AI Leaders Agree to Slow Things Down & Tesla Makes a Surprising Comeback

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0:26Dario Amodei:Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, AI leaders agree that it's maybe time to slow things down. Then, what's powering Tesla's surprise EV comeback? It's Monday, September 14th. Let's ride.

0:47Dario Amodei:If you find yourself wanting to smooch everyone at an upcoming New Year's Eve party, here's one reason why. Champagne is getting boozier. Because of this summer's heat wave in France, grapes now have extraordinarily high sugar content, which makes them more alcoholic when turned into wine. As a result, for the first time ever, France has lifted the alcohol limit of champagne to 15 % from the current 13 % to accommodate producers who might struggle to make champagne under the current cap. So it sounds fun, but it's probably going to be bad for business. Jane Anson, a wine columnist and author, warned that higher strength champagne is not a selling point, telling The Times, today people increasingly prefer low alcohol.

1:30Also, don't expect any rowdy wedding toast this year. Champagne has to age for at least 15 months, but come 2028, watch out. Someone is going to try to crowd surf after a particularly good father of the bride speech. And now a word from our sponsor, Hotels.com. Neil, I think the hotel I just stayed at was haunted. Oh my God, that's horrifying. The ghosts were actually pretty chill.

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2:37Dario Amodei:As fears of an AI apocalypse broke into the public consciousness, the industry's top leaders vowed to hit the brakes in a stunning development over the weekend. In a blog post on Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amade called for slowing down progress on the most cutting edge models, warning that a swarm of AI agents could take over the Internet in as little as half a year. He wrote, over the last few months, I've become convinced that fully addressing the risk requires even more prudence, not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up.

3:10Dario Amodei:We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Other leading figures, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of SpaceX, responded to Amadei's post that they agree on the need to slow down. Alvin even went one step further, telling Fortune he was going to put the company's much-hyped IPO on ice, at least for this year. He said, I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public. Though experts have been warning us for years, concerns over AI safety hit a fever pitch last week when an Anthropic employee quit, saying these AI companies were, quote, gambling with people's lives.

3:46Dario Amodei:Other insiders chimed in with doomsday predictions, putting the odds of AI wiping out humidity at over 10 % within a decade. And while many agree with this prognosis, there is a sizable contingent who accuse AI companies of fear mongering in order to invite regulation that stifles competition and entrenches their position as industry leaders. Toby, just a head spinning week, a head spinning 48 hours with Dario's call to take a deep breath and slow things down. Yeah, let's dive into some of the skeptics, though. Amongst them is Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO. He is arguing that maybe these AI labs are painting this future of a very dire future where cybersecurity fears are just so big that you're going to need AI to address them.

4:29He says, who doesn't want their market to be hysterical about their product and line up around the corner for it? So he was basically saying that they're playing this up. And then some other more, I don't know, skeptical takes on this came from Nick Mark on social media on X. He said, an alternative hypothesis model performance is plateauing compute is getting much more expensive data centers are massively unpopular slowing down ai development is a way to explain slowing progress reduce spending and try to regain some goodwill and his conclusion was this is an effort to save the ipo not humanity to put kind of a bow tie on that sort of outlook on this if you do less training it boosts your margins it makes things more attractive from a financial perspective while you can dress it up as sort of this saving humanity, saving the earth type of deal.

5:18That is what a loud contingent of skeptics are saying about this slowdown.

5:23Dario Amodei:But if I was Musk, Altman, or Amadei, I would say I actually was warning about AI safety, AI doomsday, AI dangers before I even had trillion dollar companies. And this is what they were pointing out over the weekend. Elon Musk pointed to a tweet he sent in 2014, which read, worth reading super intelligence by Bostrom. That's Nick Bostrom, a philosopher. We need to be super careful with AI, potentially more dangerous than nukes. That was 2014. In 2015, Sam Altman wrote a blog post saying development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.

6:00Dario Amodei:And Dario Amadei has been sounding this alarm for years. He has previously said there is a 25 % chance, so greater than 10 % chance that things go, quote, really, really badly. So these guys would say, look, this is not just us being opportunistic with our business. We've been warning about AI danger for a very long time. Now, you could probably criticize them and by saying, well, you guys went and gone, build the thing, even that you were saying was extremely dangerous. But also people within the AI industry think their fears are still overstated. I look at Yan Lacoon. He was one of the godfathers of AI.

