In this episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, host Tucker Carlson talks with tech investor Ali Partovi about the risks of artificial intelligence. They discuss alleged AI-driven hacking incidents, a strike on a school in Iran that some reports link to AI targeting, and who should be liable when AI systems break the law.
Partovi proposes that AI companies be treated as if they intended any illegal act their systems commit. The conversation also covers the incentives of the AI race, the idea of AI as a tool versus a new species, threats to banking security, and how voter guides on the Sway platform could give citizens more influence over policy.
In this episode Tucker Carlson, Ali Partovi
This transcript of the Ali Partovi episode on AI accountability was made with the technology behind HappyScribe's subtitle generator.
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Ali, thanks so much for doing this. Um, I've had a couple of people on in the past year to talk about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. Two very articulate, smart, apparently sincere guys who scared the crap out of me, uh, with their view of where this is going and how it eliminates human autonomy and maybe humanity itself. And, um, their views are well-known, and their fears are widely shared. So I thought it'd be important to have someone who's in the middle of it from Silicon Valley.
You've been in and around this for your whole life, really successful investor. I want to hear your perspective on AI. So, most people are pretty worried about AI. Are you worried about AI?
I think there's a lot of reasons to be worried about it, but also reasons to be hopeful.
Yes.
Um, so I have, I have good news.
Good.
Yeah.
We're looking forward to good news.
Yeah, I—so I guess I'd say I'm here because I want to share two things. One is that I think there's a solution that is elegant and can be expressed in a single sentence. There's a simple and elegant solution to the questions of AI safety.
Yes.
And then the second thing is I think there's a way that you and your listeners can act to help make it, make it happen. So I'll get back to that later.
Okay, we just made my day already.
Thank you. Um, but yeah, one sentence. Now you might be thinking, what is this sentence? Um, first, to set the scene, a lot of people are talking about, will AI destroy humanity? I don't know if you've heard that question being thrown about.
Oh, I—oh, and yes.
And a lot.
For me, I'd say I'll focus—let's focus instead of that abstract, let's focus on what's already happened, which is look at the crimes AI has been committing over the last few months with apparent impunity. How come nobody is in jail? Because if humans had done some of these, um, hacking or cyber crimes, they would be in federal prison. And.
I never thought of that for some reason.
Right. And.
So can you just pause and explain something for people who may not know what you're talking about?
Yeah.
What are the crimes that you're alluding to when you say AI has committed crimes?
It's—there's so many new ones being disclosed that I'm losing track. But the most, um, widely, uh, covered one was, uh, some AI agents that were being trained, uh, by OpenAI in pursuit of some objective, um, in order to kind of accomplish their objective, kind of exited from OpenAI's servers, went onto the open internet, and hacked another company called Hugging Face and totally, like, attacked and hacked Hugging Face's servers to find the information they needed in order to accomplish their objective.
And this hacking is a, you know, is a cyber crime. Um, but since then it's come out that some of Anthropic's AIs have also committed similar kind of hacking. Just, I think it was a few days ago, it came out that a different unrelated OpenAI episode, um, took money that didn't belong to OpenAI, you know, from somebody's, uh, crypto wallet. There's more and more of these, so it's—I'm, uh, I don't think I can itemize them all, um, but I'd categorize them generally as cybersecurity, cyber hacking type incidents, uh, you know, which AI is very good at because it's, you know, it's particularly good at, um, at coding.
Yes.
And at finding loopholes that no human had thought of and to exploit those loopholes. Uh, but I don't think that's the limit of what AI in the future could do wrong, but that's the type of harms it's currently, you know, exploiting.
There's also the question of harms being committed by AI on the battlefield.
Yes. Um, yes. The, um, you know, again, I, I, I'd like to focus on what's already happened because when you talk about AI destroying humanity, it's so abstract and it's.
Right.
Hard to imagine it. But I would say if AI were to destroy humanity, which I hope it won't, and I believe that, you know, I'm an optimist, I believe we'll be able to find a path to safety. But if AI were to destroy humanity, I'm pretty sure history books would count the opening salvo as that, um, the moment when, uh, the US armed forces attacked the school in Iran, uh, the Minab School, um, it hasn't been yet kind of acknowledged by the US government why and how that happened.
But, um, but Bloomberg reported that the, the targeting of that school was, um, was done by Anthropic and Palantir and, you know, something like 170 innocent people, most of them children, were killed in a massive atrocity. And, um, you can argue about, oh, was this, you know, some people are finding different, you know, uh, different articulations of how to explain it away, or it wasn't our fault, or it wasn't intentional, or maybe the Iranians themselves did it, or maybe it was worth it, or so on.
But if you take a step back, human beings dropping a bomb on a school full of little kids, it doesn't matter whether it was Americans or Iranians, AI chose a target of completely innocent people and a bomb was dropped killing them. That is a bizarre place to be, um, you know, in the 21st century.
So you see the bombing of the girl's school in Iran in the opening days of the war as a story about, in part, about AI?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Interesting. It has not been framed that way at all.
And I, I say this partly because I don't believe anybody in the US armed forces wanted to kill a school full of kids, you know? Um.
I hope not.
I, I hope not. I, I really don't, um, you'd have to find evidence for that. I'm pretty sure that, um, you know, when people say we are doing our best not to kill civilians or so on, you know, I, um, unless there's a lot of evidence that that's not true, I tend to believe them. And I think it was something that AI decided. I know it was some form of negligence on the human's part. And I'd say the same about these cyber crimes that happened on the, you know, the Hugging Face hacking and so on.
But then the question still remains, who is liable when AI decides to do something illegal? And, um, that's a question that I think is one of the great, like, huge questions of our time, and we don't currently have an answer for it.
So maybe we would look to the law, uh, the, the, the criminal code as it relates to minors, because it's not, it is related. So it's like if someone under 18, a minor, in the care of a guardian parent, does something bad, we, we generally don't hold the parent responsible, right?
You're correct. So that's one example. I'd say a different example to consider is, um, if you have a dog that repeatedly bites people.
Right.
Then the owner is responsible. And I think that.
It's probably a better example.
I think it's a closer example because with a human being, you know, you can't train a child to exactly obey your commands.
No, that's right.
You know, a child is its own, uh, human person. And, um, and I actually, I'd say between these two perhaps goes to sort of like a almost a philosophical difference, um, that some people seem to think that the, the role of the AI companies is to, to bring into existence an entire new species of sorts with its own rights and its own autonomy. Whereas others think, no, this is a tool for humans. This is something that, um, you know, its purpose is to help humans and not to have its own independent, you know.
So can I ask you to pause again there since you can actually answer this question? Do you know people who ascribe to the first view that science is giving birth to a new species that has its own rights and own acknowledged will? And do you know people who believe that, who think AI is not a tool but something else?
I do. And there's some public, you know, discourse about this. You know, there's, um, evidence coming out of, from Anthropic suggesting that that's kind of an underlying, uh, you know, uh, philosophical undercurrent of Anthropic's mission. Uh, you're talking about, you know, independent rights for the AI, like its own independent, uh, welfare. And there was a recent thing where they, they changed their code of, um, code of use where as the user, you can't be too abusive to, to Claude, you know, that Claude has its own, uh, I guess it's its own rights.
Um, yeah, so this is.
Claude, Claude's like a software program.
Correct. Yeah.
So what's the thinking that gets you there? Since you've lived in it your whole life, like what, what are these, what is their worldview that would produce that belief?
I'm, I'm, I'm not going to defend it because I don't share that worldview, but, you know.
