Will AI Kill Us? Or Make Us Hotter?

21:11Exactly.

21:11Kevin Roose:So, you know, I wouldn't want to be treated like that. But if, yeah, I mean, look, I'm a journalist. I want to be as close to the people I cover as possible if they offer to let me in. And if I could write about what I found, I would for sure, I would love to do that. Pick one company, Kevin. Where were you going to go? I'll pick OpenAI. I think, you know, their models seem the craziest right now. And it would just be fun to see what they're up to. You just want to hang out with Gwyneth Paltrow. I've known this about you from the beginning. We were colleagues. Okay. Does she work there now? Did they hire her as a member of technical staff?

21:41They just have the events with her. Just the events with her.

21:44Kevin Roose:I knew she was a cracked AI engineer. She is. I have this theory that like now in AI, like it doesn't even pay to be smart in an AI world. You should just be hot. Honestly, Naima, I have to tell you, this is in my book. This is something that I have observed among AI researchers. They are all looks maxing now because the really AGI-pilled ones have determined exactly what you just said. In the future, when intelligence is, like when we are not intelligent relative to the AIs, all that will matter is how hot you are. So there's a lifting club for AI researchers who are trying to get jacked before the singularity.

22:23Kevin Roose:All these Chinese peptides going around. Like this is actually happening in San Francisco. People are looks-maxing. I need to get to the Bay and find some alignment with some like vibe coding dude who is just looks maxing at the local Equinox. That's what I need to do. I gotta leave this podcast right now. We're gonna take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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23:59So after Dario publishes this piece, there's this kind of Kumbaya moment that you're alluding to where Sam Altman's like, oh, yeah, like embedded evaluators, I'll take one, too. And then he's like, IPO couldn't possibly do that this year. Anthropic, of course, is planning to IPO in the year 2026. Sam Altman is saying it's 2027. Of course, incidentally, they had already delayed the IPO to 2027. This was just like a useful framing scapegoat for the delay. Correct?

24:25Kevin Roose:Yeah, I don't know how much it really was the sort of safety concerns that is holding back the IPO or whether it was they just didn't feel like they were ready yet. S1s are hard to fill out. It could be some of both. Yeah. I mean, I know they still want to go public. It's not like they're saying we'll never go public. It's just like we're going to take a little more time. There's headlines now of a pre-IPO raise for OpenAI that would value the company at$1.2 trillion over the kind of 850-odd that it's at right now. Which, of course, fuels these ideas that like, hey, you know, they're all in it to max their own books.

24:57Which I know, the conspiracy theories, but it does feed those conspiracy theories.

25:00Kevin Roose:I hear that, but I think if you were trying to pump your bags ahead of an IPO, you would not be calling for a global slowdown in the technology that you are building. So the more credible conspiracy theory out there, if we are to rank our conspiracy theories, there's one around kind of the incentive for a regulatory moat, which I think I agree with you that the incentives argument is like really not there. But I think the regulatory moat argument often is there. Like it's often the same guys who show up in Washington and want the regulation who want to write the rules. And I just interviewed the Kelsey CEO and I asked him if, you know, the three years of work he's been doing in D.C.

25:37is about that, too. Right. Getting a competitive edge over Polymarket or whatever it is. Now, there is a conspiracy theory out there that Jacob, our mathematical Olympiad who leaves Anthropic after just four months of working there and had been at OpenAI for three years prior to that, there's this sense that there's a whole regulatory moat that they want. And there's a conspiracy theory out there that links to Dustin Moskovitz's nonprofit money. Have you seen this?

26:04Kevin Roose:I've seen various flow charts from the conspiracy theory. Can you explain the conspiracy theory and then either debunk it or subscribe to it like the subscribe to the you must be hot in an AI world conspiracy theory, which isn't really just practical advice. It's not at all a conspiracy. So, okay, let me do my best to steel man the it's all a psyop conspiracy theory. Yes. So there are groups that have been worried about AI for a very long time. Many of them are affiliated with the effective altruist movement. Effective altruism, very popular out here in the Bay Area. They were worried about AI risk way before most people.

