AI Apocalypse... Now?

25:05For example, let's watch these comments by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI to kind of get at the issue. I think we are close to a world where you can have like a descendant of ChatGPT. Watch your computer screen all of the time. Watch every meeting you're in, like record every call, everything like that. Have perfect context of your whole life, everything you see. You choose what information you want it to have, but it can like go. You can connect it to your texts or email or docs or Slack or whatever. and then you have this thing that is not making decisions for you but if you're like the ceo of a startup there's always like more stuff to do than you can do and context you can't all keep track of you can't like read every piece of customer feedback every day and you can just have this thing that's like working alongside you and as you're like typing out a sales pitch to a customer or like writing a strategy doc it'll just say like hey maybe here's another idea or i think you're making a mistake here you should consider this or i can do this thing for you to help and And like this, I think we're only like one model generation away from this actually being incredibly useful.

26:06And I think that will change, hopefully at least for me, change the way I work. What's your best guess on timing? Like sometime in the next six months. Casey, does he really want AI recording everything he types, reads, sees, and says, and then being like his co-CEO? Like, is this really what this guy wants? They shipped this this week. So like you can go into ChatGPT, if you have like the app on your desktop now, it will monitor the way that you use your computer and it will sort of, you know, build little memories and then it can take some actions on your behalf. So I guess no one over there is ever looking at porn.

26:43But yeah, that actually just shipped. Or maybe they incorporate that. Yeah. But it's like he wants to live in this like panopticon surveillance state of his own making. So there are trade-offs here. There are a lot of startups right now that want you to plug in your various tools, your Slack, your Granola, your G Suite. And if you let them, they will read that and they will just suggest things for you to do. And I got to hold myself accountable here, Tommy. I started testing this thing called Town over the past couple of weeks and it has access to my calendar and emails. And so it just sends me briefings before meetings and they can be really good.

27:22They'll sort of do a little bit of research about the person who I'm talking to and kind of, you know, helps me get prepared for things. So, you know, it's not like an absolutely killer use case that I'm telling everybody to like go out and do immediately, but I'm getting some level of benefit for it in exchange for, you know, trusting some of my data with a bunch of strangers. I just, I saw a tweet from OpenAI today that said, ChatGPT can now remember your activity across the apps and websites on your computer with computer history and the desktop app. Future interactions feel more personalized and require less explanation.

27:52It does feel like the internet fever dream when we were in high school. I guess maybe this is good if like your life is work and all you do is work and maybe you have a dedicated work computer that you never bring home or like talk to your friends or family on. Yeah, I mean like the instinct here is to just increase the number of things that this technology can do to make it just like so obvious that you need this in your life that you'll just like pay any price to get access to it. And I think right now, the capabilities have not been good enough for like most people to take that seriously. But a year from now, like I do think this stuff is going to be able to do a lot of cool stuff on your computer if you let it.

28:35I just like it's so hard for me. I'm so angry about the fact that the same people who like helped tear apart our society via social media are now in charge of creating super intelligence that can learn everything there is to know about you. Well, particularly when some of these technologies have had very similar effects, right? Like a big story over the past year or so has been the way that kids get addicted to chatbots and chatbots give them really bad advice or like encourage them down the path to self-harm, just like sort of like a direct sequel to the social media moment. So yeah, like this is one reason why I've just been getting more nervous lately is because those forces do not seem to have any real counterbalance in the government.

29:19And in fact, the government, at least at the federal level, has mostly been cheering them along. You ever hear your co-host Kevin Roos' story about the chatbot Sydney over Bing? You know what? I keep trying to get him to open up about that one, but it's very personal for him. You should ask him to tell it. It's a good story. It's a very good story.

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33:08All right. So this brings us the question of what the government is doing about all of these terrible concerns we've laid out. Let's start with the Trump administration, the federal government. So one of the first things the Trump administration did was rip up Joe Biden's executive order about AI safety and then install this right wing troll named David Sachs as their AI czar. If we're being honest, the Biden EO wasn't all that syringent. I think he's primarily focused on blocking the export of advanced AI chips to China. But Trump takes office And they shift to like an all gas, no brakes approach while also whining about liberal bias and in like chatbots and then like some export controls remain in place.

33:45Then Anthropic releases the mythos model and the White House totally freaks out and the vibe has changed a lot. Can you talk about that kind of mythos moment and what the hell happened? Yeah. So before Mythos, the Trump administration just seemed very confident that AI capabilities were going to be frozen in amber at the moment that he took office for a second time. They just were not worried about it. They thought if you're worried about AI safety, that's woke and it has no place in our administration. Now, it also so happened that many of the people that Trump was bringing in, like David Sachs, but also all of the other oligarchs that donated to the inauguration and funded the ballroom, they are desperate to get this technology into as many hands as possible so they can make money off it.

