AI Execs Sign Joint Commitment, Converting Watts to GDP, the Model Consciousness Debate | Diet TBPN

0:01John Coogan:So, there was a supper last night at the White House, the Golden House, the Golden Home, Gold Home? What are we calling it these days? Well, we renamed Artificial Intelligence. It's Super Intelligence now. We were debating, is Super Intelligence abbreviated SI or just S? Because if you're, like, Super Alignment, was that SA? One problem there, John, there's no TLD for just S. That's true. That's true. You've got to get the new TLDs going. What was the word we... So super alignment, that was one word. That was one word. Some words you do, you have a hyphen. You have a hyphen. Yeah. If you just use a normal prefix for...

0:43It's just a normal prefix for something. Yeah, but then supernatural.

0:48John Coogan:Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. That's one word, right? So you would think that potentially you would just be using one word here. Yeah. But anyway, we're using two words, I guess. And so there was a dinner at the White House. David Sachs posted it. He said it's the Bretton Woods of supper intelligence, super intelligence. And there's some debate. My first reaction to this is Tyler was really snubbed. All those people there and not one chair for Tyler. Yeah. And so there's a bunch of folks here. And people were analyzing who got the best seats, who got the different positions, who got pole position, prime positioning, who was snubbed off in the little kids' table at the end, et cetera, et cetera.

1:34John Coogan:A bunch to analyze about who's on the ins, who's on the outs. But I had ChetGPT sort of go through and try and categorize each attendee by their stance on open source. Open source. So did they sign the Jensen NVIDIA open source letter? Have they been concerned about the cybersecurity impacts? Obviously, Anthropic on the far end, sort of in the red. A bunch of other folks who are more in the yellow. And I don't know if I agree with all of these classifications, but you can sort of see how Jensen is clearly pro-open source. Satya Nadella has talked about that. OpenAI, Greg Brockman, more in the middle, not open sourcing a lot of things.

2:19John Coogan:OpenAI did sign the Jensen letter, but of course is concerned about pacing the frontier, which is sort of antithetical. And so this is all as a reference point to that post from our friends over at Semi Analysis. Let me actually pull up what they said here. It says, majority of people are significantly underestimating the probability of open source models being nerfed or even outright banned in the next 6 to 12 months due to cyber concerns. And so I believe Anthropic put out something yesterday talking about the risks of open source in a cyber context, saying that the delay between Mythos preview, being able to find zero days, being able to hack into things, that gap has closed now, and the open source frontier can very quickly do the same thing, and so expect a lot of cyber incidents unless something is done.

3:20John Coogan:Can these be controlled some way, maybe at the inference layer, maybe at the data center level, maybe at the chip level? There's going to be a whole bunch of different proposals, but at least right now, in the next six to 12 months, certainly not this month, because the vast majority of people who are closest to Donald Trump have been evangelizing for open source. So I would be surprised to see any pushback against open source happen that quickly. At the same time, open source is amorphous. It is not a business by definition. And so it can't really have a formal seat at the table. George Hatz, not at the table, for example.

3:56John Coogan:Snubbed. Snubbed, yeah. No. Linus Torvalds, Not at the table. Imagine George Hodge at the table just sort of like laughing in a sort of insane way at everything being said. Yeah. And so even the companies that are pro-open source, they are pro-open source in so far that it advances their business. And so there is still a way that the closed source group could find a way for everyone who's at this table to benefit in a closed source world moving forward if open source is deemed to be too dangerous and forcing too many cyber concerns. I could see everyone at this table signing a letter saying we are now anti-open source, but the downstream economic engine actually splits the rewards and the profits of the ecosystem fairly evenly.

4:55John Coogan:I think the initial pushback and pro-open source push, especially from Jensen, was like, we don't want to be in a world where there's one company that reaps 100 % of the profits and we're not involved. But if it's like, hey, look, there's actually going to be an oligopoly. Companies don't want a single source intelligence. They're constantly going to be bouncing back and forth between open AI and Anthropic. And then consumers are going to be bouncing back and forth between Google search overviews and Muse and Instinct and all these different things. There's a world where the actual models are closed source, but there are so many front doors, and the front doors are in such competition with each other that there's enough revenue distribution and profit distribution that everyone at this table at least is happy.