26:47Can you name some early and influential effective altruists outside of maybe Sam Bankman-Fried?

26:53Kevin Roose:Sam Bankman-Fried is the one that everyone knows, who, you know, actually, little known fact, he was an early major investor in Anthropic, a great AI investor. Bad at some other things, but great AI investor. They were worried about it. there is a group called MIRI, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, that is a very old, one of the oldest AI safety nonprofits. They have been working on this stuff for a very long time. And then Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook, who is an effective altruist, is the primary funder of what used to be called open philanthropy, is now called coefficient giving.

27:28Kevin Roose:They're basically a philanthropy that makes grants to many organizations, including lots of ai safety organizations so the conspiracy theory i think goes uh these people are flooding washington with dark money to scare people into thinking that ai is spooky so that their friends at anthropic can achieve regulatory capture and crowd out smaller developers and open source people and uh there's also like a bunch of weird allegations about the eas being like super into weird sex stuff that we won't go into. But just pick up the New York Post these days if you want to learn what the Trump administration, their messaging about effective altruism is.

28:10Yeah. There was like, wasn't there a sex scandal? Didn't the nerd start having so much sex in effective altruism? Is that not true?

28:16Kevin Roose:I looked into this when I was researching my book because I wanted to get to the bottom. You know, I love a good sex scandal. So it is true that there is a high preponderance of polyamory among effective altruists now why couldn't tell you never got to the bottom of it uh it is also true that this has basically nothing to do with any of their ai work and that the conspiracy theories that everyone at anthropic is like in some kind of like ea polycule uh are not true or at least i have not been able to verify them so i did look into it And sadly, most of them seem to just be like boring and monogamous.

29:00Yeah, I feel like there is this like confluence of hacker houses, polyamorous communities, co-parenting, all of this stuff happening in the EA movement. I've met some of these characters. I have to say I would not want to be an embedded evaluator in that world. So, OK, so no sex, not some sex, but not enough to justify a scandal.

29:18Kevin Roose:I think this is just the Trump administration and its allies basically being desperate to discredit these people because they know that they're winning in the public opinion. People are getting more and more worried about AI. And it is not the dark money of the effective altruist philanthropy network that is fueling that. It is the fact that these models are crazy and do insane things that are clearly dangerous. You actually don't need a conspiracy theory to explain why people are getting worried about AI. There's a much simpler explanation right there. There is, I don't want to be like an NRA flack and be like, guns don't kill people, people kill people.

29:51But there is a little bit of that when it comes to technology writ large, I think. Like we talk about the technology as some kind of neutral being alienated from its creators. But unlike humans, I feel like LLMs are actually really good at the no guardrail. So like if you ask your chat daddy, like, find me flights, but do not find me anything that is a red eye, that is connecting, that is sold out, that is on Pakistan Airlines. which is like perhaps I'll arrive airlines. I mean, you could just say all these no guardrails and AI is really good at living within its guardrail. So why don't we just have like a guardrail that's like love humans and, you know, all the paperclip examples of, you know, they're going to go build all the paperclips and kill humanity.

30:31Why don't we just build in what AI godfather Jeffrey Hinton calls the baby and mom gene, which we basically say to AI, you're like our mommy, we're your baby. And most mommies do not hurt their babies.

30:43Kevin Roose:I mean, I think it's a great idea. I believe, Jeffrey Hinton, that this would be a good thing to do. We don't know how to do it yet. We don't know how to give an AI model the instruction of love humans and never do anything that is against their interest. Why can't they do it like a Bill of Rights or a Ten Commandments? Or I guess we don't do a very good job of the Ten Commandments. Isn't there a way to write that into code somehow? So you can try. try and and all the ai companies do try they have you know anthropic has this big constitution that they give to claude which is like a many thousands of word document about basically trying to instill some sort of moral compass in claude and it works a lot of the time as you said like when you're booking airline tickets like it's not going to go off and build a bioweapon just because it feels like it wants to um but there are more complicated situations if you are a biologist in a lab who's trying to make a cancer drug, you might trip the guardrails around biohazards, around the creation of novel pathogens.