34:33And so the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to make sure that they are not restricted from doing a bunch of things that I think a Democratic administration probably would have tried to rein them in on. But then along comes mythos, and they show it to whatever adults are still left in the Trump administration, and they show how it can hack into government systems pretty easily. And boom, it's like this instant conversion. And all of a sudden, folks in the Trump administration say, oh, I guess AI safety is not just like a woke project of the left. It's something that we actually need to take seriously.

35:08And for what it's worth, I'm glad that they had their conversion moment. Like we're in a much better position now than we were before that. Yeah, I'm glad their conversion moment too. but the way it happened was quite odd, right? I mean, it was like five o 'clock on a Friday. They did what? They just cut off basically foreign access to Anthropic? Yeah, so basically after the Mythos moment where Anthropic said, we're actually just like not going to release this, Anthropic releases a somewhat less capable model called Fable, which has, you know, my understanding is it's basically, you know, Mythos without all of this scary cyber attack stuff.

35:45But even within that, the Trump administration was shown some things that led them to believe we don't even know if we want people to have this. And so they essentially forced Anthropic to pull it off the market and make even further changes before they would re-release it. And they subjected GPT 5.6 to a similar set of controls. So the same people that had been saying, we can't put the brakes on these models, otherwise we're going to lose to China, all of a sudden had just invented out of whole cloth this de facto licensing regime, which remains effectively a secret. Like to this day, we don't actually know how you get a frontier model released in the United States.

36:23Yeah. Can you tell us a little more about that? It's a voluntary secret framework. Yeah, it's voluntary in the same way that paying your taxes, you know, is, yeah, I mean, like, seriously, if any of these companies try to release one of these frontier models without checking with the Trump administration, there would be hell. Around the time of fable, the Trump administration said, we're going to come up with an executive order that is going to dictate how we let these frontier models get released. They reportedly have now come up with this model, but they've only shared it with the labs themselves.

36:53So I imagine there's some sort of testing requirements that are in here, but we just don't know. And it was interesting. I mean, when they initially went after Anthropic over this Mythos model or the Fable model, we wondered if it was a continuation of this fight the administration had been in with Anthropic because Anthropic basically said, no, we don't want to help you do mass surveillance on American citizens or make autonomous killer drones. Those are our very, very tiny lines that we won't cross. And Pete Hegseth lost his fucking mind. But then they went after OpenAI too, which did seem to signal this was a broader concern than just one company, right?

37:28Yeah. And that's what gives me the confidence that there are people there who actually are taking AI risks seriously now, because it was never only about one company. It was about the fact, you know, be able to stop here and, you know, because not all of your listeners may be familiar with this, but a really weird thing about AI is that basically everyone has the recipe for building a more powerful model, right? Like we know if you just sort of add enough data and enough computing power into the mix and just sort of let it cook for a while, as you sort of increase those things, you're going to wind up with a more powerful model.

38:05So that's just very different from other technologies. You know, it'd be as if everyone knew how to build the iPhone at the same time or the personal computer. But because everyone has the recipe, that is why the Trump administration is freaked out, because it is only a matter of time before adversaries will have access to similar technologies and capabilities that we do today. Well, and the sort of thing you always hear out of the federal government or from people that are like, you know, utopian pro, like, all gas, no brakes, people, is that we have to win this imaginary race. It's not really imaginary.

38:40We have to win this race against China when it comes to AI. Can you explain that argument and whether you find it convincing? Yeah. So, you know, and here we can go back to House of the Dragon because in Westeros, Tommy, as you know, at the time of House of the Dragon, there was one great house that had this super weapon that was the dragon and it let them control the entire world. And that mostly went badly for, you know, everyone who didn't live in the Red Keep. The fear is that if super intelligence becomes one of these dragons and only one country has access to it, then, I mean, they could just do some old fashioned conquering, right?

39:19And it could be like really, really bad. There are some better worlds available, like a world where there is a balance of power where, you know, there's maybe like an alliance of Western dragons and alliance of Eastern dragons. And, you know, they sort of mostly keep each other at bay. But that is the scenario that the government is planning for. And also, by the way, they feel like if we are able to get there first, then we will hopefully be able to control the terms on which other people are allowed to use it, including our adversaries. So OpenAI is VEGAR. DeepSeek is sheep stealer. So I just finished this series like two nights ago.