5:39John Coogan:I don't think the open source community would be happy, but I do think that there is a world where in 6 to 12 months, it's possible that everyone at this table is like, yes, for cyber reasons, we need to find a different way forward where everyone benefits. economically, but we are now a little bit less pro-open source. But I don't know. What's your read on it? Six to twelve months, you think open source is going away, or you think it'll stick around? I mean, it's so hard to ban open source. I think maybe you can kind of get something like a ban if you're just worried about the business impacts economics, because then you pressure the providers to not host this stuff.

6:16But if you're worried about safety, if you have a bad actor, it's so hard to police downloading open-weight models from somewhere and running it locally.

6:24John Coogan:Yeah. And like, yeah, maybe there's some, you know, you need tens of thousands of dollars to like physically buy hardware. Exactly. If you're a motivated bad actor, like that's not that big of a hurdle. Exactly. Like, uh, it does feel like we are pretty far away from go and get a random gaming PC and be able to run something that is, you know, mythos level hacking machine. Like you probably need some serious GPUs. You probably need something that's basically rack scale. You need to be running it a lot to try a lot of different things. Like a lot of these cyber exploits, it was not just one-shotted by the model.

7:00John Coogan:It was a fan out of agents working together. Yeah, like Navier Stokes is like, you know, 10 ,000. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, and so there are, like one way to control it is through KYC on hardware. You know, like the data center that is, you know, being used maliciously is a lot more risky than the laptop that's being used maliciously, even with near frontier open source intelligence. So I don't know. We'll see how it goes. I'm sure there will be more discussions. It's not even to say that this dinner was about open source at all. It's just sort of interesting to take the temperature of where is DC on AI, who is getting the most quality time with the president and the administration, and then where do they stand on the issues of today.

7:49John Coogan:Obviously, this was much more just about pacing the frontier, the build-out, etc., stuff like that. And signing signatures. We had some signature analysis break down. Sholto shared a picture of the letter that was signed, the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, the Joint Committee on Frontier Responsibilities, in order to build a positive future for the American people in the world. We believe that every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with consumers and the public. One, they're going to implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of models during training and deployment around cybersecurity, biosecurity, chemical threats, etc.

8:34John Coogan:They want to empower an internal team to ensure all the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended. Three, they're going to partner with external auditors and evaluators to carry out independent assessments of whether the controls monitoring and detection are operating as intended. And four, they're going to designate an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee and receive reports from the teams operating the controls and the internal and external auditors. So a line to the board of directors that circumvents the CEO for safety, alignment, evaluation, all of that good stuff.

9:09John Coogan:A bunch of people signed it. We got Sundar from Google, Dario from Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg from Meta, Greg Brockman from OpenAI, Elon Musk from XAI, Jensen from NVIDIA, and Donald Trump, the president of the United States. A lot of people do an analysis on the various signatures. Yes. Someone did a tier list. I was surprised by their tier list. I'd like to see you do a tier list. Where would you put Donald Trump's signature? I mean, hate him or love him, I think it's pretty iconic. It's just so aggressive. It has a nice flow to it. It's very uniform, but it's hard to read if you don't know it's a signature.

9:51It looks like a child drew a mountain range.

9:55John Coogan:Versus Jensen, I'm seeing a lot of Jensen Wong in there. But what's impressive to me is I would want to compare the DJT signature. Like, I would want to look at 100 of them and see, like, is he nailing it every single time? Oh, okay. He's been doing autographs for long enough. I would expect that he is. But still, it looks like very difficult to actually be able to nail that and really get that dialed. So, again, he's going with a Sharpie, too. So he's sort of, like, trying to mog. Oh, that's true. I didn't realize that he pulls out the Sharpie. He's like, I'll give you the pen. I'll take the Sharpie.

10:27Yeah. Automatically, it's like.