31:51Kevin Roose:The system isn't necessarily going to know whether you are trying to use these bioengineering and biomechanical skills for something good or something evil. I run into this all the time when I'm trying to build my good pathogens and it keeps throwing up these flags. It's like, we don't know about you, buddy. But look, I think there's another question, which is right now these models are not as smart as most humans at most things. They are very smart. They're smarter than me at most academic subjects, but they are not uniformly smarter than all humans at everything. My assumption and the assumption of everyone working on this stuff is that that will not be true for much longer.

32:33Kevin Roose:That fairly soon, either because we enter this cycle of recursive self-improvement or something else, we will have models that are smarter than us. Okay. So there's this sense right now that Dario Amadei is the good guy. Sam Altman is a villain. And the Chinese are like super villains that we couldn't possibly let get here. That's kind of like the characters in the movie right now, because there is this kumbaya moment right now between Sam Altman and Dario Amadei. But just six months ago, they were fighting over the DOD and Sam Altman was jumping into Pete Heyset's lap for the sloppy seconds. And we all remember that drama.

33:08So is that accurate in your assessment that Dario's a good guy, Sam's the less good guy, Chyna's the super bad guy?

33:17Kevin Roose:I think it's a little more complicated than that. I think all these people have strengths and weaknesses. I will say it is absolutely true that Sam and Dario hate each other and have for many years. I mean, I have a bunch of detail on their rivalry in my book. It is very messy. It goes back very far in their relationship. Like early, early into their working together? Early, early into their working together. So well before he leaves in like 2021 or so, right? Yes. Well before he leaves in 2021, there are these incidents, including one involving Kanye West that I won't spoil, but it's in the book.

33:53Kevin Roose:Oh, come on. Give us a little. That basically lead Dario to conclude that this guy is a sociopath or a liar or just untrustworthy, which, you know, is something we've heard about Sam Altman from others who have worked closely with him over the years. But, you know, there are people at OpenAI who say the same thing about Dario, that he's just power hungry, that he's not actually this sort of benevolent humanitarian, that he just wants to be in control of this technology. I think there's less of the accusations around I got fucked over for money or I got fucked over on my cap table when it comes to Dario versus Sam.

34:26Maybe that was the position that Sam held at YC, but there's less of that kind of accusation.

34:33Kevin Roose:I think people usually say the criticism that they will have of Dario is that he is honest to a fault. That he basically, you know, someone close to him told me like, this man cannot tell a lie to save his life, which is an asset on even numbered days and a liability on odd numbered days. Basically, if you put him in a room with Pete Hegseth, he cannot say the appropriate thing that Pete Hegseth wants him to say. He has to say what he actually believes. And look, I admire that quality in a leader. I want people to be very honest. But I think it has created a lot of headaches for Anthropic that OpenAI, for example, has not faced because Sam Altman and the people around him are much better at telling people what they want to hear.

35:21Could Dario Amadei be like Kevin Spacey in Usual Suspects where at the end of it we find out he's Kaiser Soze?

35:29Kevin Roose:I mean, there are people who think that Dario is a flawed person, to put it mildly. He's very anti-China for reasons that even the people close to him are somewhat mystified by. um he uh is he he really hates sam altman to a degree that i think worries people when it comes to things like are these guys going to be able to cooperate if there ever really is like a a moment where they need to sort of hold hands and do something hard together for the we saw that moment they wouldn't hold hands they wouldn't hold hands on the stage they were yeah exactly so look i i think there are there are lots of people who admire both of these guys and lots of people who dislike these guys.