6:32He worked at Meta for a long time. He said, Dario was already claiming that GPT-2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019. I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now. So again, kind of in that camp that they are beating a drum, that we are, the end is nigh. And yet it probably, they've been saying the end is nigh for a decade at this point. Maybe the end is actually here, but maybe it's just crying wolf once more.

6:57Dario Amodei:All right, so the biggest X factor is probably China. And that's what these guys say had been stopping them from slowing down previously. And Dario Amadei of Anthropic said that this was the toughest dilemma because if they slow down, the idea is that China will not slow down. And this this technology is so powerful. It confers to their wielders so much benefits in terms of military and geopolitical dominance that we just simply can't do it. This you hear this from President Trump as well. If China doesn't slow down, then the United States can't also slow down. Over the weekend, Sam Allman, in that interview with Fortune, said that Trump and Xi, who's the president of China, would win the Nobel Prize for just a one-page AI agreement if they just came together and agreed on some shared standards and testing for development of this technology.

7:45Dario Amodei:Trump was asked over the weekend whether he supported AI regulation because that's becoming, all of a sudden, in the past few weeks, just a huge topic in Washington, D.C. He said, not really. Whoever's going to win this race wins. We're going at this with China. So that really is the X factor and why the many in the AI leadership camp say, look, we really can't slow down. I know Amadei is saying we can slow down a little bit, but they're saying this is a tough decision because of what China presents. So how is the market reacting to these frontier labs saying that they want to slow the roll? It is dumping.

8:18I'm looking at the NASDAQ 100 futures right now. They are down more than one and a half percent because when you are calling for that slowdown, that raises a lot of questions around demand for AI, inputs like memory chips, the things that have been propping up the market for the past year, year and a half or so. So market does not like when you say slow down because they want full speed ahead when it comes to this AI build out. Moving on, there's a saying when one door closes, another one opens. But when it comes to oil flowing out of the Middle East, all the doors are slamming shut. Saudi Arabia shut down its critical east-west oil pipeline as a precaution just before the weekend after drone attacks likely launched by Iran damaged The pipeline is of critical importance to the region because it's the pressure release valve for the Strait of Hormuz.

9:04When the Strait is blocked, the pipeline can take up to 7 million barrels a day around Hormuz, out to the Red Sea, and onto the global markets. Saudi Aramco chairman Yasser al-Rumayan calls it the lifeline for us as a Saudi economy. That lifeline has since been kinked, making the global supply crunch even worse and sending oil past$100 per barrel for the first time in months. Even before the pipeline was hit, though, Iran-backed rebels were tightening their hold on the region. The Yemen-based Houthis captured a key island in the Bab el-Mendab Strait, which means even if oil was able to traverse the pipeline, it's not guaranteed it could make it out past the Red Sea.

9:42Neil, option A is oil goes through the Strait of Hormuz, but ships are still barely trickling through there. Option B, send it through the east-west pipeline, but now that's out of commission. Option C, send you and me in there with a camelback and a can-do attitude.

9:56Dario Amodei:I'm booking my flight because things are getting pretty dire over here. Costco, the shining beacon of abundance, buy anything you want in as much quantity as you want, is now placing limits on how much Kirkland motor oil you can buy. And it's also jacking up the price. So stores are now limiting motor oil to two per customer per week. They've jacked up the price to a 10 quart box used to cost as low as$30. Now they have raised that to almost double. It now costs$58. That's just how stressed this market is. All these refiners are getting limited amounts of crude. And when they turn this crude into various products like diesel or motor oil, and the margins on diesel and other refined products like jet fuel are so much higher than the motor oil you buy at Costco.

10:49Dario Amodei:So there's just a shortage of motor oil, and we're seeing that at Costco. I do want to just put some perspective, though, on what that means. Even though it's two per customer per week, that is a five-quart two-pack. So that is 10 quarts weekly. And so gas buddy Patrick DeHaan on X said, unless you're hurt, most households don't need to worry. It's more symbolic than anything else. It's more symbolic than anything else because everything is bigger at Costco. And then I joked that let's send Neil and I in there because there's no other options. There is actually a third option for getting oil out of the region.

