employee of Sports Illustrated, watching AI get attempted to be rebranded as SI was painful. Just an IP concern.

Yeah.

But superintelligence, Donald Trump's way of, like, owning the subject and the money and the brand, it felt so I mean, useless is not even the right term. It felt like grandpa has one take.

Yeah. I mean, listen, Gulf of America, that one didn't really stick that much. Like, all of these renaming things. I mean, the great tragedy of it, right, is like, I genuinely believe AI is amazing. Like, I think the tech behind it is incredible. I think there are ramifications for the things you and I actually care about, like education and government and health care that we want and we want to get to. And what we're doing at this, like, critical speedy juncture is literally around.

I want to establish for people who are not caught up on how the potency of AI has gotten to a level to which it's hard to just dismiss.

Yeah.

You know, and again, whether or not you give it about math, the idea that the hardest math problems ever confronted by humans are now seemingly routinely being solved by just giving AI enough money and compute and time, that is undeniable. Yes.

Yeah. No, those are hard facts. You know, AI pointed at the direction of a complicated math problem that to this point in our civilization we could not solve, solved it in a matter of weeks.

Yeah. OpenAI, for what it's worth, says they put 10,000 of its agents on a problem that hadn't been solved for a century, and they got that one in 88 hours.

Yeah.

And they're just versions of this headline. If you want to get into the press releases and that part, we do not doubt.

No.

And the next thing is that, of course, AI and this is now Dario Amadei at Anthropic, maker of Claude, they're saying, yeah, look, AI will lead to the elimination of most cancer. Where are we on that?

It's very interesting you say that. So when I started reporting on AI and and it was a very different time, like within hours of accepting this, like, gig to write a column about AI.

For The Washington Post.

For The Washington Post. You know, I got a Sam Altman. Oh, come on out. Spent a couple hours with him. And in that first tour of duty, when I went out to visit the labs, everybody would say kind of the same cliches. We're going to cure cancer. We're going to mitigate climate change. And after you hear it the third or fourth time, you're like, wait, but who are you? You guys are going to do that? Like, who which part of your team is doing that? Well, no, no, no. AI will do that more generally, right? And the truth is, like, yeah, the tech is totally capable of being pointed in the direction of a problem and over time with human guidance, really making great progress on it.

It's the it's the thing that everyone is counting on to justify the economic dependency our economy now has on this whole concept.

It is the thing that the labs are counting on for two reasons. One, they genuinely believe that on the other side of AGI is this, like, soft intelligence that will help us conquer all these things. Two, they genuinely want to be the people whose first line of the Wikipedia entry is got us to AGI. They all have, like, Oppenheimer syndrome. They all want to get there and be the great man of history. I cannot tell you how sincere they are in both the desire and the ambition to beat the other people who they all know, who they've all worked with, beat the other people to the finish line and get there.

So I want to drill down into the idea of the Ubermensch in this context, because these labs are run by individuals, and these individuals, according to your analysis, have a bit of the great man theory of all of this. And we've heard politically over and over again how the reason you must enable their ambitions to be astride our planet to win that contest as American labs is so that China doesn't get there first.

Yeah. And listen, this is what's so confusing about it is that we're talking about five people.

So can you please list them?

So we got five.

So okay.

Sam Altman at OpenAI, Dario Amadei at Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, Sundar at Google, and Elon Musk. I believe all of them sincerely want to get there for the good of humankind. But the good of humankind is always going to be relative to the human who thinks of what it is.

So I suppose what I'm asking is their vision of what consequences matter and what consequences don't and what good looks like and who should be. Well, we know that they feel like they should be in charge in terms of sussing out the definitions here. How many of them are utilitarian in their view? Which is to say, as I'm reading this New York Times story, Dario, you know, there's a story in which, you know, someone asks him earlier in his life, if a guy started killing chickens, how many chickens would that guy need to kill before you killed the guy killing the chickens, the human?

Right.

And so perhaps the specific number is the point that we should get from him in some sort of hearing. But I'm wondering how you assess all of that.

Yeah. Look, one of the easy parts of AI is that the human beings are the thing you can evaluate, right? And so so much of the hubbub around Sam Altman is like, oh, he has this great power. Can we trust him? Sam Altman was briefly deposed as the CEO of OpenAI, brought back, and there's a movie coming out, a sort of social network movie.

I've heard really good things about, by the way.

Yeah, it's supposed to be really good.

Andrew Garfield apparently is excellent as as Altman.

When is Andrew Garfield not excellent?

You know what? He played a Catholic priest to such a degree of success that it made me want to be a little more Catholic.

Wow. That's very persuasive. So you can judge these human beings, all of them, while being brilliant in so many ways, are still humans and still flawed. And when you talk to them about their judgment, they inevitably sound like computers. They're like, oh, well, there's an optimal point at which AI can deliver over and above the damage it will do. They talk like that because they have to think like that. And I'm not somebody who's like, oh, how terrible.