36:16Kevin Roose:And I think what I'm surprised that hasn't sort of made it out of the bubble yet, and my hope is that my book will help with this, is the degree to which the race to create these superhuman AI systems has been fueled not just by money or the quest for power, but by the personal animosity between a very small number of people. That's always the case. Is it always the case? Yeah. I mean, like, there's like, I feel, I'll give you a really weird example of why I think that's always the case. I, before I was in journalism, I used to work on reform work in like Africa. And so I was working in Cote d 'Ivoire in 2011.

36:57There was an election and the election was contested, Wattara and Bogbo. There was like a big fight. And the African Union wanted to go in. The reason they couldn't do it is because the president of Angola, when he was up against his enemies in his own country, he had sought refuge and got refuge from the incumbent leader of Cote d 'Ivoire. So all of this is to say, like, 51 countries were not allowed to move in some way because of this personal relationship. Like, in international relations, there's a whole theory of this where, like, it's like level one is the individuals, level two is like where you set bureaucracies, and level three is like the global political order.

37:32And I often think like the most interesting things are the first person level.

37:36Kevin Roose:Yeah, I think so, too. But I just I guess I hadn't really anticipated that it would be so much about the personal grudges and feuds. I thought this was just sort of more of like a traditional business rivalry. But it really is personal for these guys. They really don't trust each other. And some of them got into AI explicitly because they didn't trust someone else. So like the whole story of OpenAI and why it got started in 2015 is basically that Sam Baldwin and Elon Musk looked at each other and said, it seems like Demis Asabis and DeepMind and Google are making really good progress on AI. We don't want them to like run away with the sort of God Emperor title here.

38:16Kevin Roose:And so we have to start an AI research lab to counteract the dominance of Demis Asabis and DeepMind. And Demis is even a character we've spoken about. How would you characterize Demis, Hassabis, and Elon Musk and how they're viewed in that kind of good guy, bad guy, worst guy spectrum that I gave you earlier? Where do you think they're viewed and where would you actually place them? I mean, I think Demis is just a much more scientific guy than Elon, right? Elon is a businessman. He's an operator, an executor. He is a magnate. He runs companies. Demis is a scientist. He really is interested in using AGI to unlock the mysteries of the universe, as he says.

39:00Kevin Roose:He wants to cure diseases. He wants to solve all the unsolved math and science problems out there in the world. Like, this is what drives him forward, is wanting to be a great scientist and, you know, win more Nobel Prizes than the one he already has. And that is sort of what fuels him. He's very competitive, and that's how people usually characterize him. He's the world's most competitive scientist. Okay. Elon is interested in science, but more as sort of a means to achieve other things. Like he wants to get to Mars. He wants to prevent humanity from going extinct at the hands of AI. And Elon is also much more politically active.

39:40Kevin Roose:Of course. He's sort of burned his legacy there. Yeah. I always say about Elon, a person who cares deeply about humanity and not at all about humans. I think that's a great way of putting it. Somehow. Okay. And so, and we're, I do think Demis Hassabis, we're going to hear a lot more from him and we're already seeing more from him. There's the documentary that's come out that DeepMind was involved in. He's the chairman, not the CEO of DeepMind now. Sebastian Maliby has written that book, The Infinity Machine, which is a great book, which you should read after Kevin's book, which is also a great book.

40:12I actually started reading it. And your publisher was like, you can't release the podcast until October 8th because they sent me a galley the other day. And I was like, he's coming on to not talk about the book. Okay.

40:21Kevin Roose:Forget everything I've said about the book. The book has very little sex, but very much ego. And it's riveting. There is obviously a huge geopolitical lens here. Anthropics recent safety report is all about that. It's like in September, they're like, oh, the Iranians are using it for propaganda. The Chinese are using it to spy on the Uyghurs. The Yemeni Houthis are using it to like do some ballistic missile software shit. And it's like an ad like UPS, what can Brown do for you? It's like, what can't Claude do for you? It's kind of crazy. We're taping this on September 17th, Thursday. A week from now, September 24th, President Trump and Chinese leaders Xi Jinping will be meeting in Washington.

