The A.I. Revolt Is Here

24:06There is not even a fight that's really going on. Nobody wants it was a phrase I heard over and over. You have a very influential definition of AI populism where you call it a worldview in which AI is viewed not only as a normal technology, but as an elite political project to be resisted. Unpack that for me. The phrase that you hear a lot from AI critics is, why is this being shoved down our throats? or with, you know, ChatGPT, it's not that people are saying there is literally no use for ChatGPT. It's people are saying, why are you forcing me at my job to use AI to do something worse when I could do it better?

24:45And so I think that a lot of the public backlash to AI that has risen over the past six months is not explained by people thinking that the technology has no use at all. it's not explained by them being worried about specific technical properties of llms that might lead to rogue ai or misalignment or whatever which are the sort of safetyist arguments it's ai as sort of an avatar for a small group of silicon valley billionaires ability to impose their vision of the world onto everybody else without their consent and i think that's also what i hear echoed in these data center debates it's not just uh it's going to use this much water that much water.

25:26I frankly think that even if there was no misinformation about water use, people would be just as angry about the data centers. Yeah, I consider the water, I don't want to say the water issue is fake. What I will say is like there was a debate online a while back about how much water, like a Chachibidi query consumed. And somebody was like, if you really care about water, are you eating beef? Yes. As someone who doesn't eat meat, I thought this was a quite good, like, you could really save a lot of water by going vegetarian. Yes. And relatively much, much more than not using chat GPT. And relatively few people in that conversation were giving up meat.

26:03Or giving up YouTube videos. Or giving up YouTube videos. Like, use more water than a chat GPT query. Which is to say that I think sometimes people don't like a thing. Yes. And they're looking for reasons to justify that dislike. Yeah. But what's actually happening at the base is they don't like the thing. Right. And the data centers, as you're saying, I think speak to this AI populism question even more precisely. Because the issue with AI itself is that I think people's relationship to it is very complicated. I have myself a very complicated relationship to AI. I use it a fair amount. I'm not sure I think it's a good thing for society, the way it is going.

26:42I don't want my kids using it. I know they'll be using it. Maybe it'll make things better, but I really don't know. like, I think that the costs are going to be very, very high for us relationally and economically. And, you know, and so I just I'm very conflicted. But do I want to live next to a data center? Yeah, no. Yeah, it's totally different. Like that's easier. I mean, one of the most somebody is just making you do that. Yes. Of like going to this back to back. I went to this Abdul-Bernie AOC rally in Lansing, Michigan, and then I went and saw the Saline activists the next day and I was researching how the Saline Stargate project happened.

27:16And it was really interesting to see these echoes of the populist message sort of manifest in this specific project. Like when I'm at this rally, people are talking about the oligarchy. They're talking about corporate billionaires, whether it's big tech or big pharma or DT, the utility companies, paying off politicians in order to, you know, screw the people over. And that's why you need the people to come together and to get money out of politics, to prevent DT from donating to these super PACs and paying off Gretchen Whitmer or whatever. And then when I learned how the Saline data center saga played out, what happened was the Saline township city council, unlike a lot of city councils, actually voted for one against rezoning their land for the data center.

27:59So this was a case where local government said, this is not a vision for our community. It's not worth it to us. And what happened, the data center developers sued Saline township, a town of like, again, a few thousand people into saying, wait, no, this is exclusionary zoning. You can't have no industrial use in your entire township. And when a town of that size is getting sued by a giant AI data center developer, they just settled. They were just like, fine, give us a few million for the fire department and for some schools. And this fight is not worth it to us. But that to people felt like a profound violation of little d democracy.

28:34It felt like the dark money and politics story, which is, You know, you have some very rich companies show up with a bag of money to your politician. They don't tell anybody else what's happening. The politicians aren't allowed to tell their citizens and involve them in the decision making process. And they themselves work out a deal, a deal that is fundamentally asymmetric because of the amount of money on one side that will then transform the image of your community, your lived reality into the world that these tech companies have decided for you. And so I think that the data centers in that sense are a very visceral microcosm of the way that a lot of people feel that AI is showing up in their lives.