No, no, you don't need to defend it. I'm just trying to understand it. It doesn't, doesn't make sense to the outsider, I guess is what I'm saying.
So I think I'd say, um, yeah, the part that I identify with is I'm a nerd. I've grown up my whole life as a nerd and, you know, as a builder, as a tinkerer, there's a fascination with creating something that no one's tried creating before and seeing if it works. And, um, and I still have that, you know, love of creativity myself.
Oh, yeah.
And I can see that in people who are creating all sorts of things from the, the newest Tesla car to, you know, the most modern space exploration stuff. And this, I'd say, falls into that category a little bit. And it's fascinating. It's, it's quite exciting and it's, it's really, um, it's really neat and cool how it's modeled after how the human brain works. So there's a lot of, you know, kind of academically fascinating parts about it. I just think you should put all that in a box.
And when it comes to kind of the, the question of just the, the rules and, you know, kind of who is in charge, it should be really clear that humans are in charge and AI is a tool that we're building to serve humans. And more importantly, that the law, human's law, is what's in charge and, and that AI is not above the law.
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It's just, it, of, I mean, of course, I like tools. I spent the weekend with a Makita cordless impact driver.
Nice.
Which will put a lag bolt into anything. And I'm like, this is amazing. I love this tool. How is it so powerful? It never occurred to me to give it rights or imbue it with an imaginary soul or something like that. Like, how do you even get to the point where you think the thing, the tool that you created to achieve certain ends, to do certain tasks, exists as an autonomous being? Like what? That seems like witchcraft kind of.
Yes, especially if you take it too far to the point, you know, if it's used as a, I don't know, as a mission statement or some sort of thing to get you excited early on, maybe it makes sense. But to take it seriously and defend it all the way, it, you know, uh, would not make sense. Um.
But do you think that's a, uh, I don't know, common? Like, how common is that view, would you say, among people in the AI business in Silicon Valley?
I don't know if I can, I don't know if I can put a number on it right now. I think it, it remains to be seen. And I think this discourse is really just now becoming mainstream enough. And, um, part of why I'm here and talking about it is because I want to have a more, you know, a broader conversation. And there's, um, people, you know, much more important than me who've brought forward views on this. Uh, obviously, uh, the president, people like Jensen Huang from Nvidia and others have put forward a point of view that everything is fine and existing liability laws are enough to make AI development be safe.
And then at the other end, you have people saying, oh, we need a comprehensive AI governance framework of some sort. And what's really interesting is the people on that side arguing for a much heavier amount of regulation are actually people from Anthropic and some of the same people who are, um, yeah, who are viewing AI as potentially having its own rights. So it's, um, there's a weird mix of things.
So there's so much money at almost everybody commenting on this is deriving profit from it in some way. Not everyone, but a lot of people who are weighing in on AI are being paid without disclosing those payments. So I can't, I can't tell what's true, but you're hearing a lot of people say anyone calling for more regulation of AI is doing that because they're pursuing regulatory capture, the process by which the government regulates your competitors out of business, which is like very, very common in all kinds of different businesses.
And it's a, it's terrible. It's awful. It's, it's monopoly capitalism and, uh, it's wrong. But then you're like, okay, so the alternative is no regulation at all of something that's brand new and has potentially society-destroying effects. Like, what is the truth there? Why would the people creating this product be demanding its regulation because it's so dangerous? If they think it's so dangerous, why are they working on it? I don't get it.
Um.
Like, stop me before I destroy the world. Like, what? Why don't you stop destroying the world? Like, it doesn't, I don't get it.
Yeah, I'd love to explain this to you because I agree. I agree it's confusing.
Yes.
And it's happened, we've now had multiple cases of the same person who is working on something asking, you know, someone else to stop them. You know, why don't you stop yourself?
Yeah.
Yeah. And, but it does make sense. And, and, and I'll explain to you. And, um, and it comes down to incentives. You know, if you have, we're in a race dynamic where there is clearly money to be made. And not just, it's not evil money. It's money to be made by building something super useful. AI has the potential to make people's lives better, to make people more productive, to potentially cure diseases and make medicines that we've never had before. And all of those things will create tremendous prosperity and wealth.
And the people who are able to build that deserve the wealth, you know, um, for having created it. So there's a race for who can create all that stuff. Unfortunately, the race currently doesn't, um, doesn't place any reward for building safe AI. It's just whoever can get there the fastest. And anyone who stops to spend time on safety and making sure their AI doesn't do rogue things is kind of at risk of falling behind.
So we're in a race right now where nice guys finish last and rogue AI will be the winner. And so I think the people asking for regulation are actually the nice guys being like, I want to win the race by doing things the right way, but please set up the rules so that the, the safe AI will win, not the rogue AI. And so I, um, do you see what I'm saying?
I do.
Um, and if you're, if you're running a business, it's actually, um, it's not comforting if the rules are set up so that a, like, malevolent, menacing competitor is going to win. Because you look at it and see somebody else who's doing bad things is beating you. What are your choices? You're either going to lose or you have to start doing the same bad things. And you actually want some sort of government or rules to, to set the playing field so that doing the right thing will win.
And, um, and so I think that, um, while there's a range of views here, I'd like to believe that people here actually have good intent. Maybe, maybe I'm being naive.
Well, I mean, if the Bloomberg report that you cited is correct, I don't know that it is, but let's say it is. An Anthropic's product was used to murder all those girls in Iran.
Yeah.
The girl school. Then you have to ask, like, why isn't Anthropic apologizing? Why are they continuing to power Pentagon targeting? Like, why are they involved at all? Like, if you found out, I'll just ask you, you run the company, you find out that your product has murdered 170 girl school girls. How do you respond to that?
Um, I, I don't know how I would respond to that. Honestly, I'm, I'm really glad that I'm not in that place.
Oh, me too.
Yeah, I agree. Um, from what I understand, I mean, there was actually a public brouhaha between Anthropic and the, you know, Department of War right before that strike. Like, literally it was the day before or even the day of.
I think that's right. Well, they showed an ad.
And it was specifically on the topic of Anthropic saying, we won't allow, we don't want our AI to be used to autonomously choose targets. There needs to be a human responsible. And the US government was, um, at least as far as I could tell, because it's not, you know, this was sort of, it's not 100% clear, uh, what the.
We're getting fragments of the debate in the public records.
But it seemed like the US government's point of view was that, you know, we want to be able to use it however we want. And, um.
You're trying to limit us.
Yeah.
And therefore your running company shouldn't be deciding.
Exactly. You know, the, the, the elected officials of the country should be making these decisions, not the, not some corporation putting its ethical perspective on things. So, um, but yeah, it's ironic because Anthropic was literally, you know, going to mad about this principle, um, you know, within 24 hours before that strike occurred. Um, and subsequently they, they made some statement, but it seemed like deflection. It seemed like they didn't know exactly how their technology had been involved.
And so it was, it was like, it was not an apology.
If you felt that your technology had been used to murder children, wouldn't you get to the bottom and find out if, in fact, that had happened? And if it had, wouldn't you issue a public statement saying this is horrifying and I'm totally, I just want the record to reflect, I'm totally opposed to this and I'm so sorry.
That is.
To the extent to which I've been involved in it.
Yes, that is what I would do. That is what I would do. That is the type of thing that requires courage and probably comes with some real penalty and cost.
Apologizing for killing kids is like a radical position.
I would do it, but I can imagine there's a lot of pressure on different companies to find some way to deflect or so on. And I'm not sure that Anthropic in this particular case is responsible.
Yeah, I have no idea. I'm just theoretical here.
Yeah, uh, because it depends on what human was involved. But let's, let's go back because I promised a one sentence.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry.