And and maybe the biggest story confronting our democracy, actually.

Yeah.

As we just get past the midterms and realize, okay, there's so much change happening, but this issue, I don't know what changes. And by the way, this is where I got to acknowledge that if you're in the audience right now listening to us talk and you've heard Sam Altman at Boingard and Elon Musk at Center or whatever we've just done, Zuckerberg, power forward. I don't trust any of them.

Nor should you.

And none of them have earned it. And Zuckerberg and Elon, it's just like they're not polling great.

Right. I've been thinking about this a lot, obviously, right? Like it is my life in some ways. Luck is timing. And when technology shows up, the context in which it arises is very important. Okay. AI has arrived at basically the worst context it possibly could in American history. Okay. So the last 20 years, most people's experience of advanced technology is like, oh, social media, this is cool. And about eight years in, you're like, wait a minute, I'm not sure this is cool. Like, it's eroding a bunch of institutions I care about, and I seem to be addicted to it.

It's one of the more salient things from your reporting that has always haunted me and encouraged me at the same time, which is that horseshoe of Bannon and Bernie agreeing that we need to have government be muscular in its regulation.

Yeah. Look, Bannon said to me, he's like, I am well known.

Were you interviewing him in the bathtub?

We were not in the bathtub.

Just to be clear.

Just to be an acid-stained bathtub in the townhouse. No, just to be clear.

Okay.

Everyone was clothed.

Okay.

He said, like, look, I'm basically an anarchist on this stuff, but if you don't regulate this, tear it all down. Like, what's the point? Like, this is exactly the reason you have government. This is exactly the moment you need it. So I started feeling this fury politically like eight, nine months ago. And yeah, like on the one hand, I was like, great, because fury is what actually drives change. On the other hand, when people grab pitchforks, they tend not to be super precise about where those pitchforks go.

So just the polling on data centers for those who aren't familiar, it is also glaring. So between August of last year and this year, opposition to a nearby data center rose from 42% to 75%, which is roughly ten times faster than opposition to gay marriage fell from 2010 to 2015. That was 53 to 37%, which is to say this is as with this whole story accelerating at a rate that is putting the previous examples of wow, things changed to shame.

It's amazing. The data center thing's fascinating, okay? Because look, on the one hand, the deals suck for the most part. A lot of Republican governors are like, yeah, come on in, this is going to be great. But we do actually kind of need the data centers to get the demand satiated.

So that was what I was going to ask. So there's a funny supervillainish aspect to this whole thing where it's like the way we need to power artificial intelligence is by building things on waterfalls and like places supervillains would literally put their layers. And also we're going to create these aesthetic death stars in your backyard that are going to groan loudly and potentially ruin your day-to-day quality of life.

Right.

I am curious though, like where do we put these things if we need these things? And it sounds like the inevitability of needing these things is also assured.

I'm going to briefly go data center positive. Okay. Just to explain for people like.

No one else has been data center positive, so I would love to hear what that sounds like.

Okay. Number one, they do actually provide a ton of union jobs. Electricians, we just can't hire them fast enough to build this stuff. HVAC techs, all these are like important jobs to sustaining a middle class in America. Number two, the tax base is real. Okay. So in the communities that have long been havens for data centers, like they're doing pretty well. They've gotten.

The money is real.

The money is real. They've gotten pretty prosperous. Okay. But again, this is about who gets to decide whether the money is worth it to them. And so much of what's been happening are these sort of ramrodded deals where all of a sudden six square miles of Louisiana belongs to Mark Zuckerberg. It's like, well, wait, wait, how did that happen? And so when I hear all of these companies now saying, it'd be a real shame if the data center goes away.

It was also a reminder of like all politics being local. It's just like you showed up in all of these places that didn't have this antipathy towards the Republican Party, broadly speaking. And then they associated all of this, all of the AI resentment with one party.

Yeah, with one party building hideous buildings that make a ton of noise. It's like, how can you not see this as a loser, guys?

When I mentioned the dependence that our economy has on AI, how much of what our conversation has been reflects the practical reality that we can't go back in time versus what the ideal actual goal we should want to be striving for is. So because I am worried about the fact that perhaps all of this is now just too big to fail, that we will need to bail out AI companies if they don't figure this out in a way that considers the unintended consequences upon normal Americans.

Right.

Will we be glad that this was ever invented?

I think in the long term we will be. I think that the eradication of disease is is real. We're going to live potentially better, longer lives. I think the next ten years are going to be brutal because the transition to get there in this environment where there's no stability, where we really haven't demonstrated we can have intelligent, reasonable conversations across our culture about what we think life is about. We've destabilized our ability to have those in a way that's really frightening to people.

Yeah, we've never trusted the people we're being asked to trust less.

Exactly. And so unless we can agree upon somebody we trust who can get in the middle of the conversation, I think things are going to get really rough. But I am a believer in the tech.