29:09I would also maybe even take that a little bit further. I think that the way that not all of the ag companies, and I think Anthropic has largely been a good actor here, but many of them have acted, has opened up such a chasm between what they say and then how they act under pressure that one should be incredibly, incredibly skeptical of them. And what I mean by this is that, you know, Sam Altman and all these different people, you know, in front of congressional testimony and in interviews will say, you know, it should not just be us making these decisions. There should be a real deep, small d democratic role here in how AI rolls out, in, you know, what effects it has on communities and how it is governed.

29:58And then when a community or a politician who is representing a community tries to say, well, we don't want this data center here or we want to impose these regulations, we have watched repeatedly these companies turn tremendous amounts of financial artillery against whoever is standing in their way. Right. And to use this, the expertise and the money and the power they are amassing to kind of short circuit that democratic voice. Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. One is like, I think one big gap I noticed between Silicon Valley and the folks in these communities I was talking to is Silicon Valley does tend to think that money solves all problems, that if you just make the check bigger, everything's going to be OK.

30:43And I think people have a sense for I'm being bribed. This corporation is not offering me a free lunch or whatever. There is going to be something that I'm losing here. And in fact, sometimes the fact that the data center deals were bigger or the amount of political spending was bigger, actually, it just makes people more suspicious. Like in the Abdul race, like his number one hit on Haley Stevens is how much money she is getting from APAC, from DTE, from pharma or whatever. And so one is just that I think we're in a political environment where making the numbers bigger and the amounts of money bigger makes people more suspicious, not less.

31:14Another one I'll just quickly mention is I don't even think Anthropics should be left off the hook for things like labor market impacts, right? They are the ones simultaneously warning that we might see a, you know, 50 percent of white collar jobs lost by 2030. this is really important to us we're freaking out about it uh dario has written in his essays we might see an underclass of people of lower intellectual ability and they are building the agents they are building the coding agents the banking agents the design agents that they know are going to displace jobs or they believe at least are going to displace jobs and i think that people feel that hypocrisy as well which is if you are so worried about the inequality why are you building the agents to do it.

31:54And when I ask executives and researchers and whoever are at Anthropic this question, they don't really have a good answer because it is true that their business model is fundamentally premised on the disruption that they say they are causing.

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34:03You did a big piece for The Times on the very widespread belief in Silicon Valley that they will create this underclass. Yeah. What does the underclass mean to them? The idea of a permanent underclass caused by AI is basically a world where any job a person can do, either AI or a robot can do for them, which means that workers lose all the economic leverage they have. And capital owners, people with money, can simply pay machine labor to do all the work instead of paying workers. What that means is anyone who earned their living by working is no longer able to do that. You end up with a world of runaway inequality where the rich get richer and the working class gets poor.

34:44Maybe they get some welfare checks. But fundamentally, it's a loss of economic mobility in a society. And when I ask folks in Silicon Valley, do you think by default AI is going to increase or decrease inequality? I have not yet heard anyone say it will decrease inequality or keep it the same. They might say the floor will get really high. They might say AI will bring the cost of consumer goods down. And so people's lives are going to get cheaper and, you know, everyone will be super healthy. So it's OK. But I have not heard a single person in the tech industry tell me that they believe that AI is going to decrease inequality.

35:15And in fact, many people are very worried that instead most workers will lose their leverage and be on a kind of permanent welfare in the far off future. I'm pretty skeptical of this vision, although I don't rule it out. Right. It might happen, although I just don't think AI is going to be quite as revolutionary as a lot of these people think us. and will not diffuse into the real world as easily. But, you know, the thing you're going to need to adjust to any major technological change is time. And then also it's like the industry is like an all out war to make sure we have as little time for adjustment as possible.

35:50I mean, look at I just find it hard to like unknot that. How many enterprise salespeople are open AI and anthropic hiring in order to convince companies that they can replace their workforce or maybe not replace, but expand their workforce with agents instead of humans, right? They are having these sales conversations trying to persuade people of these questions. I don't think that a permanent underclass is the likeliest outcome economically that we're going to get. I think that AI is actually just really jagged and human jobs are super complex and super hard to automate. and most of the folks who are predicting economic apocalypse haven't actually worked enough real jobs to know how complicated and how multifaceted most jobs really are but i definitely agree on the speed point i think that like alex demas the economist has made this point very well one thing i think a lot about are people say well humans can adjust humans can reskill they can retrain they can just do the new jobs that we're going to develop instead but you look at things like software engineering, where people will often say now, senior software engineers are doing great.