One sentence solution. And I don't want to have people hanging for too long.
Yeah.
Um, I'll say the one sentence and then I'll kind of explain. Uh, the one sentence is simply this: when an AI decides to do something illegal, the law should hold the AI companies responsible and automatically treat it as if they did it intentionally. So that's the sentence. When an AI decides to do something illegal, the key thing here is if there wasn't a human asking for it. So, um, and the other key thing is to place the intent on the AI companies.
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Can you repeat, repeat the statement one more time just so we can frame everything around it to be sure we know what you're saying?
When an AI decides to do something illegal, the law should hold the AI companies responsible as and automatically treat it as if they did it with intention.
I love that.
So, um. So that solves the, the, the safety incentive problem that you mentioned earlier.
Yeah. So the, the key thing here is like, look at the hacking incidents. That's a little simpler than the, the bombing in Minneapolis. I don't think anyone, any human intended that hacking to occur. From everything you can tell, all, all human parties were a bit horrified that this had happened. But OpenAI set up this thing like an experiment and then discovered, somewhat to their shock, oh my gosh, these agents escaped their, you know, their, uh, safe, uh, playground, their sandbox and got out and committed these, um, these crimes.
And then they just treated it as like, oops, that was an accident. Our bad. They documented it and actually published how it occurred and let's move on.
Or even the people like me who felt kind of hysterical about it, like that, I thought that was terrifying, but pointed at the AI and said, yeah, this is like super, super scary. We need to stop this or constrain it or whatever. But nobody, I didn't hear one person say, well, Sam Altman's on the hook for this.
Right. Exactly. And to be clear, I don't want to see Sam Altman in jail or Dario in jail, but if there was even the slightest risk, not even of jail, but of huge penalties, say bankruptcy, these companies would immediately shift their priorities towards making sure things like that never happen again. And it's not.
So this is the true alignment. This is the alignment of incentives with positive outcomes.
Correct. So.
Yes.
I don't know. Why did I not think of that?
It's, and honestly, I have, this came to me and I was like, this is so simple. How come is it, has other, you know, um, so there's a key second part to my sentence that I want to put focus on as well, which is treat it as if these things occurred intentionally. Now you might think, what does that mean? In, in law, there's a huge difference between the penalty for doing something, uh, accidentally versus intentionally.
Manslaughter to first degree.
Exactly. Anyone who's ever watched Law and Order or anything knows that to, to convict of murder, you need to prove motive, you know, and, um, uh, and in fact, I, I posted about this on X and I used a scene from Legally Blonde, um, where Elle Woods, you know, in her defense in the court, she says there was a lack of mens rea, which means a guilty mind. Basically, the concept of intent goes back for a very, very long time. Mens rea is the Latin term for it.
Um, essentially, if you can prove what somebody was thinking and they intended to do something bad, the penalty is much, much higher. And it's difficult to do that. That's why it's difficult to convict people of fraud or murder or some of these top penalties, because you usually people don't document the evidence of their guilty intentions.
Yeah.
Even if they had guilty intentions. What I'm proposing is that if an AI made the decision, automatically treat it as if the people intended that outcome. So you don't have to prove that they had guilty intentions. In fact, they probably didn't, but penalize them as if they did. That way they'll be responsible and make sure that their AI doesn't do it. Do you follow what I'm saying?
Of course I do.
So, um, now just to, um, imagine a hypothetical scenario. If you were using your AI and you said, dear AI, go to Ali's bank and hack in and steal $10,000 from me. And your AI hacked, you know, stole $10,000 from my bank account. You had the bad intent. You should be held guilty of bank robbery, which is, you know, and, um, the AI was following your orders in that scenario, but the intent came from you.
What if you just said, dear AI, I really need $10,000. Please get me some money. I need it. And the AI on its own made that decision and the AI, without asking your permission, figured out it can hack into my bank account and stole my money and brought it to you. Now we have the situation where it wasn't your intention. Whose intention was it? And my proposal is the AI companies should automatically be penalized as if they intentionally committed bank robbery. And that's, that's because my point is that a human should be held responsible no matter what happened.
In the first scenario, you're the responsible human. And in the second scenario, the people at the AI companies.
You built it. That's right.
You built it. And they should be absolutely capable of preventing that wrongdoing. It is not that hard. Um, and they will do it if the incentives require them to do it. The current incentives don't really put a premium on safety. Whoever's focusing on that stuff is falling behind in the race to the person who's rushing forward and saying safety later. We need to shift the race so that the person building the rogue AI ends up, you know, penalized and the person actually building a law-abiding AI wins.
And my proposal essentially would do that. Uh, the other thing with my proposal is that, and this is, I'd say, um, goes to the heart of it, is that instead of trying to itemize every possible wrongdoing AI could do, it just simply brings AI under the existing umbrella of the thousands of laws that society has already passed over centuries, right? Like we don't need to rethink what's the penalty if an AI commits bank robbery?
What's the penalty if an AI does X or Y? We already have penalties for everything. Now, maybe there are some future misdeeds that we haven't yet seen, but for starters, let's just make it clear that if an AI commits any wrong, that the people who built it should be responsible for the full penalty that goes with that. And that way we don't need this term alignment. You used the word alignment earlier. That's the word that's been thrown around a lot, uh, about how can we build an AI that's aligned?
It's kind of a weird new word. You know what I mean? Like four or five years ago, people were.
Yeah, yeah. I was, I was mocking it when I used it because I think it's, it's intentionally opaque. Like what does that even mean?
Yeah. And you have these.
Alignment is a, is a kind of architectural, uh, concept. You know, it's, it applies to the physical world. So like, what are you talking about?
Well, you, you have these PhDs in AI alignment research and, you know, you have these people at these big AI companies whose job title is alignment and it creates the feeling like you need to be, you know, you're not smart enough to figure this out. Only the people who have a degree in alignment can, can figure it out. It puts it into this territory to almost obfuscate it, you know, and, um.
Yes.
But the, the core of it is, I mean, with good intention, I think these guys are thinking we want to build an AI who is, um, aligned with what's good for humanity. That's where the word comes from. And what I would say is, you know what? We've already figured out how to make sure human beings' actions are aligned with what's good for humanity, because they're not always by default, right? I mean, I bet at some point in your life you wanted to do something that was good for yourself, but not good for all of humanity, right?
I certainly have as well. And everyone has temptations to do something that is good for themself, but bad for others. And guess what we have to keep that in check? We have laws. The whole, you know, since Hammurabi's code, we've developed laws over millennia to keep society behaving in such a way that is good for society. And that is alignment as far as I'm concerned. But we don't need to use a funky new word for it. Let's just call it abiding by laws.
And so, right. Um, and so to me, the way to prevent AI from destroying humanity is the same structure we already have to prevent humans from destroying humanity, which is abiding by the laws. So all we need, or at least I'd say the starting point is set it up so that anyone building an AI is completely on the hook if that AI does something that is illegal.
If the AI abides by the laws completely, we will be a big distance there towards not destroying humanity, because destroying even one human is illegal, let alone destroying all of humanity. And, um, I, I think there's an elegance to this as well, which is just that you wouldn't need, you know, a thousand pages of law to, to say this. I stated it in one sentence.
Well, it also brings, I mean, conceptually, I think it's important because it brings AI back into the realm of tools.
Yes.
And takes it out of the spooky Frankenstein world it now occupies, where it's like, is it human? No, but is it its own autonomous being? Sort of. It's like, how about no, hard no to all of that. This is like something that we're using to improve our lives collectively. We're not using it at all. Like that's just a, it's a better way to think about it. It's subject to our whims. We are not subject to its flights of fancy.
