Empires of AI With Karen Hao

29:39He just feels like one of the weirdest characters in this whole story. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Like when I went to profile OpenAI in 2019, I actually, the first person I reached out to was Jack because I had spoken to him before and he had until then, until recently been playing communications for, had for OpenAI and then he had shifted into a policy role. And I remember when I... when I was at the company, I was like, hey, Jack, like, do you think you can actually give me more access to seeing the things that I like? Stuff that I'd like to say. Yeah, like, I was literally asking, so they wouldn't let me go beyond the first floor.

30:21There were three floors, second and third floor. I'm so sorry. There's computers there. It's not like they have an AI machine. Come on. Yeah. And I was like, hey, like, can I just literally just go up to the second floor? Can you like take me up and just like let me walk on and he looked at me with this like like deep deep side eye of like no karen like you absolutely cannot and i was like hey you're a former journalist you know how this works like uh you know that jack row in 2014 for the register was shock and aws the fall of amazon's deflationary cloud just as jeff bezos did to books and cds Amazon's rivals are now doing it.

31:00He used to write these very grouchy, LREG-style pictures. It's just so weird. Yeah, I mean, I think this is the... But it gets back to that thing you were saying about the doctrine. Yeah, so because I started covering this company in 2019, I talked with people then that I then talked to for the book, and I was able to sort of have this unique opportunity to track how people's individual beliefs evolve when they are seeped in this world. And there were people that I was talking to back then that were like, I don't really believe in this AGI thing, that by the time I was talking to them for the book, were like AGI all the way, like that this is a genuine, true belief.

31:45And I think there's a lot of reasons for this transformation. Like one is that you are only talking to people who believe this. So you're just constantly in this environment where you're not talking to people who are challenging or testing that belief and instead just like continuously being reinforced in this echo chamber. But I think there's another thing that I kind of came to realize while reporting on the book is like people who really, really believe that AGI is possible, that we will actually be able to replicate human intelligence. It's not a belief about what AI is capable of. It is a belief about what human intelligence is.

32:29And a lot of people in the AI world today have this belief that human intelligence or everything in the world is inherently computable. And all you have to do is just amass more data and more compute and eventually you will get to that thing. You will be able to replicate that thing. And when you are in this kind of environment where you have people constantly arguing to you that this is why AGI is possible because everything's computable, and then you see the rapid clip of your models being able to do more and more functions that other people outside in society previously would have suggested were not possible, it's sort of this self-reinforcing belief machine.

33:11Like it just manufactures more and more evidence. You said every sign kind of gives you. Yeah, exactly. And so I think, and one of the things that I also have just has a general realization, not just with OpenAI, but in general, when I'm covering tech companies, I kind of have a policy for myself to do a little bit of a detox after I spend a lot of time talking with them. because it is like when you're talking with all these people that exist in this world, you do adopt their worldview and you do adopt their talking points and you do see things through their eyes. And usually I then have to like let myself just be in the actual world for a little bit and remind myself of what the average person thinks and what the average person values and remind myself that there are problems beyond the Silicon Valley's borders that just look fundamentally different from what they conceive the world to be.

34:12And so I did that with the opening eye profile. I did that with, I profiled Facebook years ago, and I did that with Facebook. I did that with the book where I would interview lots of people in these big batches and kind of really do my best to try and occupy their shoes for a couple weeks a month. And then I would spend my time explicitly not interviewing open AI people, just interviewing other people that were out in the world to just like reset my brain chemistry a little bit. Because it really does feel that way. It really does feel like you kind of get absorbed into this singular worldview.

34:50And then you have to kind of remind yourself of the greater reality.

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37:24i'm gonna ask this question without getting you in too much trouble do you think that's what happened with kevin roose i mean it's really i know i don't want to put you in a situation we have to talk ill of someone but that interview was bizarre in hard fork i so i've been i think really lucky in that i've covered the tech industry almost always not living in SF. I agree. That's a great thing. And, and, you know, like I've been able to figure that out in my career and that was an explicit decision. Like I did not want to live in SF anymore. Like I had lived in SF. I wanted to get out. Um, and I think this is a really, it's, it's, it's a really hard balance for any journalist is you need to decide whether you're close to your subject and immersed in their world and therefore might be co-opted by, their world or whether you exist outside of that world and therefore you don't have as much access you don't get to go to the parties where you hear tips all the time and and that's 100 % just like it's been a tension in my career as well as like I constantly feel like I'm missing things because I'm not an SF but the thing that I think I have gained from not being an SF is just a continued connection to non-SF world, you know?