36:51They love cloud code. Junior software engineers have been mostly replaced, and you see hiring and job postings are down in that sector. Well, do we think that a human software engineer is going to reskill or upskill themselves faster than the next model is going to get better at software engineering? That's the question that I really wonder about is, If AI progress outpaces humans' ability to reskill, retrain, upskill, adapt, then I'm not really sure what there is going to be left. There will be some jobs left, but it's going to be a really, really painful adjustment. I have had so many people at the top of these companies, right, the very tippy top, tell me they wish all this would slow down.

37:33Yeah. I'm sure you have had them say this to you, right? But in this world where in their unguarded moments, they will say they wish all this was going slower. Well, one way to slow AI down is to constrict the number of data centers you can build. Just like you've done, you know, as good reporting as anybody on just how conflicted people even working for these companies seem to be about what they are building. And yet they're in this competitive race to build it as quickly as possible. And so it makes them a pretty unconvincing pro-faction. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We're building the thing we're telling you to be afraid of, and we need to build it as fast as possible, even though we sort of admit that it would be better if the whole thing was slowed down.

38:21It's very confusing. It's a weird argument. Yeah. It's so confusing. I remember when I sat down with Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Senate candidate, he cited Dario's 50 % white collar job loss stat probably like five times in the 30 minute conversation. It's like he was like they're saying that there's going to be recursive self-improvement and it might kill us all. Like, yeah, I get why you would not want to make this thing go faster. This is true for data centers, but it's true for any other way that you might slow AI down, which is that everyone only wants to be slowed down if they can guarantee that the other companies, that the Chinese labs are going to slow down with them.

38:55So long as that's not true, they're going to keep racing. And I think for that reason, yeah, I mean, the thing that I hear when I talk to people at the companies and data center executives about the build out is how much money do we need to give these cities to let us build a data center? Tell us how to bribe them better. Tell us what we can do. And so when I talk to them about the build out, I'm not hearing any sort of personal moral reckoning with slowing AI down. I'm hearing how do I make the bribes bigger? How big do they need to be? So then how do you reconcile what many of these executives, many of these AI company workers are telling you about their fears of creating an underclass, about their fears of losing control?

39:34I mean, we just saw the situation where OpenAI's model was breaking out of a sandbox in order to sort of cheat on its evaluation. Right. So the AI safety people are very worried, right? The safety teams in here clearly don't have full control or even understanding of what they're building. How do you reconcile, if you reconcile, the way the AI companies talk when they are giving voice to their fears or the people at them talk when they're giving voice to their fears? And they're pretty profound hostility to anything that would slow down how fast we are building this thing whose consequences they freely admit they cannot predict.

40:17yeah it's fascinating because just on a very personal level when i talk to people at these companies i just think like man if i thought this thing might have a 10 chance of killing us all or taking taking everybody's job i wouldn't work on it yeah i would not build that i personally could not morally justify taking that chance and and when i talk to people who are not in the san francisco ai world they feel like i do they're just like why would you do it and i think there are basically three rough buckets of rationales that I hear from people or that I hear between the lines from people. One is this sort of sense of techno determinism.

40:54It's super intelligence is going to be built inevitably. There is no way it's not going to happen. If it happens, I want to be part of it. I want to make my money from it. I want to maybe make it happen in the least bad way. I think that's a super common answer another is um this technology might kill us all but it also might be really amazing it might produce super abundance for everybody we might be immortal um it might double everyone's lifespans cure all diseases bring the cost of every consumer good housing energy whatever to near zero and that would be utopia and so i think all the time to that anecdote that I think SBF said on a podcast where it's Sam Bankman-Fried.

41:38Yes, Sam Bankman-Fried said on a podcast where it was like, if you could flip a coin and it was 51 % odds, you would double the total amount of like human welfare and 49 % chance everyone dies. Would he flip the coin? He says yes. And again, I feel compelled to say like have you have like, you know, how'd you really know that's what's happening? Blah, blah, blah, whatever. Put that aside. Take the hypothetical, the pure hypothetical. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a hyperbolic example but i think it's not actually that far off from what a lot of the people building super intelligence believe too that they are basically willing to flip the coin maybe we all die but maybe we're all immortal and that expected value wise cancels things out and then the final category is just i think folks who are so fascinated by the technical endeavor of whether we can build this thing and how to do it that they just aren't super worried about the consequences or what else might happen.