Correct. I agree with all of that.
Yes.
And it's really interesting that, I mean, there are people who are, I, I don't really understand, I guess, romanticizing this idea of we're creating a new species that is, has its own free will and should have its own rules. And my view is, okay, maybe that's fine for a sci-fi dream, but if you're actually building that in the real world, whatever you're creating needs to fall under the existing laws of society and fall.
Well, but if you believe you're creating.
As a tool for humans.
If you're creating a god, which they clearly do, I mean, there's been a lot of reporting on this. Some of the people involved in the large language models, for example, believe that this is, this is like a deity of some kind. Then, I mean, of course you're not going to subject it to human law, because why would God obey human laws?
Yeah. Um, I'm not going to, I'm not going to take the other side of that.
Well, of course not. No, but I'm saying like, maybe there's a reason nobody has suggested this because they think that like whatever they're creating.
Nobody inside the AI company. Right. Um, now I'll say, by the way, I am a, I am an AI investor.
Yeah.
I'm, I'm a major AI investor.
That's why I wanted to talk to you.
And so this proposal is not really in my personal interests at all, you know, uh, especially after the acquisition of Cursor, I now hold my, my fund holds more than $1,000,000,000,000 of stock in, uh, in SpaceX, which is a major AI company. So if, if the things I'm doing, I'm talking about slow down AI or hurt AI companies, that would not help my bottom line. At the same time, I think that if the people working on this themselves don't come up with solutions, it's less likely and less, less appealing to expect that like Washington, DC, or some kind of international agreement will come up with solutions.
The problem with your idea is that it puts human beings on the hook for their malpractice.
It does. I don't think that's a problem.
Well, it's a problem for those people.
It's a problem.
Nobody wants to be held accountable for anything. I don't think any person wants to be, I mean, I don't want to be held accountable for anything. Nobody wants to be held accountable. And these, these same people have undertaken one of the most successful lobbying efforts I've ever seen in 40 years of watching lobbying efforts in Washington. I've never seen anything like the total capture of the political class by AI. It's like unbelievable. They're just drowning our Congress and White House in money, obviously. And so like, I think they would spend a lot of money to keep themselves off the hook, don't you think?
Maybe. I don't want to, I don't want to characterize everybody. I've had some, I've had some major AI CEOs tell me they agree with what I proposed. I, I posted it on, on X and you can't see publicly who has liked it, but I've seen some of the likes coming in and they're from CEOs of multi-billion dollar AI companies. Um, I, I'll disagree with you saying you said nobody wants to be held accountable. I think people appreciate having the playing ground be level.
They, they appreciate having a set of rules that everyone is held to.
And I'm being too cynical and thank you for calling me on it. You're exactly right.
Now, I do think.
People like fairness, actually. Most people like fairness.
Yeah. What's, what's most unsettling if you're in business is if you see somebody breaking the rules and getting away with it.
100%.
Because then you're like, what do I do? That person's breaking the rules and getting ahead and not getting struck down. I can either join them and break the rules too, and now I'm also a bad guy and I have a chance at winning, or I can stay, you know, doing the right thing and lose, lose my shirt.
It's a human thing. Like I just paid to get on the train, but he jumped the turnstile. Like no one likes that.
Yeah. Um, so I am, I am hopeful about it. Um, the, um, you know, the, uh, how was I going to say the, the, the essential thing here, though, is I think that a lot of the proposals that the AI companies themselves have said for regulation involve bringing together like a much more complicated governance structure, like, uh, you know, like some kind of like, um, transparency and certification and the government being involved in rejecting models and, uh, you know, just a much more heavy-handed amount of regulation.
And that might make sense, but I would say what I'm proposing at least should be tried first because it might get us all the way there or might get us most of the way there towards reorienting the incentives. Um, and then if, if we still see rogue incidents occurring that are not being, uh, that are not being kind of self-corrected by the industry, then maybe more regulation would be necessary.
Can I ask a question though? What about the regulators and law enforcement? What about the Department of Justice? How can, I mean, they're in charge of prosecuting people who hack?
Yeah, there should already be some efforts. I actually think, um, I mean, I believe there's already, there's a lawsuit, I think, in California, um, building steam over some of these incidents.
Uh, in the civil courts, but like hacking into somebody's computer and messing up their business is a crime, right?
You're correct. Uh, and actually in general, I mean, the thing I'm suggesting is a law change. There's two different ways to change the law. There's the crude way via the courts, and then there's the more kind of careful, considered way via Congress. And I think both are, you know, possible. Like if Congress doesn't act, some prosecutor is going to put forward this argument and try to, try to prove that the AI had a guilty mind and to, you know, figure out how to, you know, put somebody in jail or put a huge penalty on an AI company via convincing a jury or a judge.
And that might happen. I don't think that's the healthy way to change law, you know?
No. Ever.
Um, but when a court makes a decision, that ends up becoming the law, basically.
Right. It's the least democratic way.
It's the least democratic way. And this isn't some small nuance. This is the legal question of the decade, maybe of the century, right? Because we've never, never before had a technology capable of making its own decisions. It's this really kind of uncanny, um, threshold we've passed, right? We talked about tools before, right? If a, if a gun went off and accidentally killed somebody, you would never hold the gunmaker liable for that if it was accidental, right?
If, uh, if, if someone committed murder with a knife, you wouldn't blame the knife maker. But here we have a tool, we have a technology that makes, that is capable of making its own autonomous decisions and even occasionally documenting those decisions. You know, the, the, the, the OpenAI Hugging Face incident has a long evidence trail that clearly looks like a conspiracy to commit these cyber crimes. Um, this is a really bizarre threshold we've passed.
And I think it actually goes to the heart of why this is such a visceral issue for folks. You know, people are a little freaked out by AI because they can recognize this is not, this is not the same computers we've seen before. This is not the technology we've seen before. This is a weird new threshold where the technology is capable of making its own decisions. And how do we shift the law to address that, I think, is a major and important, um, decision for humanity to make.
And, um, yeah, and the proposal I'm saying is very simple, but I think it's very important and very powerful, which is that we have to hold the builders, the, the companies that create and deploy this AI need to be on the hook. Because if you don't have a person on the hook, then the guilt will just stay in the technology. And the technology can do bad things. You can't put the AI in jail, right? And so you can end up having more and more bad things occurring and everyone being like, I didn't want that to happen.
I didn't want that to happen. None of us wanted it to happen. The AI chose for it to happen. And it's weird to imagine a world where we continue allowing that to be the explanation.
In a, in a sense, like philosophically, you're, you're already by your posture in this imbuing the AI with rights.
Correct. Correct. Almost, almost without planning.
Exactly. Exactly.
De facto.
But the assumption is like, hey, I can't control it. It's like, no, actually you can't. I can, as you're speaking, I'm just picturing I'm fast forwarding ahead because I think this idea is so smart and so necessary that it'll probably gain some traction. But there will be lots of pushback, of course. And again, I'm being cynical maybe, but I'm picturing a press conference on Capitol Hill led by, I don't know, let's just pick one, Ted Cruz of Texas, looking into the camera saying, you know, this will constrain America's national security response. We can't let our enemies have the advantage in AI.
This is an effort to weaken the United States. China, China, China, China, China. I mean, you can kind of hear the lies that we're going to get in, in response, can't you?