10:29John Coogan:You're winning on thickness. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Winning on. The breadth is much more significant with that. Interesting strategy. And then going down the list, Sundar, again, would never know. But I like the two lines, the little dot there. Yeah, it almost looks like. There's a couple different. Yeah, it looks like an abstract artist signature. I can see that on a painting. Or maybe he, yeah, it almost looks like he's made up his own letters and language. Okay. um dario uh a little more tame kind of kind of like down on the first word and then it seemed like he was kind of drifting upwards my theory i i almost think here like someone was like holding the piece of paper and they were all so i think i basically think trump put the paper down yeah aggressively signed with a sharpie and then told everyone else because he knew this was going to go out you guys sign you know when you're trying to so you think it was a situation where like dario was signing on craig's back like oh sign on my back like that type of thing that might have been what happened yeah kind of like throwing down yeah notably you don't see any situations where the pen punched through the paper that sometimes happens if you're trying to sign a document on someone's back and you're punching through the soft uh jacket that they're wearing that could be a risk doesn't seem like it happened in this case anyway so dario pretty down the middle pretty safe again kind of emulating that sort of mountain range style right where by the the end of the signature it's just a bunch of lines going up and down sort of unclear um zuck again, more kind of rock star-esque, right?

11:59Almost musical feeling. GDB coming in, just minimalist. Minimalist. Minimalist, simple, readable. Yeah. He's a very, I would say, in some ways, these are reflections of their personalities, right? Yeah. GDB is a very practical person. Signature, window into the soul. It's a window into the soul, right? Extremely practical. Stick into the basics, stick into what works. Yeah. And, yeah, obvious why a lot of people are saying that's at least A tier.

12:29John Coogan:What is Mark Zuckerberg's actual signature? MZB? Or is it MZ and then the Z goes crazy? Is that what that is? It starts doing tricks? Yeah, it starts doing tricks. And I think Sundar might have done the same thing. But I feel like there's a little bit of a line that you don't cross. If somebody asks you for a full signature and you do an initials, that's a different thing. Sometimes you're on a document, you've got to sign your initials a bunch, you've got to sign the full thing. I have respect for the full name signature. If you ask me for a full name signature, I'm throwing down my full name.

13:01I'm not just randomly switching up to initials. I think it's totally fair game. It's totally fair game.

13:07John Coogan:You can just do initials. To rip cursive initials. Is this cursive initials from Greg Brockman? No, but I think that's where Sundar was maybe going. So you're giving Sundar the pass. You're giving Mark Zuckerberg the pass. I'm giving Zuckerberg the pass. Jensen, a lot of people are saying that Jensen's... Calligraphy? He brought his calligraphy. Yeah. I mean, I first read Ed Hardy.

13:33So I thought that, I don't know, maybe he had some affinity. Let's pull up the Ed Hardy logo.

13:40John Coogan:Did he put his middle name in there? What's his middle name? Here's the Ed Hardy logo. Jensen does not have a traditional English middle name. Oh, it's Jensun. So J-E-N-H-S-U-N. So that second letter. Okay, chat GPT that to make it look exactly like Jensen. Yeah, so he signs not with the English version, with the lowercase E-N-S-E-N. He throws a capital H in there, which gives it an extra flourish. It's the most tasteful. It earns the S tier. A lot of people saying, you know, Jensen has the same initials as John Hancock. Kind of evocative in his signature as well. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

14:29John Coogan:Monitoring the situation, monitoring meme here, did not like Sundar's. He put Sundar in F tier. I thought Sundar's had some nice flair to it, although it was potentially the most abstract. But, yeah. And I feel like putting MZ in C tier. I guess the Z does go a little crazy, but anyway. Here we have Donald Trump, Dario Amadei, and a few other folks gathered around, standing outside, and we will watch this clip right now. Whatever he says is okay. Be careful. I will say what I've always said, which is that AI has incredible benefits. I've talked about the meta benefits of the technology. As the president has said, you know, whoever wins, wins.

15:12I think that's very important. But technology has very real mechanism how we address those risks

15:20John Coogan:This is like a super cut of

15:43Probably not. Trump really makes them seem like they're all his like sons and like younger family members. It was a very productive...

15:55John Coogan:Mr. President, how did the meeting go, sir? Yeah, crazy. Let's play this clip from Natasha Tiku. She says, unfortunately, I will be going back to school to write my dissertation on this one-minute film. Let's see what happened in this film. A slowdown to AI. So I just want to hear from you after this big summit where you are today. Look, I mean, I will say what I've always said, which is that AI has incredible benefits. I've talked about the medical benefits of the technology. As the president has said, you know, whoever wins AI wins. I think that's very important. But I think the technology has very real risks.

16:31And, you know, the mechanism, how we address those risks is still under discussion. but we all need to work together to make sure that we can win and we can win safely. If we do this right, we work with the president and everyone here, we can win safely. Whoa, that's so much louder. Fascinating.