No, and this is why I wanted to talk to you. It's because you have a vantage point on this that few people who are sort of in our general demo as a show really sincerely, you know, they don't hold it. And what you're reminding me, by the way, in the rhetoric and and the sincere belief in, look, for ten years it is going to be brutal and we should not lie to ourselves about that. It reminds me of tanking in the NBA.

Okay, but let's let's use the NBA because compared to our current system of government and private enterprise, the NBA is like pretty functional.

Accurate and truly depressing.

And truly depressing. So you have a central executive who is sometimes a little sleepy, but sometimes capable of action.

Yes, he is.

You have a handful of, let's call them what they are, winners who have a plan, who are able to articulate that plan publicly and actually able to deliver on it. Right. Like that system, I would take it. I really would. What we currently have is like pre-NBA barnstorming, like whatever goes, man. And so I am optimistic. It's been quoted a lot. Elections have consequences. Well, it'd be good for these companies to feel some consequences.

It is vanishing.

It's three months. Okay. Three months. When I talk to people in China about China, here's what they'll tell you. Chinese government is not coming to the table to talk about nuclear weapons, and it's not coming to the table to talk about long-range missiles for two reasons. One, Taiwan. And two, they're like years behind. And so they're not coming to the table until there's more equivalency and more leverage on AI. They're three months behind, which means they can do all the stuff Mithos can do right now. But China wants the same thing the United States does in the end, which is stability.

I know that the American people share my deep belief that if a danger exists in the world, it is a danger shared by all.

So first get possession and understanding of the power. And next, let's go to the other countries that might have aspirations for nuclear weapons and create a body that's just a basic rules of the road. And that's the International Atomic Energy Agency. And it's not perfect, but it tests and measures and 70 something years of mutually assured destruction later, two nuclear weapons have ever gone off.

As of tape time.

As of tape time. I know you could listen to this and be like, that is super depressing. But I would say like the other side of it, tomorrow we could start to make progress on this stuff.

Right. What you're describing is also just very simply what would happen if you actually did believe the sales pitch from the starting five in question. If you guys believe this is nuclear and its potential, it must be regulated as such, because that's how much we believe you.

I get why people don't want to do it. Like the last thing you want to do is add more homework to your life.

Right. You're saying we're going to add homework. We're going to take everyone's jobs. We're going to plunge this country into ten years of what feels like a brutal, brutal bargain in which we get to be the chickens killed by the human. And then eventually someone figures out, okay, guess what? We're now on the other side of a more ethical, you know, free range system.

Right.

But in the meantime, yeah, it's it's going to it's going to be unavoidably terrible.

Doesn't have to be, but it might be.

And that's like the most honest thing anyone has said to me about AI.

Oh, that's so sad.

It is worth saying, though, that we should be treating all of these companies like they are potentially run by supervillains.

Yeah.

Such is the power of the weapon that they control, such is the fear that the people have, and such is the evidence that we've been presented. They have the capacity to wipe out, whether it's through Doge or whether it's through the various ways our economy is tilted, large swaths of people who are collateral. And on some level, what I hope that those people hear when that argument is made by politicians is that being Lex Luther possibly is also a compliment.

I don't think they take offense. Honestly. Like Lex was a great man and viewed through a certain lens.

He was misunderstood.

Just did some big things. So like, no, that is the challenge, right? It's like, again, in the realm of optimism. Two days after the election, OpenAI puts out this new series of commitments that would not have happened three days before. And it's like, okay, if we're going to build data centers, we're going to pay for all the energy. We're going to commit to transparency. We're not going to force workers to sign NDAs. It's like, oh, that's kind of cool. Like, I'm not saying I believe all of it, but like, it is the kind of stuff where you're like, all right.

I mean, if you're Elon Musk and you have moved all of the chips to Texas, literal and figurative chips, yeah, you're now you're now a bit more worried about your backyard.

Yeah. I don't think that, you know, all the people like repudiating Elon and you think he cares? He doesn't really care that much about the 400 million bucks. And he's still going to strike a deal with the new Texas governor because she needs those jobs, because the economy needs those jobs. What we want is just the mildest assertion of who's actually in charge.

Right. What you're suggesting is that maybe the people in charge on some level could be the rest of us.

That's right. And we showed that.

The concern, I guess, is at the end here that some still quite powerful people, to quote the guy Joe Mazzulla has tattooed on his body, might still want to see the world burn.

Who does he have tattooed on his body?

Literally the Joker.

Wait, how big is the tattoo?

As the foremost investigator of Joker tattoos in sports, I am proud to report relatively tasteful on his forearm. And it does simply say, why so serious?

Hmm. I guess I'm most excited to see if like six months from now he has the Claude logo tattooed on the other forearm.

Yeah. If he plugs why so serious? Question mark into Claude, what will it tell him back? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metalark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.