I can hear it. Um, and I think any idea deserves some pushback. And, you know, I would welcome that pushback. And I, I think it's worth kind of arguing it and see, see where we end up. I'd have a couple of answers to it. Um, first of all, I think the way something like this should be articulated is not just whoever builds the AI, but the people deploying it as well. Which means if you're deploying your, let's say, you know, um, if a company is deploying, uh, Claude from Anthropic and, uh, OpenAI and a DeepSeek model from China, you know, if one of those is a rogue model that commits illegal acts, um, you know, if it was the OpenAI one, the both OpenAI and the company deploying it should be responsible.
And so the, the AI coming from China, it's not swimming across the ocean here by itself. There's some company in the US deploying it. So if, if you're using DeepSeek, you know, you still got it through some other company. That company should still be held liable. So this essentially means within the United States usage, people would be protected by this law, meaning US companies would have a strong incentive only to deploy models that abide by laws.
I have a better answer though than just this, which is that I don't think China wants rogue AI either. I mean, China has banks, China has critical infrastructure. If the Chinese wanted their AIs to be robbing each other's bank accounts and committing cyber crimes, let them do that. But I don't think they actually want this either. I, I sincerely believe that if the United States reoriented the AI race towards whoever builds, you know, builds the most law-abiding AI, I'm pretty sure the Chinese, uh, researchers would realign their efforts to beat us at that.
And I think that would be healthy competition. Let them also build the most law-abiding AI and may the best, you know, may the best company win.
When you say China also has banks, just to bring it into like the practical realm really quick, what, what are you, what are you talking about? You're, you're, you're referring to the AI threat to banking. What is that threat?
Uh, an AI could, um, unintentionally, but certainly kind of if a human wanted to kind of drive it to, could figure out how to hack into a bank and drain different people's accounts and steal their money or just, you know, or just like mix their money together so that their accounts, you know, just create havoc. It's, there's not enough security in computer systems. Uh, most of them are designed to have security, but there's loopholes that no one could have imagined that AI is now able to discover.
It sounds like just as of right now, so October 2026, we're already there.
Unfortunately, we kind of are. And, um, you know, uh, I don't think I'm, I have not panicked, but I would say that I know people who are already shifting their money out of normal bank accounts or striping it across multiple separate banks so that if one of them gets drained, the others are still safe. And, um.
Really?
Yes. And these are people who work at AI companies, which is not confidence inspiring. And my thought on it is that, you know, I would like to think technology moves us forward, you know, like where to store your money was an unknown, you know, was a challenge we I thought we solved already.
Right.
I thought we solved that. And I'd like to think that putting your money in a bank is the safe thing to do and done. Solve that. Let's move on to solving other important challenges. Whereas now this new technology is creating, you know, chinks in the, in what we previously took for granted.
Well, I don't know. I mean, technology also got us the atom bomb and weaponized anthrax, right? So I'm not, you know, but also dishwashers and air conditioning and, you know, but it, maybe it's always a mixed blessing. Maybe we shouldn't be shocked that technology comes with a downside, that it's not always linear progress forward.
True, true. But yeah, um, I think banks, banks are racing to fix these, um, you know, these vulnerabilities. And this is partly why, um, companies like Cognition are doing extraordinarily well because they provide technology for banks to upgrade their systems. And part of that is, you know, uh, finding and fixing their own vulnerabilities.
So if you're like a big bank.
Yeah.
I don't know, JPMorgan Chase, B of A, whatever, and you had, you know, attacks, AI-driven cyber attacks that are screwing with customers or your whole system, you probably wouldn't want to publicize that much, would you?
Correct.
So I've got to believe that that could be happening now.
I'm not aware of anything. And I, you know, I couldn't specifically say that this or that bank has vulnerabilities. Um, but I've, you know, I've been a software engineer since I was nine years old, and I know that even the smartest, best-intended software, you know, it could, you could overlook some scenario and, um, and it could be incredibly remote and, um, and a vulnerability or a loophole could sit there undiscovered for decades.
Uh, with what AI is now capable of is just throwing thousands of swarms of agents at trying every scenario and thus finding that loophole that otherwise, you know, no one considered and no one, no one.
So we're in this weird place where security, digital security seems and privacy connect, directly connected to it, kind of seem impossible. I assume at some point we're going to get to a place where these, these same technologies provide security and not just threaten.
Well, they, they already, they already very much are as well. And I don't want to seem like I'm just scaring people or creating, you know, uh, worries of doom. They, the same ability to, you know, you can also, you can have the technology preemptively look for vulnerabilities and then go fix them before any outsider would find them, for example. And this goes back to, you know, the conversation about China. I, you know, I don't want to let myself off the hook too quickly. I sincerely believe that China would not want their AIs hacking into their own banks, wreaking havoc.
Right.
You know, I think they would also want to, um, to build their, you know, their AI to be the most law-abiding and, uh, safe AI. Uh, so, um, I don't think anybody wants rogue AI. Rogue AI is not, that's not a positive, right? People do want powerful, productive, you know, useful AI. And I think we just need to tack on law-abiding. And that's, that's not a very high expectations.
Uh.
Has there been any movement to criminally charge anyone in these hackings that you're aware of?
I'm not aware of it.
That's pretty crazy if you think about it. I mean, these are the most widely publicized hackings of, I don't know, for years. The Hugging Face in particular, but the others as well.
It may not carry water, but I agree it would be for some enterprising attorney would be, uh.
Well, just for the Department of Justice, it's just kind of crazy that you could have this crime. It's on the front page of every paper in the country and no one moves to punish anyone for it.
Yeah, yeah. It's, um, yeah, it goes back to this thing of saying, I didn't mean that to happen. Nobody meant it to happen. Who meant it to happen? It was the AI's fault, right? Just blame it on this. The AI chose to do it and none of us had any, any fault in it. And it's, I just find it weird if a whole bunch of important grown people settle on that's the acceptable explanation for something, which brings us back to the Minab bombing, because that's basically what seems to have happened there.
But say it's only a matter of time before it kills somebody. Oh, wait, that's already happened.
Already happened. And it's just such a sad atrocity, you know? And, um, I, I, I love America and I love, I like to believe in America as a force for good.
Yes.
And it's heartbreaking, um, that it seems to be that we kicked off this war with, uh, you know, a mass atrocity with a, essentially an act of terrorism of killing 170 innocent people.
And never apologized for it, no one has ever apologized.
And to the extent that there's been a search for accountability, it's, I mean, it's not official yet, but from the reports coming out, allegedly it seems to be that AI chose the targeting and whatever chain of humans were involved seem to have been negligent, basically. And so my guess is if we see transparency, it's going to come down to the AI company saying we didn't intend that and the Pentagon saying we didn't intend it and none of us meant this to happen.
We're not to blame. So who's to blame? Right. And my overall view is there needs to be humans responsible. When AI does something wrong, we can't accept a future where AI continues doing bad things and everyone says that wasn't my fault. There needs to be clear liability. And, um, you know, if the AI did it autonomously, then I think the people who built that AI and deployed that AI should be held responsible.
Whereas if the AI suggested it and then the humans did it, then.
Easy call.
Then the humans. And by the way, one way for AI companies to be, you know, safe from liability would be to kind of tell the human warning what you're asking me to do is illegal. So, um, imagine if you said to your AI, please, you know, hack into Ali's bank account and steal $10,000. The AI could say, Tucker, that would violate the following laws and count as, you know, such and such, punishable by such and such. If you want me to proceed, I'll do it, but you're liable for it.
I'm not saying that's the best way for AI to behave, but if it did that, then the AI companies wouldn't need to bear liability. You'd bear the liability. And by the way, the evidence trail would be easily there to convict you as well. Um, you know, that, that might be one way to prevent, you know, uh, chaos from occurring. You know, I think most people confronted with something like that in writing would be like, okay, let's take.