39:58OK, just a piece of context here folks should know is that there was an organization called CISA that did some really important cybersecurity work for the federal government. Trump basically destroyed the organization and half the staff got pushed out or fired because he was mad that the 2020 – CISA said the 2020 election was secure. So that is sort of the backdrop as you think about the potential cybersecurity risk. Are they thinking about addressing that at all, Casey? I am very nervous. You know, I was learning from a friend recently who works at one of the big labs that the United Kingdom has actually funded their AI Security Institute at something like eight times the level of the US equivalent.

40:44So like the British are investing way more money into trying to understand AI and trying to make it safe than we are here in the US. So this is why like I have become quite nervous and have been leaning pessimistic about AI over the past few weeks is because I look at what the US is investing in order to make this technology safer. And it's just not even scratching the surface. Not great. Anything happening at the state level? Are there any meaningful efforts in California or other places to regulate AI? And what role is opposition to data centers playing maybe in slowing things down, do you think?

41:24I think it is playing a really great role in slowing things down. And here is where I want to inject some optimism into the conversation, because the American people get that by default, AI might not be good for them, right? They've heard the message. that this might take my job and it might kill me and they don't like it. And so they're turning to the most powerful lever that every American has, which is it's very easy to get something not built in your neighborhood. And as they have fanned out across this great land, they have used that to great success. And now all the labs have to invest a ton in trying to change their minds.

42:02And while right now the labs are mostly trying to do the easy stuff, like buying people off for relatively cheap. My hope is that this movement that is coalescing, that is bipartisan in a way that almost nothing is bipartisan in America right now, eventually these labs are going to say, maybe we're going to have to make this actually just really beneficial for people. If we really want to enact this project, it is just going to have to be clear to people that this is going to benefit them personally. So this is just, to me, this is a beautiful, beautiful democracy in action is Americans see what what is going on.

42:39They're organizing and they are winning battles all across the country. Yeah, it was clearly a big, a big component in the messaging and Michigan and the recent primary and also in Wisconsin.

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44:44That's Nutrafol.com, spelled N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L.com, promo code CRICKED. Hey, so listen, whether you're in the States, across the pond, or somewhere on the other side of the world, we love that you tune in to Crooked for US News. But did you know we also have a UK news show? Yes, that's right. It's called Pod Save the UK. Pod Save the UK is a no-bullshit, unabashedly progressive conversation about politics focused on the issues that matter most to the people of Britain. With all the changes in our government, including the fun revolving door of Prime Ministers we have here, there's always lots to talk about.

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46:02Two more AI industry questions, and I want to get your sense of how, like some advice for folks on how to use this stuff. There are huge long-term concerns about the impact of AI on jobs and employment. What are you seeing so far when it comes to the impact of AI on the employment picture? Yeah, so Stanford has this Canaries in the Coal Mine project, they call it, which is this project that they're doing. They have access to data from one of the big payment processors. So you probably get your paycheck if you're a W-2 from one of these companies. And they take all of that data, and it lets them track what is happening with jobs on a really granular level.

46:44And the good news for right now is that we are not seeing massive disruptions, but at least according to that group, they are seeing enough happening that they believe that the risks to jobs are real. It seems to be happening right now at the more junior level. Companies are a little bit less likely to hire a junior employee than they were maybe three or four years ago. So this is just something where we're all going to have to keep our eye on it. And I've never heard anyone talk about an AI-proof job, really. I mean, if you're a parent with a kid who's a freshman in college right now, is there a path that they're getting steered that is more AI-proof?

47:31I'm deeply uncertain about this question. What people who are optimistic about the future will say is, it's easy to automate a task, but it's hard to automate a job, right? Like your AI might be able to generate that meeting briefing for you and create that slide deck for you. But you're the only person who knows how to actually maneuver through your organization and get buy-in from all of the right people and use your critical thinking skills. And so that's why you're always going to have a job. The pessimists say, well, a job is just a collection of tasks. And if you believe that the capabilities of these models are going up over time, eventually they might actually be able to do all of the tasks that comprise your job.

48:15So this is one where I just have deep uncertainty. But when I sit with the increase in model capabilities just over the past three years, it is hard for me to imagine that they just sort of like top out in the next six months and we can all relax like that just seems very unlikely to me we're fucked podcasters we're done bro i know a fork in us i mean i'm sure you've seen the stories about the networks of like automated podcasts that just sort of like you know oh my god it does feel like the what do you think about the ai newsrooms because i feel like they're good at aggregating but the idea of an ai agent like going out and collecting new information and interviewing people and buildings like it feels a little more challenging now i went like four email rounds back and forth with some jerk who is like hey i put together an ai newsroom and over the past three months we published over 40 000 stories and i was like okay so what you're telling me is you stole a bunch of work from a bunch of hard-working people and you're now passing it off as your own like you want me to get excited about this so i basically blew him off uh a week later he got profiled and wired um so uh i don't know Tommy, he might have a better strategy than I do.

