No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:34:42 · Elad Gil
[00:34:42] S0: Or what is the safety that's really needed that's actually protective of people? What is the risk? What is the outcome? That's kind of the Janssen from Janssen Pharmaceuticals. He's considered one of the best drug developers of all times. He has these great videos on YouTube where he's interviewed thirty, forty years ago talking about regulatory capture in pharma. And the reason things got so expensive and so slow is number one, regulatory capture, and the second is risk reward scenarios where the FDA, in his mind I'm not saying this is correct or incorrect. In his mind, the FDA focuses too much on safety and risk and not enough on benefit. And so there's no risk reward. There's only risk. So that slows everything down because you're only looking at one side of the equation. One could imagine a scenario where in the labs, a version of that is created as well. Right? Where the safety burden is so high even if the outcome is even higher, even if the positive outcome is dramatically higher relative to the risk. And so this is back to if you only focus on one side of the equation, you'll always constrain things. And if you constrain things but then push progress forward internally on an exponent, and a year is worth three or four years in normal time, then you're a year ahead internally, that's a massive advantage. And so it's this very interesting question of where do we as a society feel comfortable on the risk reward spectrum for different things? Like, if my email gets hacked, is that so terrible relative to better healthcare through AI models sooner? And so that's kind of the trade off. So yeah, these are all things we'll have to work through from a societal perspective.
00:36:18 · Sarah Guo, Elad Gil
[00:36:18] S1: I think part of the challenge here is it's not a comfortable stance for the regulators to for many policymakers to hear from technologists that you have to see what happens with the technology versus control. [00:36:32] S0: We've always said that. It's always been a tech thing. It's always been throughout history, hey, of course, this technology could be used in negative ways. Right? Every technology has both positive and negative applications. Biotech, you could create a virus, but you can cure cancer. Nuclear, you could have free, cheap, abundant energy. You can also create weapons. And if you actually look at it, you know, 70% of France is still nuclear in terms of its power generation. Right? 70%. Where are all the accidents? And where are all the kerfuffles? You know, nothing. Nothing's happened. US is 18, and we haven't built a reactor in forty years. Japan is 25%. Very safe, very abundant, but we had a safety lobby in the seventies basically kill abundant clean energy for us. Right? [00:37:19] S1: Well, we're making them now. We just need to make a lot of them.
00:37:19 · Sarah Guo, Elad Gil
[00:37:19] S1: Well, we're making them now. We just need to make a lot of them. [00:37:23] S0: We're not making much. We're not making much. So I think there are real outcomes where safety has hurt us. And that's hurt us in power and energy production. It's hurt us in aspects of medicine. It's hurt us in lots of places. And the question is where do we want the spectrum to be on AI for this stuff? And there's many worlds, many scenarios, many outcomes. And societally, we kind of get to choose where do we wanna where do we wanna place that needle on that on the wheel of safety versus risk versus outcome. [00:37:55] S1: Elad, before we go, what is something that you're just excited about that is on the positive end of that wheel?
00:37:55 · Sarah Guo, Elad Gil
[00:37:55] S1: Elad, before we go, what is something that you're just excited about that is on the positive end of that wheel? [00:38:05] S0: I mean, there's so much stuff I'm excited about there. Like, I think there's so much we can do from a human productivity perspective, from an education perspective, from a health care perspective, from a daily life and benefit to life perspective, self driving and elderly, everything. There's so much good that can come of all this. So I'm optimistic about a lot of applications, and that's why I'm cautious about where we should end up on that spectrum. Because I do think it's always good to make sure that we have the proper safeguards societally, but I think that historically, for big industries, we've gone too far. And the reason tech has been so successful so quickly and has had so much human impact is because it's been lightly regulated. And I think it's better to keep it that way than not. And we'll lose optimism. We'll lose momentum. We'll lose progress. And that's what happened in biotech, and that's what's happened in a variety of areas over time. It's what happened in energy for a long time. [00:39:04] S1: Call to arms against regulatory capture. Alright. We'll see you guys. Find us on Twitter nopriorspod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you wanna see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That way you get a new episode every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at nopriors.com.