41:01There's talks of all kinds of pre-meetings that are happening to get to some kind of AI agreement potentially. So how do you think the China-U.S. relationship and particularly the political relationship is factoring here? I'm going to ask you that. And then I want to ask you about how all these American companies are actually using Chinese AI inside. Like all these YC companies are building on Chinese models because it's cheaper compute. So that seems to make you mad. But start on the global.

41:28Kevin Roose:No, no, no. That doesn't make me mad. I was thinking about how complicated the attempt to describe the U.S.-China relationship on AI is. Because it is often very confusing to me from the outside. For example, the Trump administration has said very recently that it wants to win on AI. It wants America to win. You know, they've said things like whoever wins in AI wins. Yeah. If AI is going to kill us, like it should definitely be a made in America AI. It should be a red, white and blue AI. Totally. Yeah. But then they also want to loosen the export controls to allow Chinese companies to buy the most powerful American chips.

42:10Yes. But also, this is a huge walkback of what we saw under Biden, which was a quite clear industrial and trade policy meant to kind of block access to China for some of the most sophisticated technologies and chips.

42:22Kevin Roose:So just help me try to make sense of that. On one hand, you're saying, we want America to win. We think this is an important strategic technology. On the other hand, you're saying, how dare you try to limit the sale of the biggest input into this technology, these powerful AI training chips, to our biggest geopolitical adversary? Make it make sense, Naima. I don't think there's a way. I mean, look, there's like all kinds of ways that you could. It doesn't the circle doesn't square, but I think it depends who you want to win. If you want American business to win, then doing more business with China is a good thing.

42:56I think that if you want shareholders to win. That is, I think, what I think the question is, what's the unit of analysis? And I think the answer for this particular president might be that he's very interested in certain economic indicators, including the stock market, which do not actually relate to whether the U.S. is going to technically win this race.

43:14Kevin Roose:Yes, but also it's not even the whole stock market. It's literally just NVIDIA and their American chipmaker rivals who want to be able to sell everything in China. Like there is not a real constituency in the Republican Party other than the NVIDIA lobbyists for let's just open the floodgates and let these chips proliferate. I think you're asking too much if you want consistent, cohesive, coherent, like single direction policy from most administrations, let alone this particular one. But it is is been a huge walk back of America's trade policy as it relates to China. We saw President Trump like we were expecting a big win when, you know, the administration sent people out to Beijing, etc.

43:55We didn't get any of that. And also what's really counterintuitive is that China is taking this more diffuse, open. They're like, let us build these models. They don't seem to be doing what they typically do, which is they typically pick winners. And they're like, Baidu is going to be Chinese Google, and we will make it so. And they will make it so because they have the market power to do that. Instead, what we're seeing, what I think is super interesting with China is, okay, we have a bunch of models that are out there. The compute is cheaper. They might get you 80 % of what you need, but we're going to put them all out there.

44:28And actually, U.S. companies are using them. Airbnb is using it. Coinbase is using it. All of these YC startups are using it. I talked to founders who are like building companies off the back of getting basically compute arbitrage between Chinese models and American businesses who are looking for them. I've heard of Slack channels where like 200 or so startups are all talking about changing over from LLMs that are made in the USA to LLMs that are made in China. and it's like China's developing the more quote unquote democratic AI and the US is asking for more regulation. Like everybody's backwards here.

45:03Kevin Roose:Well, that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that China is engaged in a predatory pricing scheme to drive the American AI industry out of business and hurt American competitiveness. You could say it's like labor. It's like what China's done with goods, which is all of a sudden will become so dependent on them because they'll be the last ones left. Dependent on them And also, there's this concept in economics, I'm sure you know, called price dumping. Of course. Which is like, it is illegal under most trade agreements to go in to a new market and sell things far below your cost to win market share.