49:22Well, listen, I admire your gumption in having that fight. Okay. So if AI takes all the jobs, that is obviously bad. But there's also, I think, a less obvious risk to the economy if AI is all actually just bullshit and hype, because that means there's a massive stock market bubble built around AI that's going to pop. So there's a bunch of different ways you could try to quantify the size of the AI bubble right now. But one easy one to think about is there's about seven companies, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tesla, that make up something like 30 % to 35 % of the S &P 500 market cap.

50:00If their AI businesses crater, that would lead to a stock market crash. There's also like AI is driving a huge amount of corporate investment. I think I just saw Goldman Sachs release a report earlier this month where they estimated that there will be$1 trillion of AI-related investment in 2026, more than half of that in the US. And if that investment is worthless, obviously it dries up. So Casey, how concerned are people you talk to about the risk of an AI bubble bursting? So people are very concerned about this. I have to say, this is a place where I have a strong take, which is that I do not think that this is going to lead to some sort of massive wipeout.

50:44Here is where I should say, my fiance works at Anthropic. That is something that you should know about me. I strive to maintain my independence, but it is just a fact of my life. But here's the reason why I don't think that we're about to see a big wipeout. Because you personally might not care about AI, you don't want to use it, but my guess is your boss does. And this is the entire thing. Businesses are buying AI. They are buying as much AI as the labs can make. Almost all of these companies, well, maybe not Grok because it sucks, but the Frontier Labs, right? So the Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, for the most part, they have been in this kind of capacity crunch for like a year now because people cannot get enough of this stuff.

51:32They are bringing it into their businesses. That is why these companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, are on pace to have two of the biggest IPOs in history. So in order for you to believe that there is going to be this big wipeout, you have to believe that businesses are going to stop buying the technology. And if that is the case that you're going to make, you have to give me a really good reason for why they're going to stop buying it. And I just have not myself heard that reason. I can't believe you said that about Grok. if you want to create an image of a teenage classmate in a see-through bikini where else are you going to turn that's a good point that's a good point yeah thank you i do think there is like there i think you're right there like grok is grok is a shitty llm there is a question of whether tesla and spacex and all his various companies are going to do something interesting in robotics that could be revolutionary in some way do you are you more of an optimist in that use case?

52:26I'm like pretty scared of robots, actually. But I would make another point about Grok because it's relevant to the bubble discussion, which is that Grok was not able to use all of its capacity to make CSAM. And so what they did instead, because there was no real consumer demand, was that they just sold it to Anthropoc. And so I think you're going to see this dynamic because some people are like, well, what if we massively overbuild and we have a bunch of data centers lying around that nobody needs, like, you know, that's when the bubble will burst. My view is no, like whoever happens to be winning at the time, they're just going to buy the excess compute because it takes a long time and you have to fight a lot of political battles to get one of those things built.

53:03Yeah. Okay. Let's end with something a little more fun. That's hopefully also educational. First of all, people need recommendations. Like I use, I switched to Claude. I use it as mostly a souped up Google. I don't really let it write for me because I don't trust that it's not hallucinating, but I find it very useful as a research tool. What AI products do you use? What has helped you at life and at work? And is there anything you've tried that was just comically shitty that you can tell us about? Sure. Let's see. I mean, some things that I've done, like something that I encourage everyone to do is use one of these tools to build a personal website.

53:45You don't have to put it on the internet. Like you can build a website that just lives in your browser, but use a tool like chat jpt codex or claude and just say hey make a website about me the reason i suggest people do this is because it's kind of fun to make a website and two if you haven't yet like watch this thing work i think you will learn a lot from that process right when you see that you're like um could you like you know make it purple and add in a little widget that pulls on the weather and like maybe my spotify history and it just kind of does it that may help you understand like, wow, it's pretty weird to just be able to like types of words into a box and like make an entire website.

54:21So like, that's usually where I suggest that people start. In terms of other tools that I'm using, I really like this tool called Granola. It seemed a lot more interesting when it came out because everyone has copied it now, but basically it just like listens in on my meetings. It takes really good notes, but then importantly, it's just like kind of a knowledge base so that, you know, I'm planning this new company with Kevin. I'm trying to remember what we decided about this one particular thing. I could text him, but you know, he's, you know, a diva who knows where he is. 80, 20 split for you of the equity is what I, what Granola told me.