42:31So people have all sorts of self-justifying narratives as to why it's worth it. Some, I think, are better than others. But it makes sense to me why the public is not particularly sympathetic to any of these. I mean, that middle narrative. I heard Sam Bankman-Fried say that. I think it was on Tyler Cowen's podcast. It was like, oh, that's a psychopath. To actually believe that, you would have to be a psychopath. You would have to have a very, very, very low value on, I think, human life. Yes. Right. Imagine being the person who flips that coin and it comes up wrong. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Like I'm a parent.

43:07Like the idea that you would do something that's like 51-49 on like your kid is doubly happy or your kid is gone. Like, yeah, you would never. You don't even want to say that out loud. Of course. I think that's how almost everybody thinks about it. And again, I think 51-49 is obviously the most egregious example you could think of. And so SBF is very unsympathetic. But when I think about the super intelligence bet, a lot of people will characterize it as a 90-10 bet, as an 80-20 bet. And this question of how much is an acceptable amount of either extinction risk or total disempowerment risk, you know, I think people have very different risk appetites.

43:45and Silicon Valley is a place that has always prized their high risk appetite. I think that makes a lot more sense when you're talking about maybe yourself or your company full of people who have opted in to taking a very high risk endeavor. I think that's extremely different, obviously, when you're talking about the rest of the world. And one thing with the data center debates that I'd always hear is like, you know, I get that these people are making this crazy bet on this technology they think is going to change the world, but why do they have to do in our backyard? Why is Mark Zuckerberg not building a data center in his backyard?

44:13And so this question of, yeah, you guys are going to create like these very tangible impacts and to their view harms on specific communities that are not the communities benefiting from this technology. At least they don't see the benefits yet. They don't see the cancer cures. They don't see themselves getting these million dollar, 10 million dollar salaries that the researchers are getting. It feels like, I think it feels to a lot of these folks like they are pawns in some tech billionaires' game and they do not like to feel that way. Why aren't they building it in their own backyard? That's why don't you see a bunch of data centers in, you know, Northern California.

44:48I don't think I need to tell you why it's so hard to build in Northern California. But I both think that's true, that it's hard to build in Northern California. But I also think there's like a truth to the other thing being said. They don't want them there. No. I mean, the land is expensive. It would be very hard, like inexpensive to build a data center and like the places where we're talking about. But it also gets at a core truth, which is people don't actually want data centers around them. It is a cost. Yeah. It is a concentrated cost for a diffuse benefit. Like if you believe in the benefit.

45:19Yeah. So I think that's part of it. I want to go back to the first bucket you were talking about, which is like the race dynamics. Yes. So at the most generous, the thing that I've heard repeatedly is sort of what you're describing, which is it would be better if this were going slower. But I can't control that because I, whether I'm at, you know, Anthropic or OpenAI or Google or Meta, you know, if we slow down, it just is our less ethical competitors over there who speed up. And even if you put down legislation slowing down all of America, then it's China. Right. You know, the CCP, which is going to win the race.

46:03I guess one question is, do you buy this central metaphor of a race that has a ticker tape line, where at some point somebody passes it and then they have the recursive superintelligence and the race is over? Or do you see this more as, like most technologies, a linear set of gains? I mean, it can be fast, it can be slow, but it doesn't have that somebody-is-going-to-win dynamic. Yeah, I find this really confusing. One of the first things that I did when I started reporting more deeply on AI was try to figure out what AGI meant, because a lot of the way that this race has been characterized is who will build AGI first?

46:47Artificial general intelligence. General intelligence first. First thing I found, no one agrees on what that means. AGI means everything from AI that can build itself to AI that can do all human jobs to AI that produces whatever number of economic value. And so everyone has these different milestones for what constitutes AGI to them. What that also means is that the race has different finish lines and moving finish lines. And I think that you see the way that these models perform differently on benchmarks. They are extremely jagged. They can be super good at math and they can be super bad at poker at the same time.

47:24They can be amazing at cracking cybersecurity problems, but not able to build anything in the physical world. And because of that, I don't think that technology is as general as people suggest it is. I also think that means that it is much harder to define a finish line to the race. And my sense is that the race, because you cannot adjudicate it, everyone will always feel that they are falling behind on some dimension. I mean, to then make the case that these AI companies are making is they do believe in this recursive self-improvement. They think that, you know, OpenAI, Google, DeepMinded, and Anthropoc are all extremely focused specifically on the question of, can we build AI that builds itself?