11:21Saudi oil can actually go north through the Red Sea and use a pipeline near the Suez Canal to reach the Mediterranean. But that adds a lot of time, adds a lot of money. And then also, as I said, the Red Sea is no longer this safe place anymore because of what has been happening with the Houthis there and how they've kind of established themselves in the region. So a lot of people may be taking an optimistic look are saying that this is happening because the economic strangulation that we are trying to do on Iran's economy is coming to pass. They're losing some of that leverage. So they want to get it back by attacking these alternative routes.

11:58Again, is that a good thing for the global oil market that they are becoming more aggressive? Probably not. But maybe you can look at it and say it's because they feel the walls closing around them that they are making these more aggressive plays.

12:10Dario Amodei:Quick check on oil prices. They were up 8 % last week. This morning, they're up to$108 a barrel. That is kind of getting close to the peak a few months ago during the war, which was$120 a barrel. Diesel is now at$8 a gallon in California, a record. Many stations are showing$9.99 a gallon because they just can't add that extra digit on their digital signage. So if this isn't going to seep into inflation, nothing will. All right, welcome to winners of the weekend where Toby and I picked two things that had an even better weekend than Celine Dion. I won the pre-show game of Sequence, great board game if you haven't played, so I get to go first.

12:50Dario Amodei:And my winner is Tesla, which is making a Minnesota Vikings level comeback in the American EV market. According to the Wall Street Journal, Tesla now accounts for more than half of electric vehicle sales in the U.S., 52%, up from just 43 % one year ago. It's a far cry from the 80 % share the company once commanded, but it's a pretty sizable bump following a years-long slump. It's not that Tesla is doing great in this depressed EV environment, it's just doing less worse than others. So far this year, Tesla's U.S. sales are down 16%, but that seems downright stellar when you consider the overall EV market has plummeted 30%.

13:27Dario Amodei:CO Elon Musk makes many predictions that don't come true, but he pretty much nailed this last year when asked how the elimination of the federal EV tax credit would impact the company. He said it would be painful at first, but over the long run, beneficial since it would hurt his rivals more than Tesla. Toby, sometimes it pays to be the biggest fish in an ever shrinking pond, a Zverev, when Alcaraz and Sinner are out of the draw. You just gave me such a flashback to playing Sequence growing up. I haven't played it in probably a decade, but it is a fantastic game. The Tesla story is also just a Model Y story, because Tesla technically has multiple models on the market.

14:02They have the Model 3, they have the Cybertruck, but one out of every three EVs sold in America is a Model Y. Model Y sales are down just 2 % this year. And again, they are falling, but against the broader backdrop of what else is happening in the market, falling just 2 % is a massive W. I'm just looking at what is happening to the competition because they are dropping like flies. The Honda Prologue, which is their version of an EV, that's discontinued heading towards discontinuation the Volkswagen ID4 that's going the same way the Ford F-150 Lightning never took off that's going to be discontinued and even though GM resurrected the Chevy Bolt they're actually reducing the resurrection they're making production smaller and they're probably going to phase it out again in 2027 so it really just is the fact that Tesla is standing at all and not falling to the wayside means that it's going to grow its market share I

14:53Dario Amodei:think it's also an FSD story and FSD is full self-driving, which it's not full self-driving. There's a parentheses there that they had to include called supervised, but people are obsessed with this. Basically, if you buy a Tesla and you get full self-driving supervised, which is a monthly payment, you can literally put in an address into the GPS in the car and then it just drives you there. And you're supposed to have your eyes on the road and your hands near the steering well. You're supposed to be alert, but this is crazy. I mean, I saw someone tweet, I just bought a new model Y and can confidently say cars and Teslas are no longer the same product.

15:29Dario Amodei:A car is like a pony or horse. I still like driving a stick shift. It's fun. Tesla with FSD is a transportation robot. So if you get hooked on this particular software where you can just punch in an address and it takes you there without you having to do anything, then this is going to be the car for you. And as more people get hooked on autonomy, it's like your own personal Waymo kind of. So that's, I think, another reason why it's this particular software and this autonomy that's driving Tesla to the front. Have you never been in a self-driving car yet? Have you experienced it yet? No. It is crazy.