54:56Yeah. That's what I think that's, that's what I remember too, but now I can just sort of like get it from there. So that's another one that I like. That's really useful. And then, um, I've been trying this thing town that I just mentioned. And this thing is like only been around since June. I don't know if this thing has legs, but I like the fact that it's briefing me on all of my meetings. It also creates this wiki. So it's kind of like a wiki of my life. Think about how much useful information is hidden in your email. This just kind of organizes it. It pulls out important documents. It puts them in a place that you can find.

55:27So just like kind of basic personal assistant stuff that I find really useful. That's really interesting. I mean, I think people are always like, oh, you should try Claude Code and build something. And I was like, hey man if i had a fucking idea for an app i would have been like rich in 2012 okay but i'm not so that's why i'm here talking to you people but i mean have you guys thought about doing like because you could make a pod save app maybe you have something like this already you could just feed every transcript of every episode and like you know everyone on your team because i'm sure you must all the time be like what episode did that happen on when is the last time we talked about that when is the last time that guest came on the show that is something that you personally could make with ai it would not even be that hard oh that's really interesting what about if i wanted to make something that's like, okay, I have like some nerdy niche interests.

56:10Like I really care about American politics. I think foreign policy is super interesting. I do shows on each. Could I build an app that is able to brief me every morning on those things? And the thing I worry about how to get around is like, whenever I ask Claude to research something for me, the websites that come back as sources are not the most reputable, Casey. It's none of the stuff I pay for. It's not the great journalism that I pay for. Can I get it to pull from that? It's a great point. You know, this is an area where the publishers, to protect their own interests, because the AI companies are all incredibly, like, rapacious and would steal absolutely every, like, pixel on their website if the publishers would let them.

56:46The publishers have all said, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, like, you cannot scrape us. So, like, they have not created a way so that you can, you know, sign in to ChatGPT with your Bloomberg account, which is something I would love to do so that I could get the kind of briefing that you're talking about. So can you get a briefing? Yes. Will it be high-quality sources? know are there a strange number of websites that just seem to like republish the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and other credible sources and so you still sort of wind up getting a decent briefing anyway yes um but yeah that's it's not a bad place to start yeah uh weren't you building yourself some sort of goofy day planner that Kevin made fun of you for yes um so you know here one of my core beliefs as a technology journalist is that it is fun to build and make things.

57:30And so I like to just have moments in my week where I am building and making things that one of the easiest things you can make with an AI tool is a to-do list. And I've used literally all of them and they're all functionally the same. There's no good reason to use one over the other. Anyone will, will do you. So I had the idea to make one that was themed with a comic book that I've been reading, which is called Nightwing. Tommy, I'm sure you know that Nightwing is Dick Grayson, the original Robin. And so, you know, I, I, I basically just wanted to see what it could do. Could I get Gemini and chat GPT to violate DC comics, copyright and create for me a nightwing themed to-do list app.

58:08And guess what the answer was? Yes. And that's the power of AI. Oh, nightwing who has not wanted a Robin themed anything for me when I want to build something, I just grabbed the magnet tiles with my kids and I'm not doing that. Uh, last question for you. So So there's probably a lot of people who are listening. Thank you for still listening, by the way. We got to the end of the show. Who feel like they are getting totally left behind by this technology. And they just want a better understanding of these tools. I think you gave some great advice there of like use them, build some things. But are there also organizations you look to or like YouTube series or like people that are doing kind of like informational stuff?

58:42Let's see. Besides reading Platformer, of course. Of course, of course. I'm listening to Hard Fork. and we'll have a new show for folks to watch pretty soon. What I see people doing that is great is that they're going to public meetings and they're calling their representatives and they're raising concerns. And that is the place where I see getting involved really making a difference. Look, if you want to learn something specific about AI, you can just type it into the YouTube search box and I guarantee you there is some hustle bro that has like a 14 minute video about how you should do all of it instantly.

59:15Well, he planks. Yes, exactly. But no, just, you know, I would try to stay curious about it. But like, if you're nervous about what you're seeing out there, like just know that I'm with you. I'm nervous too. Okay, that's good advice. Casey Newton, thank you so much. Everyone go to platformer.news to learn more about AI and everything in tech. And I really appreciate it. Thanks, Tommy. It was fun. Thanks again to Casey Newton for joining the show. And we will be back in your feeds on Tuesday. Pods of America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Faris Safari, with Reed Gerlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill.

59:53Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, Kirill Pellaviv, David Tolles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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