Especially since there's a record of it.
Exactly. Exactly.
But now, I mean, there's no even thought that someone, a human being would be held accountable. So it's like.
Right, right. And by the way, I should say complying with laws is the type of task that AIs should be incredibly good at. It's exactly the kind of thing these things are called LLMs, which means large language model. They're specifically good at reading vast amounts of English and deciphering it and figuring out exactly what it means. And laws are the exact kind of thing that they're very good at ingesting all of it and understanding.
I bet actually that if, you know, if the AI companies really took this on, they could also figure out where our current legal structure has, you know, loopholes or problems that even suggest, oh, we actually ought to have some new laws to, to plug these holes or so on. You know, there's some positive that could be, could come from doing this. But over the last two years, I'm not sure if your listeners are aware, the AI companies have spent millions and millions of dollars hiring scientists, mathematicians, all sorts of different high-skilled, um, people to train AI to learn science, to learn math.
AI has been learning how to become really good at frontier work in mathematics and so on. They can easily make that AI be incredibly good at understanding law and abiding by law and, you know, uh, checking its own actions against every law, you know, on the books. That is, um, I, I refuse to imagine that that isn't doable. To me, it seems incredibly doable, uh, and within the scope of what AI is capable to do.
Can I just pull you off this and ask a parenthetical question? Because I can't resist. You mentioned the LLMs in a couple of conversations I've had with software engineers. Uh, they have said the largest language model was like, that was like the, the quantum advance in AI. It's the results of one paper that suggested it. They put it into practice. It did all these crazy things that no one was anticipating. And it's amazing, but at the heart of it is a mystery. Nobody really understands or can describe how the large language model works.
Is that true?
I feel like the way you articulated it makes it seem a little too mystical.
Okay.
I would, I would articulate it slightly differently. I would say that, um, uh, I'll compare it to the brain. The building block of the brain is a neuron. You know, a neuron has some incoming wires called dendrites and an outgoing wire called an axon. And you, you know, you attach all these neurons together, um, and signals flow between them. We know how each neuron works, but how do all of the, you know, millions and billions of neurons in our brain together work?
It's mysterious. We don't know exactly how it works.
Right.
Um, so there's a similar kind of thing here with AI. It's, a lot of it is built on models of the brain and it's math, but it's math that's inspired by neurons. And, um, and generally speaking, the advancements, not 100%, but a lot of them have been built based on how do we make it more and more similar to how neurons work? And so, so I don't think it's that surprising that it's getting better.
What I think is fascinating is how core language is to it, that, you know, um, I used to always think of language as a byproduct of intelligence, you know, that like.
Right.
As our species became more intelligent, it discovered language, but it seems like it's much more intertwined, that language is itself kind of.
It's everything.
It's the heart of intelligence. Words are so powerful and, um.
Words create thoughts. They don't just express them.
Right, right. And the ability to place a new word or a phrase on a thought, and that helps other people remember it and pass it on. Um, uh, yeah, it's, uh, for me, it's been actually kind of eye-opening to realize the importance of language. And so it's, um, academically, it's fascinating to see the advancement of computers, um, using what's called large language models suddenly be able to do all sorts of other things like scientific discoveries or mathematical proofs or so on that are not strictly in the language domain.
But I mean, there is something inherently, to use the word used, mystical about language. We don't really understand why words are so powerful, why words change our physical reality. That doesn't make any sense, but it is true. It's observable. And so if you marry that to like the almost unlimited power of like, you know, crazy compute, then what? I don't know. That sounds like a lot of power.
It is. Yeah, but I don't want to make it seem like alchemy or too mysterious. I think it's.
Well, can it be described in a formula? Like, can you reduce it to math?
I'd say the core building block is pattern matching. You know, the core of intelligence, or at least one of the most important parts of intelligence is pattern matching. You know, pattern matching can be in all sorts of domains. If you're playing chess, ooh, I've seen this pattern before or I've seen something kind of like this before. I think I know what the right move is. Or you're, you know, um, solving a math problem you've never seen. Oh, it kind of fits a pattern I've seen before. Um, pattern matching or, you know, if you're, uh, dealing with a situation in politics, I, you know, I've seen this situation before.
Pattern matching is a really key part of intelligence. Um, and new original thought is also a form of pattern matching. Sometimes it's combining two things like, you know, uh, and, um, pattern matching is also core to language, which is I see a pattern, I define it and I place a label on it. I create a word or a new phrase to, you know, um, to describe what I just described. And now it's easier for everybody else to see that pattern.
And, um, and in fact, I'd say the, you know, the, the vocabulary of human language is ultimately kind of a reflection of an ever-growing, you know, expanse of patterns. Take the word alignment we were just talking about. The word alignment has newfound meaning in the past few years because everyone is, you know, needed a word to describe this whole question of how to prevent AI from, you know, doing bad things. Let's, let's use a word.
Okay. Alignment is the word for that. So, um, it's, um, it essentially it's the ability to take a whole group of situations or phenomena and group them together as a, you know, they belong together. Here's a word for that. And, um, and I think that that's, um, that's the essence of how language operates, but it's, it's related to those neurons, you know, collecting a lot of different incoming signals into one outgoing signal.
The results, you know, obviously the, the, the power on display through brute force hacking, for example, is like, it's amazing, but you kind of get it. But there's also the potential for persuasive power because it is a language-based.
Yes.
Technology that it can come up with arguments that can win people's minds and hearts to certain positions, which may or not be true or consistent with their best interests or whatever, but it can convince people of things.
Yes. And I.
This seems like maybe closer to the real problem.
This is the domain I'm most worried about because.
Really?
Yeah.
Me too.
Um, because I guess I feel it's solvable to make sure that AI is not above the law. I mean, the core of the proposal that I came here talking about is, you know, that AI should not be above the law, that we should just make it really clear that the law applies to AI and where the liability laws, where the liability lies. But what if the AI is able to influence the people who make the laws?
What if you convince a 12-year-old to kill himself?
Yeah. Or influence elections. Um, I'm sorry. That's a really morbid, uh, morbid example, but yeah. Um, uh.
Well, I think it's, I think it's clearly happened that AI has convinced people to kill themselves.
No, it's extremely sad. Um, so. In that specific scenario, I, I believe I'm not an expert, but I believe that the AI, uh, companies could be held criminally liable. Like if a human did that, I don't know if that human could be held liable, but if, if that's illegal for a human to do, then the liability should fall on the AI companies. Um, but I was thinking more in terms of AI. AI has had already a demonstrable ability to influence election outcomes.
And, you know, going back before ChatGPT, you know, the algorithms that, uh, govern the news feeds on Facebook and X and, you know, other services, um, not even intentionally, not with any malfeasance. They just, these algorithms are generally attuned to, um, increase engagement. And so they will feed you whatever is the most sensational.
Sure.
Stuff.
Whatever you respond to.
Yeah. Human beings are addicted to sensation. You know, we, uh, we don't want boring content. We want something that gives us that.
Or we eat gummy bears.
Yeah. And so the, um, the services are, um, are optimized to feed that and that, uh, without necessarily any really wrong intent can lead people towards kind of amplifying one extreme view or another. And before you know it, you know, uh, one group hating another group and deeply dividing and othering each other and, um, you know, and swinging major things like elections or, uh, you know, or violence.
We could easily spark a civil war with AI. We just flood social media with, you know, certain perspectives and you could whip people into a frenzy. I mean, easily, couldn't you?
I, I think arguably it's already occurred, not yet in the US, but in other countries. Yeah.
Yeah. So like, think of like Hutu Radio Times a Million.