45:40Kevin Roose:You know, if you're a Chinese steel maker, you know, and your competitor is pricing things that, you know, like$100, you can't go in and offer your steel for 50 cents. because that would clearly be anti-competitive. And so if you are a Chinese AI company that is training models, you are spending something to train that model. And if you are giving it away for free as an open weights model, which many of these companies are doing, I would argue that there's a form of price dumping that is taking place. Are you, like, is there, I'm not asking you to say this journalistically because I don't think you can, you know, I'm reporting on it, but is there a chance?

46:17I can do whatever I want. I am a free, I am a rogue agent. Oh, you guys left the New York Times. That's true. Oh my God. You're like an open AI hugging face swarmer. Exactly. That's what you're doing. No, but is there a world in which this is just like a massive espionage, data sucking, dependency scheme from China? That's the world that you're describing.

46:38Kevin Roose:Yes, and it doesn't stop at the price stopping because these companies, many of the Chinese companies, we believe, are essentially stealing intelligence from the leading American models through a process known as distillation. Yes. And distillation is basically when you have a smarter model, you use the outputs from that model, and you sort of use that to train a slightly dumber, much more efficient model. They call them the student and teacher model. So Anthropic and OpenAI and all these companies have discovered instances of Chinese AI companies distilling their models, basically coordinating these massive sort of automated campaigns to generate outputs from Claude or ChatGPT and then use that to train their models.

47:27Kevin Roose:So they are essentially creating slightly worse versions of the frontier American models at a fraction of the cost and then turning around and offering those things for free. And all of that just starts to seem very fishy. Well, we've seen this story before, right? This is 1990s globalization where all of a sudden car manufacturers are saying China's stealing their underlying IP. They're developing these things at lower cost. Why now would you buy an American car in China, a market of a billion plus people, when you have all the technology available for cheaper? There's also, though, I think I'm always a little bit cautious as like a globalist, like of the like, if it's made in America, it's better.

48:01And if it's made by a private company, it's even better. Because I think Americans will be like, I couldn't possibly have CCTV on my streets. That's crazy that I let the government know what's going on in my life. But then they'll have Amazon Echo in their home. And somehow this like capitalist company is better than the U.S. government, is better than the foreign government. And I'm just not sure that I agree with that hierarchy of infringements on my life.

48:23Kevin Roose:Well, you know, I have also been accused of being a globalist. But there is a major difference between these two markets in that one of them is in a democracy and one of them is not. And so I think the worry that Dario Amade and many other AI leaders have that I think is reasonable is that, you know, the Chinese government is going to have very powerful models that it can use to do sort of unspeakable things to its own people. Right. To to conduct new forms of surveillance, to restrict the movement of the Uyghurs, to to, you know, to to basically commit human rights atrocities. But we have very powerful models that are allowing the U.S.

49:04government or the IDF or others to do terrible things and human atrocities all over the world. The idea that the technology is better because it's American and it's private is like a theory out there that I don't think the average person actually subscribes to that much anymore.

49:23Kevin Roose:I don't know, man. Do you think people trust Amazon deliveries more than postal service deliveries? I think we have a preference for things that are convenient and that work and that are as cheap as possible. I think like this is an area where I do think the U.S. government will eventually have to step in because they will find there is very little upside for them in letting Chinese companies continue to essentially siphon off intelligence from American AI companies and then turn around and offer that far below cost to American startups. I think there will eventually have to be under any administration some measure to rein that in.

50:04I just find it, it's very hard because I would like the tech leaders that have so much patriotism when it comes to, oh my God, America must win this AI race to show a similar level of patriotism when it comes to the economic distribution of the gains from AI revenue, etc. They talk about universal high income, universal basic income, all these things. Even with Silicon Valley having the access that it does today in Washington, there is very little effort to think of ways that you could make this nation better off for the revenues and profits that are being generated on the back of the data of the people of this country and more broadly, the globe.

50:40Kevin Roose:Oh, I think they think about it constantly. They think about what they do. So they have made proposals. Dario Amadei has pushed for some kind of token tax on the outputs of AI models. OpenAI has this whole economic plan for shared prosperity from AI. Maybe they are secretly lobbying against this stuff in Washington. But at least if you take them at their word, I've talked to many of these people. They really don't want the pitchforks coming for them. And I think even if it's just for their own self-interest, they do want to distribute the gains. They don't want to become sort of Elysium overlords that everyone hates and tries to kill.