38:47Like, I, um, I noticed when I spend too much time with SF people that I start, my vocabulary changes, like, how I talk about things changes, because, because people in SF talk about things in a very particular way, you know, like, they are talking about like optimization hacking and like they have a particular utilitarian maximization mindset around how they do things and why. And I have to then kind of step away from that and reset my language even when then I sit down to write a story that's for the greater public. And so, yeah, so I think this is something that's just challenging in general is like, And it's really hard to not get too close to your sources and to not start adopting everything that they say as your own, especially if you are literally living with them.

39:51Yes, in some cases, right? Could be anyone. but it does feel like there is a kind of almost word contagion or thought contagion with this stuff with AGI that it pickles certain people they hear about the idea of the autonomous computer and it drives them mad and everything to your point they they start chasing it even though there's not really any evidence that we can do it yeah I mean I mean like when I first started covering ai i also was so enthralled by the premise like when i when i so before i covered ai um i didn't like the when i first started covering it at mit technology review uh i did not realize before then that ai was actually trying to recreate human intelligence i thought it was just you know i mean it is marketing it is a marketing term but even then this sounds like it might be a definition that people would argue over.

40:51Right, right, right. But I mean, like in the original, like when AI was coined as a term in 1956, like John McCarthy, he did explicitly coin the term both to attract funders, so as a marketing term, and because he was trying to describe what he wanted the field to do, which was to recreate human intelligence. And that is just, it's such a evocative thing. like to think, wait a minute, could we actually do that? And what would that mean? And there's so much philosophical, it's just a philosophical mind field. Like, and if you are someone that loves philosophizing, you can just sit there for like days and days and days and think, holy crap, like what would that be?

41:37What would that look like? How could we do that? Thousands of words of New York Times columns. And so I really got, I got pulled into just the kind of sheer, enigma of that and also the power of that of oh wow if we could do this like if you know if if imagine being in the shoes of someone who's actually doing the AI research and thinking to yourself I might be contributing to the recreation of my own intelligence or of our collective intelligence like that's intoxicating you know it feels like philosophy marketing though because I just look at this stuff and I hear about this stuff and I always think okay but what are you doing today?

42:24And then I look at what they're doing today and I say that doesn't seem anything like that. And I actually don't think that there's anything harmful in discussing AGI. What pisses me off is how many people don't seem to be discussing AGI. They discuss the ramifications on the edges because something that Casey Kagawa, our friend of the show, has brought up a number of times with me is like no one seems to be discussing personage. like if we make a conscious computer do we give it a social security number that's actually really funny because i think there are too many people discussing personage i i don't see them in the well perhaps they're not doing it in the media because agi gets brought up as this vague term and then they go huh what do you think yeah this could be good could be bad millions trillions i don't fucking know and it's just it's so bizarre because i look at i've been covering i personally with AI really only started looking at it hard in 2023 which is my own fault and I've looked and perhaps that has also colored my belief system because I kept looking for the thing like the stuff the thing that everyone was freaking out about and you look and it's like we've extrapolated from large language models that AGI will come out but actually that kind of leads me to another question you sam ortman's a confusing person what about mar uh dario amaday dario amaday what do you think does he believe in agi you think you think he's a true believer i do think dario is a true believer yeah and i do think that he's a true doomer as well like he genuinely is has a lot of anxiety around uh the agi creating the end of the world um whether or not and also what does it mean to be a true believer?

44:06Does he believe the bollocks he's saying? Because he claims that AGI will be here by 2027 or quicker. Yeah. So that then is when he's just wearing his CEO hat and he needs to say something. When you say wearing the CEO hat, can you be a bit more specific? I think Dario is an interesting case in that he originally, he has a different background than Sam. You know, Sam is a VC that, or an investor that then became the CEO of an AI company and his skill is storytelling, right? That's what all investors do. Dario was, he was a scientist. He studied, I think, computational neuroscience. And he had a kind of deep fascination with this idea of how do you figure out how the brain works and how do you replicate?