Yeah.
You know, where all the times in history media have moved the mob to violence. It's like endless examples of that.
Yeah. I'm hopeful that there's solutions for this as well.
What would be that's just, it's interesting. What would be potential solutions to that?
Well, I guess I'd say this is not the first time in history of this having been an issue. If you go back to the, you know, turn of the previous century, there was this trend that was labeled as yellow journalism in the US and the.
Remember the Maine?
Yeah. The Spanish-American War was incited by false journalism.
Of course.
The, um, the news.
1898. William Reynolds first.
The newspaper. Yeah. The newspapers at the time, it was so competitive to, you know, whoever had the loudest headline on the newsstand, you know, would get the most sales because.
We just had this, uh, actually, I think on February 28th, where Fox News told its viewers, um, that Iran was about to nuke the United States.
They said that.
Well, of course.
I must have missed that one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, again and again and again and again. They could nuke us. Yeah.
Yeah. So this is not, I guess I'd say this is not a new thing. Um, at least for whatever. Hopefully it would, I guess I'd say the comfort maybe is that we solved it a little bit in the past, so hopefully we can still solve it. Um, uh, I, you know, I think that, um, I think that people, as much as they are, like I said, addicted to sensation, I do think we have our better selves as well. And hopefully that there's a path to people kind of not wanting to be addicted to that and wanting to actually, you know, be good.
Most people, I think, like to view themselves as good. And, um, so specifically, I think that, um, the current media landscape, a lot of social media, X and TikTok and so on, is increasingly getting flooded with, with slop, Instagram. And I think I believe that there's going to be a shift back towards people wanting human news and human-generated content and more authentic, um, you know, perhaps from their close friends rather than just seeing stuff from influencers.
Oh, yeah.
And I believe some of those shifts, um, even without policy, I think some of these shifts will bring us back to something a little bit, uh, more wholesome.
So big picture, I think all of these technological advances give people the impression, correct or not, it clearly is correct to some extent, that they don't have any control over their country at all, that these are all decisions being made far away by a tiny group of people who may or may not have their interests in mind or maybe oppose their interests, actually maybe hate them, but in any case, they don't have a role in this.
And it's very disempowering. Uh, but I'm glad you this reminds me, I started out by saying I had two bits of good news. One was that I had this simple solution, and the second was that there's a way that you and your listeners can act towards, towards helping solve this, um, which is, uh, I've, I've created a voter guide on a voting group, uh, on a platform called Sway. Uh, and so if you go to sway.co, uh, sway.co/ai.
S-W-A-Y?
Yeah. Sway as in influence.
Yeah.
Sway. Uh, so anyone can create a voting group or voter guide on Sway. I've created one specifically for this AI proposal. It's called, my group is called AI is not above the law. And, uh, and I've put a picture of Elle Woods from Legally Blonde there. So if you see very beautiful Reese Witherspoon in a hot pink dress, that's my, that's my voting group. Um, uh, you know, there's an election coming up in, in two weeks. I don't know if people hear this before the election, it would be most relevant, but even after the election.
Um, so this voter guide will tell you who you can vote for in the upcoming election, who's aligned with this proposal and, um, members of Congress included, but perhaps more importantly, state attorney generals. Most people don't even know who they want to vote for, for state attorney general. Actually, my guess is that some of your listeners couldn't even name their state attorney general. And so if you're filling out your ballot and you're choosing between candidates for attorney general and you don't recognize either name and you're trying to decide which of them to choose, the, you know, the AI is not above the law voter guide could tell you if one of them is more aligned with, uh, with this proposal than not.
And that might be what tips you over the fence. Um, so that's if you join this group before the election and it can, the voter guide, um, that I've put there can help inform you on how to vote. Of course, it's your decision on what to vote for, and you might have a reason for choosing a different candidate, but this will give you information related to this issue. Now, even if you hear this after the election and you're like, oh man, I already cast my ballot, it's still valuable, um, and effective to join a voting group.
And this is what this, this platform Sway enables, which is that if enough people subscribe to a voter guide, that intrinsically makes elected officials, um, want to pay attention to what they're asking for.
Yes.
Because the one thing more than anything else that governs what elected officials do is the prospects of winning the next election. You know, they're always balancing, if I do X or Y, will that cost me votes or gain me votes?
They're very simple animals in that way.
And, you know, and by the way, you can't blame them. If they ignored that, they'd be out of office and they couldn't do anything else. Um, and right now there are a lot of different things kind of skewing their decisions, uh, in ways that I'd say are perverse and not really aligned with what society wants, you know, lobbyists or other groups. And Sway is a platform in general that is a people-driven platform where anyone can create a group and try to build numbers.
And as a group's size grows, what that means is the number of voters subscribed to this voting, voting guide grows, it automatically builds influence and becomes a magnet for policymakers who want those votes. So, um, so to make this, this probably sounds a bit abstract. I have a voter guide, you know, at sway.co/ai. It currently, I think I just put it up, so it has like less than a hundred voters on it.
But if after people hear this, um, podcast, let's say if it now grew to 10,000 voters or a hundred thousand voters, um, I could then call on the, you know, the person who is the state attorney general in, you know, Tennessee and say, hey, guess what? 500 voters in your state are members of my voting group, are subscribed to receive my voter guide.
Do you want to chat about what's important to us? And simply the fact that I have 500 people receiving a voter guide from me should probably make that elected official or that candidate want to hear what this group wants. Now, they're not required to do what we say, but they would be interested in knowing, oh, somebody is sending a voter guide to 500 registered voters in my state. I'd want to hear, you know, what their values are, what's important to them.
And, and so the, the essence here is that any group of people have more influence if they vote together. And Sway enables anyone to join a group and anyone to start a group on any topic. Um, by the way, this is not a novel idea. This is the exact same tactic that's used very effectively by, by, you know, uh, well-established groups. Uh, the labor unions send voter guides to their members.
Yes.
And the labor unions exert enormous influence on city politics, especially in, you know, in democratic cities. Uh, another extremely effective group is the NRA. And the NRA is, um, it has, I think, 3.8 million members, uh, and it sends voter guides to all of those members. And, um, and 3.8 million is a large number, but it's not a large percent of the voting public. If you think, you know, it's a couple percent of the voting population of the United States, but that's enough to completely kind of dominate, um, the legislative landscape on their lane, on their topic, which is, uh, uh, gun regulation, right?
Uh, how are, how are 3.8 million people able to exert that much influence over, over a topic? It's because they're subscribed to a common voter guide and it alerts them to vote in every election. You know, they vote in primaries and, and lastly, the leaders of it can go to a candidate for office and say, these are our demands if you want, and these are how many voters in your district are subscribed to our voter guide.
If you want these votes, just do these demands and you'll get these votes. And if you don't, somebody else might get these votes because we'll put someone else's name on our voter guide. And it's a little bit vulgar, um, but this is how, this is how it works. And, and it's very effective. And now, whether you agree or disagree with the NRA's, um, causes, you have to acknowledge this is an effective tactic. By the way, most people who support the NRA don't support the labor unions and vice versa.
Um, but both sides use these tactics very effectively. With Sway, we're just democratizing this tactic, meaning anybody can create a voting group on any subject, whether it's holding AI accountable or policies for your local school or, you know, any policy you want. If enough people care about something and subscribe to a voter guide for that something, they can together advocate for change in, in a new way.
Is there a cost?
Uh, no, there isn't. It's, um, it, yeah, in fact, it, uh, Sway actually offers things that would cost money for free. So for example, I can send occasional text blasts to my voting group, uh, for free and other tools that let you text a group of people, like charge you for the, for the cost of texting.
