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00:08:07 · Calin Fabri, S0
[00:08:07] S1: And also, like, it was during this time that he won the Nobel Prize. Yeah. Do you recall that moment? How did it feel to see him win it, and how did it feel for you being part of this historical moment? [00:08:20] S0: Well, I remember going to see him afterwards in the same pub I told you about. And he showed up this time with a backpack, and he said, okay, I've got something to show you. And he reaches into the backpack, and he pulls out this little box. And inside the box, there is the gold medal. It's like this disc, like like this size. Heavy thing. Right? And on one side of the medal, is the picture of Alfred Nobel. And you flip it over, and on the other side, there is the goddess of nature wearing a veil over her face, and then the god of science is lifting the veil to look at nature. Wow. It was the perfect image for Demis, who says he wants to build AI to understand the fabric of reality. [00:09:02] S1: Absolutely. And also I think a lot of people can learn from from your book. But from the beginning, Demis had some concerns, and he was very safe on the way he wanted to develop AI. Also, when they sold to Google, he wanted to make sure that the governance doesn't go into the wrong hands. Like, why do you think that Demis is portrayed as this kind of evil genius, whereas, like, the others are the saviors?
00:09:32 · S0
[00:09:32] S0: It's true. Demis wanted to make it safe right from the beginning. So in 2009... Right? 2009, artificial intelligence couldn't recognize the picture of a cat. AI could do nothing. It was deep AI winter. And in that year, Demis met Shane Legg, his cofounder of DeepMind, and they met at a lecture. Shane called it the Halloween scenario, where basically it was on Halloween's day in 2009, and he was imagining a time thirty years in the future... Twenty years in the future, around 2030, you know, there would be, he thought, artificial general intelligence. He used that phrase, AGI, and he said, in 2030, it's going to be scary. It's going to be threatening us. It's going be more powerful than us. We should worry about this. There could be a Halloween scenario. We could be threatened as humans. And at that lecture, Demis went up and saw Shane, and they bonded. And this was the beginning of the idea for creating the company DeepMind. So safety was baked into the vision of the company right from the beginning. And yes, you're right. You know, Elon Musk would go around at one point saying, oh, Demis, he's an evil genius. And then if you said to Elon, what do you mean? He said, well, you know, when Demis was young, he created a video game called Evil Genius. So he must be an evil genius. It was a sort of ridiculous argument. But one thing which is true in this area is basically because people are very aware of the kind of incredible power that they are ushering into the world, this superintelligence, you know, the first time we have this rival to human cognition, they tend to say, we're scared of it, we can't trust it, but I know I... I'm good. If I do it, it's going to be fine because I'm good. But the other guys, Elon, you know, Dario, Sam, Mark Zuckerberg, I don't know if they are good. Maybe they're not good. So I better be first because I'm good. And they all basically feel that a little bit.
00:11:41 · Calin Fabri, S0
[00:11:41] S1: Do you think it's sort of a messiah complex because they've reached a lot of success, so then they think that they know much better than others? And, you know, going from Dario to Demis to Elon, they all think that they know better? [00:11:56] S0: Well, a little bit, yes. But what I would say is that, you know, humans and particularly entrepreneurs need to have a bit of a messiah complex. That's a good thing. Right? If you don't believe you're creating something special, which is going to be... You know, the world doesn't have it yet, but you believe the world is going to want it when it sees it, I mean, that's the definition of an entrepreneur. And that's... You know, if you're creating artificial intelligence, it's just like a supercharged version of the same human trait. [00:12:27] S1: And if we would have, like, this Marvel movie, who's the villain? Who's the good guy? You talk with a lot of them.
00:12:35 · S0
[00:12:35] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, there's there's two there's two groups within AI. There's the ones who, as I was saying, you know, see this as a special thing, and they are concerned about the responsibility, and they're basically good guys. And, you know, it's a bit like, you know, Oppenheimer creating the nuclear technology and being conscious that this is really this is big stuff. And then there's another group that I would say is kind of in denial and says it's just a normal technology. And this is the sort of the open weight, open model system, open source. And it's like, well, you know, it's just a technology, guys, and don't freak out. You know, we can just distribute it to everybody. We don't have to confront the danger of bioweapons or the danger of autonomous lethal warfare and so forth. And, you know, it doesn't... We don't need to control it particularly. I think that's going to be proved wrong in the end. I think there's going to be some disasters which force politics to get even more anti AI than it already is. And at that point, AI is going to be regulated. But for now, the Jensen Huang Group, one could call it, are kind of all in on open weight. I think that's maybe a little bit less virtuous than the ones like Dario who take it seriously, the danger. But look, everybody is a human being. Everybody is complicated. Everybody has some white and some black, some good and some evil. Unfortunately, this is real life.
00:14:05 · Calin Fabri
[00:14:05] S1: It's real life. To your point, I had just been to LA three weeks ago, and on the stage it was Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, and Elon Musk. You could definitely see them splitting into two groups. On one hand, we need to be responsible, we need to pace a little bit, the Frontier Labs in particular, and on the other hand, Jensen were like, well, we need to keep going, this is not something special. What do you make of the argument that the ones that they try to pace the frontier labs is more like a regulatory capture strategy?
00:14:43 · S0
[00:14:43] S0: Yes. Would say, look, I do have one criticism of the frontier, and particularly the anthropic approach, which is I think occasionally there are people who exaggerate on that side, they say, you know, more than ten percent risk of human annihilation in the next ten years or by 2030 or something like that. If you think about it, that's a bit crazy. Right? I mean, first of all, we have no data to say what is the probability. I think you can say it's a non zero probability. That's what Demis says, and I think that's the right way to say it. We don't know how big the probability is, but it's non zero. But to say 10%, I mean, that is crazy high. I mean, first of all, the most likely outcome is going to be that there is a sort of mid level disaster. Think about Chernobyl blowing up. Think about 3 Mile Island. Think about the dam breaking and New Orleans being flooded. Right? Something very bad. Okay? But it's not human annihilation. Come on. So that's going to happen first, and then I think there will be a political reaction, and then we will take a lot of safety precautions. But the regulatory capture claim, Jensen Huang makes, which David Sacks, the former White House adviser makes, this is just nonsense. It's crazy nonsense. If you know anything about the history of someone like Dario Amodei, he was sincerely writing about serious AI risk, you know, before OpenAI was founded, so more than ten years ago. He was writing safety papers when he was a researcher at Google. And so this is deep in how he thinks about the technology long before there was any kind of commercial product, any kind of race, any kind of regulatory capture possibility. So no, he's been consistent. He's just saying what he believes.