44:52Like it was, he didn't initially call himself an AI researcher in, I think, the early days of his academic career, but he was essentially studying a lot of the things that hardcore AI researchers study, the brain, computer science, all of these things. And so I think he has this fascination. And I don't know this for sure, but I would guess that he is of the category of people that I described that believes that everything is fundamentally computable in the world and human intelligence computable. And so he does really believe that if he can figure it out, like AGI will happen. But then he has to run a company and a company can't just do science.

45:36And actually one of the things that people mentioned to me about their criticisms of Dario when he initially ran Anthropic was that he didn't care about the business at all. Like he seemed to have no interest in anything other than the science and there were people within the company that were like this is not going to work as a company if you cannot literally do business if you if you cannot raise money and so yeah i think what happened um i i i didn't actually report this out but my guess is what happened is dario then had to shift to not just being a scientist but also being a businessman and he had to learn how to storytell.

46:17And is he, uh, and, and I think honestly, he tries to match, you know, Sam Altman is a really successful storyteller and, and able to accrue a lot of capital. I think Dario tries to match the stories that Altman tells, um, in order to try and accrue the same amount of capital and, and try to take capital away maybe because ultimately their personal arch nemeses and anthropic and open ai are uh competitors why do they hate each other so much is it just because sam altman doesn't like that wario walked off i don't know that sam i i i can't figure out whether sam genuinely ever hates anyone but people certainly hate him um and dario hates him for sure in dario hate him i think it goes back to this idea of do you agree or do you disagree with sam about something fundamental and therefore do you perceive him as the greatest asset ever or the greatest threat ever and from in dario's case he fundamentally disagreed with sam about um certain key decisions around safety ai safety the Doomer brand of AI safety, where Daria was the one that decided to blow up the amount of computer chips that were being used to train a single model.

47:43So he did that from GPT-2 to GPT-3. They went from a couple dozen chips to 10 ,000 chips all at once to train GPT-3. And Dario wanted to do this because he wanted to create an internal lead in order to then have some time to do research on this model that would emerge from 10 ,000 chips. And Altman does this thing where he will convince, he will ally with people. So he was like, oh, 10 ,000 chips, that's a brilliant idea. We should totally do that. But then once it was done, he sort of shifted to, okay, now we should release it. Or now we should give it to Microsoft because we have this deal with Microsoft.

48:23We need to make them happy. We need to give them some kind of really exciting thing deliverable to justify the first$1 billion they gave us so that they can then give us more money. More billions. And so it was actually, it was like the two, it was both Altman and Amadei together that I would credit as being responsible for dramatically accelerating the AI race. Because Amadei was the one that decided we need to blow it up to 10 ,000 chips. And then Altman was the one that persuaded him, yes, you should do it because I agree with you. And then kind of flipped to, okay, now we need to get this out in the world as quickly as possible.

49:00And Amadei, I think, feels like his intelligence, like Altman, as a politically savvy person, was able to use his intelligence against him to achieve exactly the opposite of what he ultimately wanted, which was to slow things down rather than accelerate it. This sounds like colonial Britain. It's just white guys getting angry at each other over tiny grievances from years ago. Here's a weird question. Well, first of all, do any of them seem happy in any way? Do any of them seem to enjoy anything? I ask this seriously. I genuinely do. They seem miserable. That is the consistent theme from all of Jack Clark included.

49:50they all seem pissed off scared paranoid weird it's like they're being driven mad by this yeah yeah yeah i think that is an entirely accurate description i i think you cannot be not driven mad um in this world where you have convinced yourself that the stakes are the future of humanity you know like how do you not how do you not buckle under that pressure i mean skill issue I think I'd be fine. Give me$1 billion. But it does make me think that right now, as Bloomberg came out with a headline just as we were recording this, that Stargate, SoftBank's Stargate is hitting snags over tariff fears. They can't seem to raise the money.