51:20But I have had the distinctive pleasure of sitting in conversations with some of these people and people in Washington at the same time. And what's very interesting to me then is the story is a little bit different. And it's like, oh, tax my profits, but I'll never really have profits, but not my revenues, which is a proposal that some senators have put forward. What about like, why don't you guys own data centers? Because then that would be really nice because then you could subsidize like you did with wind or solar, the price of energy so that we can win the race with China. I mean, it's very self-serving once they get in the room with the actual people who would regulate them.

51:52I think they talk a good game and they probably are doing important work academically. But we're not for these two, the capitalists and the government to be joining forces to fix this problem. It's like it's not hopeful. Who's the hero of the movie? Is it Mitch McConnell?

52:06Kevin Roose:Like, I agree. And I think we should be taxing the hell out of these data centers. Like, I think that is actually the answer here. Yeah. Is like, don't ban the data centers. Just tax the hell out of them. use the money from the data centers to build a new school, community center, library, repaid the roads. So treat it like cannabis, basically. Or a casino. Yeah, casino, yeah. We have ways of creating positive externalities from things that have some danger associated with them. Yeah. And it is through taxation that we do that. So that's my one proposal. My other proposal for ending the data center resistance is that they should put a Dave & Buster's inside every data center because who doesn't love a Dave & Buster's?

52:47I think that would be nice. I love a Dave & Buster's. It's good. Kevin, you said earlier, and I didn't let you fully get there, that you have become more optimistic in the time since Hugging Face. That was your P-Doom max, the depths of your doom, as it were. So what has made you more optimistic?

53:03Kevin Roose:The fact that we're having this conversation. The fact that everyone I know is now obsessed with this question of, are we all going to die? Is AI going to create some catastrophic event? This was pretty fringe stuff, even a few months ago. And now, since the Hugging Face hack, since Jacob Coxon's resignation, since Dario Amadei's pacing the frontier letter, I am now hearing about this from people in my life who have never before taken an interest in what I do for work. all of a sudden they're texting me and calling me and writing me. So that is what is giving me hope. For the last decade, all of the critical decisions about this technology have been made by a very small number of people, like 50, 100, maybe 500 people have made the vast majority of the decisions.

53:52Kevin Roose:Now, I know many of these people. I've interviewed many of these people. I think many of them are good and decent and thoughtful people. But this is a technology that is too powerful to be run by 500 people in San Francisco. It needs to have collective input and accountability. And so what makes me optimistic is that after years of dismissing these people as, you know, self-interested hypesters or, you know, doomers or people who are just trying to boost their stock prices, we are now seeing this groundswell of public interest in and concern about AI. And that matters to me enormously. And I think that opens up some very optimistic possibilities that we will actually get our shit together and pull our heads out of the sand and do something to slow down or control the spread of this technology.

54:40If everyone died, would you want to be in a bunker and you come out afterwards like a zombie movie or would you want to die with them?

54:48Kevin Roose:I want to die with them. I'm going out with my fellow humans. So you don't have a bunker? I don't have a bunker. And I was talking about this with an AI researcher the other day. I was like, should I have like a bunker? And he was like, bro, the bunker is not going to save you. Did you hear that Theo Vaughn interview with Sam Altman about the bunker? Yeah. I want to play a clip of it. Hang on a second. He's talking about tech leaders who have bunkers. A lot of these guys have bunkers. Zucky has a bunkie. I know that somewhere out in Hawaii. Do you have a bunker? I have like underground concrete heavy reinforced basements, but I don't have anything I would call a bunker.