16:01That is exactly what happens in the area. It is a little bit freaky. The one thing that we haven't mentioned, too, is gas prices. I mean, for a while, Tesla was losing market share because gas prices were pretty low and people were just saying, I'd rather have a combustion engine vehicle. now cash prices are clearly on the rise. So that always feeds into the electric vehicle market, getting a little bit of a tailwind. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with my winner of the weekend right after this.

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18:15My winner of the weekend is America's pastime, which you might think is baseball, but I'd argue is actually taking dietary supplements. A new Pew survey found that 8 in 10 U.S. adults take at least one dietary supplement with the highest overall use coming from adults 65 and older. The most popular things Americans are taking are vitamins and minerals, with 67 % of respondents indulging. Protein powders or drinks come next, followed by omega-3s like fish oil, then herbal supplements like ashwagandha. A potent combination of social media influencers pushing supplements, as well as an overall increase in people focused on longevity, health, and wellness, has turned this industry into a$228 billion behemoth.

18:58However, the market itself is likely stronger than the evidence backing it up. Yes, there are legitimate use cases for supplements like treating nutrient deficiencies, but experts warn that most consumption doesn't fall into that bucket. Protein in particular is way overused. Harvard's Dr. Peter Cohen estimates that 80 to 90 % of supplement consumption offers no proven benefit to the person taking it, with most Americans already getting enough through their diets. Still, Neil, go into any person's medicine cabinet or kitchen right now, you're going to find some supplements.

19:29Dario Amodei:Yeah, and mine when I was a kid, shout out Flintstone vitamins. Those were the absolute best. The reason that there's such sketchiness around this industry is the FDA doesn't need to approve them. They don't approve dietary supplements. There is a workaround. So we just don't know necessarily the health benefits or the health drawbacks, which is why you have so many people taking them. There's this chasm between all the people taking them, eight and 10 Americans. I don't think eight and 10 Americans do anything except maybe take vitamins together. And the expert consensus would say, look, actually, we don't have any evidence to say these will help you.

20:02Dario Amodei:Yes. In some minority minority cases that they could be particularly helpful. But for the mass amount of people that are using them, we just can't say they actually help you. I think GLP one drugs is part of this equation as well. As you consume less food, people have been fixated on getting more protein into their diets as well. And again, I don't need to say how big of a trend protein has been. Everything, my coffee is topped with protein, cold foam. My cereal somehow has protein in it as well. But again, And scientists say that it's probably too much protein, not enough benefit. This has been happening for a while now.

20:39This is not just a recent phenomenon. Supplement use has been growing over the past few decades or so. If you go back to 1999, a survey of 63 ,000 U.S. adults found that 51 % were taking supplements. Now, if you believe the Pew survey, which is a smaller sample size, that number is up to 80%. So that is a 30 percentage point increase in just the last 25 years or so, which just goes to show how big this groundswell of support has been.

21:07Dario Amodei:And I thought the most interesting point, the most significant point is that among older adults, people take the most supplements. And there's new research that might be a little concerning about how vitamins interact with the aging brain. brain. So the Washington Post wrote this report and said, look, you know, when somebody gets older and we give them medicine, we change the dosage. We change things about it to work with their brain, with their changing body, but we don't with vitamins. It's just the same thing that a 35 year old might take. But there has been a wave of research. Washington Post points out in January, researchers found a link between vitamin D supplements and faster cognitive decline among older adults.

21:47Dario Amodei:Then in April, another study found that adults 55 and older taking omega-3 supplements displayed greater cognitive deterioration over time than those who didn't take them. And then finally, in June, there was other research that found that people taking glucosamine for joint pain, they had a much higher likelihood of progressing from mild cognitive impairment to dementia over five years. Caution, these studies are observational. They don't prove causation, but it's kind of a worrying trend to see these studies come out this year to to throw some cold water and maybe even point to a more concerning trend about how vitamins interact with the aging brain.