16:51John Coogan:Let's go over to Elon Jensen, Gavin Baker, the American.gov summit. They sat down and had a very rigorous discussion that I really enjoyed. It felt Elon's very good at going to like the extremes talking about the power generated by the sun. Sometimes he's in like sci-fi world. But in conversation with Jensen and Gavin, he was very grounded on what is happening with the energy build out, with the compute build out, what the role SpaceX will play, and also just the broad economics of compute and energy in America. And I found his talk here gave a lot of interesting context. And then I dug into it a little bit more and I want to talk about it.

17:36John Coogan:So let's pull up the clip of Elon talking to Gavin Baker. We need the Wright brothers on the job. Yes. Well, it turns out the Wright brothers are on the job. Elon, if you bring on 10 gigawatts, which SpaceX has discussed publicly, that'll be about 25 % of all the power added in America. And I know you have literal rocket engineers working on bringing on the power, helping make the turbines. So can you talk about that? Yeah. I mean, just to frame this. The White Brothers did okay. Died millionaires. The power consumption in the United States is about 500 gigawatts. So 500 gigawatts. Remember that number.

18:14John Coogan:That's how much power we got in America. It's a 1 % increase in the power used. And I think actually will materialize to be approximately 1 % increase in GDP. because the intelligence for what keeps increasing. So if you just plot on a curve, how is the useful intelligence for what increasing? How is the, both at the hardware level, at Jensen's GPUs keep getting better in terms of the compute for what, and the algorithms also get better in getting more intelligence for what. So that's maybe an interesting note. I would bet anyone that 1 % increase in power usage corresponds to roughly 1 % increase in GDP.

19:00And so 10 gigawatts would be a 2 % increase in GDP. So to reference that famous chart,

19:06John Coogan:there are no energy-rich, poor countries. The more energy a country is producing, the higher their GDP. The economy would generate about, call it$40,$50 billion of economic output each year. Yeah, I mean, 1 % would be, yeah, I mean, yeah. 1 % of the United States would be 300 billion. Yeah, 300 billion. And so 50 one-sixth. 1 % of the increase. So 5 gigawatts would be, yeah. Well, 5 gigawatts would be. So they're doing the mental math on stage. Pretty bold move because there's a lot of numbers and it can be hard to pull them up. It's very convenient that giga literally means a billion. So a gigawatt is a billion watts.

19:49John Coogan:A giga dollar, a billion dollars basically. and it maths out perfectly. What? Giga-chad, a billion chads, I suppose. A billion times the chadness of an average chad, I suppose. So the average electrical load in the United States, he said 500 gigawatts. It's basically that. Last year, it was 479 gigawatts. But let's use 500 gigawatts for 2025. give Elon the benefit of that little boost. And US GDP for 2025 was just over$30 trillion. So that's$30 ,000 giga dollars. But you math that out and basically every dollar, every watt of energy generates between 60 to 65 dollars of GDP. A single gigawatt generates about 60 to 65 billion dollars of GDP per continuously consumed gigawatts.

20:52John Coogan:So what's interesting is that the labs are tracking, the frontier labs, OpenAI and Anthropic are tracking almost perfectly in line with that. So Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly sitting between 60 and 70 billion dollars in terms of ARR, and both of them have around one gigawatt live. Some of that's used for training. They have a lot more contracted. It's hard to get the exact figure, but when you do the math, they're basically tracking to the exact same metric, the ratio of energy to GDP, as their revenues to the gigawatts that they've contracted. So there's two important notes on that. First, this is obviously just a moment in time snapshot.

21:33John Coogan:There's two ways these could diverge. First is the labs have tens of gigawatts contracted over the next few years. If they don't increase revenue, that ratio is going to be terrible because you add 10 times the energy and you keep the revenue flat. Obviously, the ratio goes way down. On the other side of it, Elon makes the point that useful intelligence per watt is increasing through more efficient chips from Jensen and also better algorithms effectively. And so those watts can produce more intelligence, which can produce more economic output. So you might actually see acceleration there. Yeah.

22:09And it's not just raw IQ of the model, but overall capability, tool use, all these things, long running agents, things, basically the more value that a model can create, the more people will, in the real economy will pay.