48:04Can we build an AI that can train the next generation model completely from scratch on its own? and in that sense you get an exponential pace of improvement for whoever can hit that recursive self-improvement curve first and they think that this might lead to that company pulling ahead right now folks think that it's anthropic which has the best coding models meaning they can code faster meaning that their next models are even better i can see where that argument is but i'm not sure when we look at, you know, the latest anthropic models versus the latest open AI models versus the latest, you know, Chinese open weights models that we see a company pulling ahead that decisively in that way, especially when every single company in lab is using the same recursive self-improvement strategy.

48:56And so basically, I don't know that the race has a finish line. And that's what worries me about it continuing. The reason I want to focus in on this race metaphor for a minute is I've come to think it is really one of the central dividing lines in how you think about different kinds of AI policy. Whether you think that we are in a race with China to get to the point where one side or the other is going to pull like endlessly and decisively ahead because they hit that, you know, recursive self-improving level. Well, then that means what you do in the next one to three years is incredibly, incredibly definitionally important.

49:38But if you don't believe that, if you believe something more like, yes, this is a powerful technology, it's a powerful technology that might have a lot of downsides, might come with a lot of social instability, its effect on a society may not be good. Then let's run faster to the bad place is not nearly as compelling an argument. And all of a sudden, the idea that we should have policy in place that slows things down for more voice, for more consideration, it's not crazy. And I guess one place this goes is that I have begun to notice a really interesting convergence between the SFAI safety people, in a way, and the AI populace like a Bernie Sanders or in a different way, and Abdul Al-Sayed, who are getting to not that different places.

50:28But through very, very different mechanisms, right? They're like the AI safety people who actually believe we are in a race, but they believe that winning that race might bring the end of humanity. Right. And so like they don't they don't want to move that fast. Right. If we began to slow down, we would have more credibility for negotiating with China and like trying to come up with like international treaties and all the rest of it. You know, and then you have like the kind of more AI populist side who just like doesn't want to give all these tech billionaires all this power, who doesn't believe this technology will be good for people.

50:57And they're starting to come up with like maybe not the policies AI safety people would, but, you know, data center moratoriums and things like that. And so you have this sort of slightly strange, like you would not have considered this coalition. It's super interesting. I mean, you literally have Ron DeSantis doing AI roundtables with Max Tegmark, who's been one of the leading advocates of pausing and slowing down AI, an MIT professor. And you have Bernie Sanders doing viral videos with Eliezer Yudkowsky, the guy who's telling us that AI is probably going to kill us all if we build it. I was talking - Which is both in line as a dozen and does kind of make sense.

51:36You know what I mean? Yeah, totally. I've been spending some time in DC this year to talk to some of these AI populists, some from the social conservative right, others from, say, the labor left. And this Bannon guy I was talking to told me he's like, you know, like, I wouldn't send my kids over to a play day at the Polycule, but I can do coalitions. And so I think it's been one of the most interesting political stories going on right now is the sort of strange bedfellows that have emerged. I mean, even with the data center stuff, I was talking to an activist and they were saying these were liberal women who had gotten into politics after the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

52:07They said that data centers were the first thing that got them to talk productively with their Trump voting neighbors about politics, the first thing in like 10 years almost, which is fascinating to me. And in this sense, they felt a really strong sense almost of political agency that almost came out of this fight. So yeah, I think one of the big questions that folks in AI safety, for example, are thinking about is, do we want to build these alliances with the rising left and right populist waves in American culture in order to slow AI down. Maybe it's okay that we have different reasons and different theories for why AI is so dangerous.

52:41For one person is big model bad. For another person, it's big billionaires bad, big tech bad. And those folks are sort of linking arms in a lot of ways against the AI accelerationists and sort of the folks pushing the race faster. So I think listening to this, we've been sort of living in the data center moratorium side of the politics. But what's the other side of it? What are the problems with just saying, OK, fine, like let's not build any more data centers? One, like this is not actually the way that you would successfully slow down AI if that's what you really wanted. um one if you if one locality or one state imposes a moratorium ai companies are very very happy to go to other states or other countries they're already flooding into texas for example because it's had such a pro data center environment people are looking at louisiana the dakotas australia um space of course is a current big interest of elon musk's because people think that maybe not now but in five years we can just put all the data centers in space and solve the political problems that way.