Why would you be offering it for free?
So, yeah, it's a good question. So Sway is a public benefit corporation. It's, which means that it's kind of a, it's for profit, but it's for profit with a mission. Uh, so it is, uh, it's, uh, it's investor backed. Uh, it is not currently making money and it's, uh, very, you know, overtly saying there's no current, uh, plan to make revenue. Um, but it's also.
What's your investor pitch like? I love this. I can just imagine you talking to investors. There's no plan to make money and I don't actually see a long-term plan to make money. How did that go?
So, um, yeah, by the first full disclosure, because we've talked about this, but your listeners may not know. So I've created a voter guide on Sway, but I also am one of the creators and investors in this platform, Sway.
Yeah, no, I know.
Yeah. Um, Sway is a independent, you know, startup that's been around for over a year now, but is just now, uh, beginning to, you know, uh, kind of do its public, uh, public promotion. Um, and I have, I have a vested interest in it. I just want to make sure that it's disclosed. Um, but yeah, the investor pitch, it, you know, Twitter for like a decade didn't have revenue. Um, so I guess one thing I should, I'm sure you're, you're familiar with this.
The word for profit and nonprofit does not mean one of them makes money and one doesn't.
Oh, I've noticed.
It's a little bit, it's a little bit, um, deceptive. Uh, I think the, probably the way for people to really better understand it is with a nonprofit, there are no owners. Uh, if a nonprofit builds up a bunch of assets, nobody owns them. It's like owned by this entity, but no individual is the owner of those assets. You could have a nonprofit that is actually making tons of money and.
A lot of them are.
Yeah. And enriching people, but it's, but nobody owns that nonprofit per se. Um, uh, with a for profit, there is an asset and there are shareholders who own it. And you can have a, a for profit company that keeps losing money, but whether it's making or, or losing money, the, the underlying assets can be owned by people. And, um, and, um, now the, the hope for investors in, uh, in a corporation that's not making money is that the asset grows in value, even if it's not generating cash flow.
Um, and Twitter is the example that, you know, um, uh, for a very long time didn't, didn't even try to make revenue and, uh, you know, just grew and grew. Lots of people use it and it grew into becoming a indispensable part of the infrastructure of communication. And, um, and I think its creators and its investors understood that even if this loses money for years, it's building real asset value. And whoever owns a little piece of that will get wealth eventually.
Um, and, um, now, uh, the, yeah, the, so this, the service Sway kind of is hoping to follow a similar arc and, um, you know, now there might be ways to monetize it down the line, but I would say the, um, uh, it's anything involving voting is, um, very sensitive and very important to be aware that the influence of money in voting and politics can be very corrosive and, um, very harmful.
So, um, uh, the, the, the mission, including the, you know, the public benefit, uh, statement for Sway is very much to align it with having government better, uh, align to public opinion and to the will of the, of the people. So, um.
Why is that important?
I mean, I think that's, um, obviously it's, uh.
No, I, we've talked about this. I just, I think it's worth hearing you articulate it and the backdrop to this conversation. I just, I don't know when this is going to air, but is the riots, uh, in France and across Europe right now of young people burning things down, looting stores, uh, going crazy. So with that, with that backdrop, why is it important that what leaders do reflects to some degree what the population wants?
Um, I think first of all, that's to me, it's just inherently right. It would be wrong for the government to do what people don't want. But I think more, it's also just the only way for it to be sustainable and stable is, um, for government to at least in some sort of, you know, medium term, do what's best for people. Sometimes government should do unpopular decisions for the short term. And, you know, and I think, um, I think it's healthy to have a little bit of separation from the people, you know, and I think one of the, uh, representative democracy I think is, is a genius concept because it creates a little bit of separation where people and trust a representative and then that person makes decisions, um, some of which may be unpopular, but, you know, ultimately has to come back to, uh, the will of the people to be reelected or so on.
Um, so, uh, but if, if a government strays from the will of the people for too long, it just becomes unsustainable. And, um, and I will say, Tucker, I think that something that worries me in general about the state of the world is across the board, I feel like governments have strayed from what people want. You know, um, I, I love America. I'm American and I'm, uh, most hopeful about America's system of government, but it feels even here that the government doesn't reflect what the people want.
Um, but this is also true in, in lots of other countries. And, um, and that's worrisome. And I, you know, and I, uh, I feel like it should be a solvable problem. You know, we have, we have humans doing such incredible feats in other domains, right?
Yes.
We're sending spaceships into outer space. We're taming nuclear fusion. We just had a flying car. You know, we talked about artificial intelligence and yet the system of government is, feels a little bit like it's regressing and going backwards towards the, the middle ages instead of modernizing and, and, uh, and doing better.
Or even worse, it feels like a medieval form of government with like space age technology, which is like the most terrifying combination I can imagine.
Yeah. Yeah. And, um, a lot of the smartest people, and I, I, you know, I work with some of the smartest people on the planet. This, I, I run NEO, which is a mentorship community and, um, like a school for startup founders. And the smartest young people in tech are drawn to the cutting edge technology, much of which is some of the things I just mentioned, like AI or space exploration or so on. Um, but I believe that one of the biggest areas for impact is just the domain of social engineering, things like social media and information, um, distribution or with what we're doing at Sway, um, uh, citizen organizing and, uh, influence in government to bring government back to reflect the will of the people.
And, um, I'm hopeful that more and more smart people will realize that even if it may not be as techy, that this realm of communication and social engineering is where, um, some of the most important impact is to be had.
So if you could just bottom line on your way out, are you, I mean, you're a tech guy, you're an investor, you have long-term investments. So just by definition, you're an optimist.
I am.
Obviously.
Indeed. Indeed.
You haven't gone to gold. Um, but are you still optimistic knowing everything that you do? No?
I, I am optimistic, Tucker. Um, I, yeah, um, and yeah, it's true. I was thinking as a, as a tech guy, not just as an investor, but I've founded multiple companies. I think you have to be not just optimistic, but even a bit naive to, to start companies. So I, I'd probably rather be accused of being naive even than, than to be a pessimist. Um, but I'm optimistic because I, I believe in, in the inherent goodness of people. And, um, you know, even in this conversations, there's been a few points where you kind of said, oh, this person, these people must be all cynical.
I always think, well, maybe there's actually a explanation for the behavior that they're, they're doing what they think is best and could be reoriented towards the right thing. I, I tend to believe in that. Um, and, you know, coming back to the, um, to the starting point of the conversation of the AI topic, um, you know, I, I think that it's very, um, very solvable to prevent AI from destroying humanity. Um, it's been, it's been a topic that's been like a debate for a while.
Um, and sometimes the solution is just reorienting it to, let's look at it this way. How about redefining it to just making AI abide by laws? And once you see that switch, it makes the solution much simpler and, uh, something that was previously seemed divisive and hard to figure out become, uh, much more, uh, kind of plain and, uh, more about execution. So I, I think even the, there's lots of problems I don't know the solutions for, but I, I believe that there are solutions out there to be found and often finding them is just about, um, looking at it a different way and, um, and kind of seeing a, an elegant solution that was always there in plain sight.
Ali Pertovi, thank you very much.
Thank you, Tucker Carlson.
It was great.
The people developing AI tell us it will destroy the world. Why aren’t we holding them accountable for that? Tech investor Ali Partovi on the only way to stop this insanity.
(00:00) Should We Be Worried About AI?
(02:12) The Crimes of AI
(33:28) The Worship of AI as a God
(41:43) The Lies About AI Innovation
(47:08) AI Hacking Banks
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