50:37I wonder if we're going to see new levels of paranoia, anxiety with all of these people as the AI trade starts to collapse a bit. Yeah, this has been an interesting theme that I've picked up on with the way that Altman operates is when he starts sounding incredibly optimistic in public about the future of OpenAI, the future of AGI, the future of all these things, it means that something is going wrong. Like it's become the opposite signal because he will roll out the most grandiose language when he needs to cover up something that is really stressing him out. and so we're seeing you know like this happening again more recently where I mean in the beginning of the year he had this post where he was like we are no longer just building AGI we are now on our path to building super intelligence like he was sort of like upping the ante saying okay yeah continue to hold on continue to stay with the program because we are about to super charge turbocharged this like 10 times more.

51:55And it was like at the time when OpenAI was starting to really feel weak because it had just lost a string of executives, including some of its most important ones, Ilya Saskover and Mira Morati. And it was under just massive amounts of scrutiny and it wasn't making the clip of research progress that it needed to kind of solve what it itself defined as the key challenges to reaching AGI. And so, yeah, so I think the more that it sort of becomes clear that people are no longer really buying into this AI future that they've painted, the stronger they're going to paint it, the more they're going to roll out this rhetoric.

52:38You mentioned this because there was a tweet from April 15th where he said the OpenAI team is executing just ridiculously well at so many things right now. The coming months and years should be amazing. So I'm going to guess things were bad. Yeah, yeah. Cool. I now know how to read Sam's tweets. Yeah, this was like a thing that I just consistently, consistently, every time I was reporting on things that were going really bad, sure enough, Altman would roll out some kind of like really crazy, some really crazy, yeah, statement out in public. So that was actually, that tweet's actually a perfect example because he says things will be awesome in the coming months and years.

53:16it's always like hold on stick with me yeah stick with me things might look a little bit weird now but oh boy like just you wait for what I'm seeing inside that like you need to just have patience for you know it's always that kind of May 7th pictures great to see progress on the first Stargate in Abilene with our partners at Oracle today will be the biggest AI training facility in the world the scale speed and skill of the people building this is awesome and then this story comes out a week later bloody hell this tells so final question how do you feel what do you think this fiji simo forgive me if i messed up the name there what do you think about her becoming ceo of applications and sam altman doing something else yeah so i i haven't actually i haven't actually done reporting on this myself but my sense of what happening what's happening is altman's not a good manager he's not actually like he's a he's a fundraising ceo he's not someone that can run the company.

54:17And I think probably what happened is that after Mira Marati left, she was the one that was actually doing the day-to-day operations and the running of the show. After she left, he then made a big show of, I'm going to be much more close to the work now. I'm going to do the day-to-day running. And probably his time is up in doing that because in my book, I talk a lot about how like he's not good at that like he is he will he's not good at making decisions he's very conflict averse so what he does is he'll just say he'll agree with every single team even when they're disagreeing with one another and it causes chaos and it causes rifts where you don't the person at the top is not able to make a decision and say we are all going to go this way now and some of you are going to be unhappy like he he does not do that and so it just leads to a lot of tumult, chaos.

55:12Part of the reason why OpenAI has had so many product releases and features and things like that, I think is actually also a product of this in that he doesn't want to tell any team, like all of these product releases and features are different teams working on these things. And he doesn't want to tell any team, like, we're going to have this person release first and have their moment in the sun. And then we're going to like work a little bit more. And then you get your moment in the sun, you know, a year later. He's like, everyone gets their moment in the sun like we're gonna do releases we're gonna do like 12 days of shipmas we're we're gonna just release that was insane features in 12 days so everyone's days of shipmas for the listeners that don't remember that was when they claimed they were going to release 12 new 12 new products 12 new products over the 12 and it wasn't 12 new it was like four new products and like some of them were like an api for an api it's just so strange it feels like while you're also describing an empire you're also describing this kind of very petty underpin it really does mirror british colonialism right which you've got a guy who doesn't want to rule who wants the power of a ruler and all the assets but someone else ideally in another country should take responsibility yeah truly awful i mean this is the paradox of empire is like it it feels inevitable because it feels so strong and it also feels so weak when you start to look at it under the surface it's it was a really great book and I really appreciate your time where can people find you I am on LinkedIn and Blue Sky these days and also on my website KarenDHow.com and yeah reach out I have a contact form there and I try to respond to as many people as possible wonderful thank you so much for joining us I'm of course Ed Zitron you'll now get a thing I recorded over a year ago that people still complain about about where you can find stuff.

57:07Thank you for listening.

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