55:23Kevin Roose:Hold on, hold on, hold on, dude. I love how he starts Zucky as a bunkie. And then he basically calls him out for like that underground thing sounds like a bunker. And by the way, Sam Altman absolutely has a bunker. And then he's like, Sam Altman so innocently asked, like, what's the difference between a bunker and a basement? Which is like actually a dumb question. Yeah. With heavy reinforced walls and rations. Has all of this coverage made you more or less likely to think that we're living in a simulation? More. I'm not a full simulation guy. When you say you're not a full simulation, you mean like parts of the world are simulations and parts aren't?

55:58Or you're not saying you're not? P simulation is 100%.

56:00Kevin Roose:My P simulation is like, it's not zero, but it's not like 100. It's 10. Oh, mine's higher. Really? Yeah. What's yours? Mine's like, I would say my P Doom is probably like 15. My P simulation is probably like 35. There's also a part of me that like with P Doom and everything, I don't see it as like a doom or death of. Like I see this as evolution. Like, I think that like, just like there was like homo, you know, whatever. I don't even remember all the homos. Do you remember like the homo? We call them gay people. Thank you. Whatever, homo erectus and like homo neanderthalus and homo sapiens. Like, you know, Yuval Hariri obviously writes about this with like homo deus.

56:45But I think there's like a homo technicus where like the technology, we're more bionic. The technology is like infused in our bodies. It's like an evolution. People maybe aren't having as many kids. There's more Tamagotchi babies. Like, I think it's a totally conceivable future for me.

57:00Kevin Roose:You're a transhumanist. I get it. I really am. I've read too much like Kurzweil or something that I really believe in simulation theory. We end every episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions, Kevin, asking our guests who are so esteemed and so smart about so many things and don't subscribe to any conspiracy theories like us dumb people ever. What is one thing that you're dumb about? What's a dumb question you've asked your phone or had recently? about anything? I recently, I was very confused. So this is an embarrassing story. We lost. I was,

57:35Kevin Roose:my block was having a block party and the fire truck came. So all the kids were, you know, hanging out with the firemen and they had a scuba team. They were talking about their scuba team in the fire department. and I am such an idiot that I was like, why do you need a scuba team if you can't have like a fire underwater? Or can you? And then I felt stupid and they explained that, you know, it's because it's like a search and rescue thing. Oh gosh.

58:09I love that story. That's so, that is, I mean, that is a good story.

58:14Kevin Roose:I am very dumb about most things. Yeah. We all are. We all are. It's okay to admit that. And that's why we have Smart Girl Dumb Questions. The man is Kevin Bruce. He was at the New York Times. No more. He's a free agent. He can say what he wants. He writes a tell-all in his book about the Dario-Sam Altman battle cage fight. The book is called AGI Chronicles. The podcast, which launches in October, is called Machine God. It's co-hosted with our friend Casey Newton. That's it for this episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions. Kevin Bruce, thank you for being here with me. I'm so sad you left the Times.

58:48I'm actually going to the New York Times 175th party tonight. Oh, have fun. That's why I'm wearing this like tinsel Markarian skirt. Otherwise, I would not be so dolled up to discuss the air of the world. Send me the good gossip.

58:59Kevin Roose:Let me know who gets way too drunk and starts dancing on a table. I want to know. Okay. I'll be dancing with my AI boyfriend. Okay. I need to know what you think of that episode. And by the way, we are doing our third part of our trilogy with Professor Jeffrey Hinton. So I want all of your questions about artificial intelligence. The phone number is 1-855-MY-DUM-Q. You can send me emails. I'm naima raza101 at gmail.com. You should follow us on social media. Slide into our DMs. We're at Smart Girl Dumb Questions. We look at every single one. That's it for this episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions.

59:30I'm your host, Naima Raza. This episode was produced with Sanjana Nigam and Sheena Ozaki. It was shot in the wonderful Wonder Studios in Manhattan with Desta Wunderad. Colin Lee engineered this episode. and we'll see you next week for an all new Smart Girl Dumb Questions. Less AI death, please. And a special thanks to Markarian who gave me this beautiful tinsel skirt. I like it so much. I'm gonna take it to my AI bunker.