53:47So one is, I'm not really sure that this would stop AI progress that much. It would just shift the data centers to other places that do welcome them. The second thing is, I actually do think that there are ways for these deals to be good. Not every community should want a data center. I think that many of them may discuss it and say, this isn't what we want. We don't need the tax revenue that bad. But in a lot of the cases with these sites that I've visited, like, you know, in the old GM site in Janesville, the Viridian Partners, the data center developer, was going to clean that brownfield up.

54:24They were the only ones willing to do so. I talked to a real estate broker who had tried to sell that site for five years, and he couldn't do it because not a single other commercial buyer wanted to clean up all of this hazardous waste. Only the data centers were willing to do that. Or with Mount Pleasanton, the Foxconn site, right? They had already cleared all this land. They had built all this infrastructure. Putting a data center there was a net improvement for the community, in my opinion, personally, from an economic perspective, from the perspective of there's nothing going on there anyway.

54:53So I think that there are ways to do these deals right. There is enough money in this industry that a lot of communities will decide it is economically beneficial for them to bring in these jobs and bring in this investment. But I think that the way that the data center deals have been done nearly guarantee the amount of public backlash that there's been. And the thing that will probably fix it, I suspect, is probably either like a state level streamlining where someone does the research probably at the state level, maybe at the federal level to figure out what is the fair way to do these deals?

55:22How do we ensure the communities get the most transparency, the most benefit out of data center deals when they happen? So it's not case by case and it's not so asymmetric with the town of 12 ,000 negotiating with an open AI or whatever. I would add two other things to that that'd be curious to hear your take on. So one, you mentioned data centers moving towards other localities And those localities are not randomly selected. They're localities that are going to impose fewer conditions. So maybe that is fewer environmental conditions. But, you know, in the case of maybe a UAE or some of the Gulf states that are interested here, you know, you're looking at more authoritarian countries.

55:55Right. So I've heard a lot of people worry about that or, you know, Elon Musk in space. So in a sense, if you make it so the data centers cannot go into places where there is more democratic control, you might end up with less overall democratic control. The other thing, and I do think this is significant, is that there is right now more demand for compute than there is compute. You know, people talk a lot about a bubble, but we do not look to have excess AI supply at the moment. And if demand keeps rising because, you know, the coding agents get better and all the rest of the things we know that are happening, but you are constricting the supply of compute, then you end up with more inequality and who can afford it.

56:41So, you know, a Goldman Sachs, a JP Morgan, right? You know, a company with a lot of money to buy compute is going to have a lot of it. And then, you know, ordinary users, small businesses, et cetera. If you believe AI is important and powerful, and I believe it is important and powerful, then you have a problem where you have created much more stratification and who can afford it. How do you think about those dimensions of it? I think with where you build the data centers, a lot of folks are starting to look at building AI infrastructure as a form of geopolitical leverage, right? And so some countries, like places like Australia, Canada, countries in Europe are thinking, actually, maybe the way for us to get a slice of frontier AI, for us to negotiate with the countries where the best AI is being developed, like the U.S., in cases like cybersecurity access, is to say, you know, we'll build your data centers here.

57:34We'll actually welcome you in. And in return, maybe you guarantee us access to the frontier models. So I think that one is that we should look at AI infrastructure as a point of leverage that both states and countries have. And as you mentioned, if local moratoriums in the U.S., if domestic moratoriums or something like that lead to giving that leverage and negotiating power to authoritarian states, that's probably something the U.S. should be really worried about. On the other hand, there are folks like Anton Light at Carnegie has done work on this, where it's can we give our allies, can we give our democratic allies negotiating leverage through them building out compute.

58:16The second thing that you mentioned about pricing is interesting because I do think one of the big macro trends in AI right now is the closing of the frontier. It's the fact that the very best models, like Mythos from Anthropic, are not being open to everybody. That is both a safety decision, as in we don't want to give really powerful cyber weapons and bioweapons to a bunch of bad actors or just unknown actors. It is also a pricing question of the best models are really, really expensive to run. They don't have enough compute to run them. And so we're going to have to charge a lot of money or only give it to the biggest corporations.

58:52And I think that's a reason that startups are worried, that countries outside of the U.S. are worried, that normal people are worried. Maybe we get superintelligence and it can achieve all these amazing things, but I'm not going to get it. Maybe my boss is going to get the superintelligence and they're going to automate my job as a worker, as a consumer. I'm not going to be able to do the same thing. So I think it's also a really good point that if we don't continue the compute build out, we do see a world where it is the folks with existing capital and access, probably big corporations in the U.S.

59:26and the U.S. government that are going to have access to Frontier AI and all the benefits that it confers.

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1:01:36You were in China for a trip reporting on AI. Was there much political AI backlash and ferment there from what you could see? I was super interested in this question on this trip because I was finishing my Times piece on the permanent underclass while in China. And so I was basically asking everyone I met there, whether it was engineers at the labs or just my family members or sort of normal middle class people in Shanghai. Are people worried about AI and jobs? Are people worried about AI and social instability? I think the answer is not as much. I caveat this, of course, with the fact that the information environment in China is obviously suppressed.

1:02:11You can't dissent in public on social media nearly as much as you can in the U.S. You don't have good polling. So it's kind of hard to understand the actual level of social discontent there is in China. But I would say that for the most part, people were not as terrified of AI as they are in the U.S. There's a few explanations for this. Some people say that China is more techno-optimistic than the U.S. is. I don't love this explanation, mostly because the thing that I heard was not exactly optimism. It was not exactly, yeah, we're going to get the cancer cures and the super abundance. It was something a lot closer to technology as a force that cannot be stopped.

1:02:45Actually, in some ways, reminded me more of some of these Silicon Valley beliefs that the future is predetermined, that when the state decides that something like AI is a national priority, that is going to march forward. And as an individual, there's not much you can do to resist, especially in a one party state, in an authoritarian society. there is no culture of resistance really and so rather than thinking about how do i prevent ai in my workplace or in the world that's not really a thing that a lot of people are trying to think about it's how can i use ai to make sure i don't fall behind in an environment that already has crazy levels of white collar competition and white collar unemployment if you're if you're not up skilling yourself with you know open claw or whatever there's a million people in line behind you who are going to get on the bus at the same time i think that the chinese state takes a pretty different approach to the U.S.

1:03:32when it comes to AI regulation and also to technology regulation in general. And so China has passed laws sort of banning a lot of kinds of companion chatbots because they're worried about relationships, they're worried about fertility rates, they're worried about addiction. China has passed, made court rulings that say that AI replaced this worker's job, AI can do this worker's job, is not a good enough reason to lay off a worker. You have regulations that require all AI-generated images to be labeled, and you'll see the made with AI sort of language on all of the AI-made ads in China. And so there's also a sense that some people, some Chinese have, that their government is more likely to look out for sort of the social downsides and the labor downsides relative to the U.S.

1:04:17government, which has thus far been pretty laissez-faire, especially at the national level, right? And that gives some people a bit of solace as well. There's been some reporting that China and Russia are pushing sort of anti-data center memes and social media bots. It's hard for me to tell what scale that is, but it has been very much picked up on by people like Kevin O 'Leary, the Shark Tank guy, whose big data center project has faced a lot of backlash. Do you buy the sort of growing view among like at least some tech elite that the data center backlash is like a Chinese psyop? I think this is ridiculous, to be honest.

1:04:57I mean, so I read the OpenAI report that was saying like, this is all a CCP plot. And like it pastes in the accounts and the tweets that are doing the psyop. These tweets have like no likes on them. They have two views per tweet. So I'm not doubting that like I'm sure some clever CCP propaganda person has attempted to inflame the anti-data center sentiment. I have not seen evidence that any of this is working. I think it feels very organic. I think I also tend to be personally a little suspicious when you just cast all your political opponents as being misinformed. I think there's a way in which people use foreign influence to avoid thinking about the fact that there are people that they live with in society who do not agree with their vision of the world.

1:05:39And when I talk to these data center activists, for example, they are actually much less TikTok adult and misinformed than I think people like to caricature. A lot of them understand sort of the basic facts of what's the difference between an AI data center and the old kind of data center? How much what's the difference between a closed loop system and an open loop system? Most of these people are not just misinformed. They have just personally decided I'm not that interested in having a data center in my community even if it pays some property taxes. So when you talk to people in the AI companies and sort of talk to them about this backlash, I know they're very worried about this, right?

1:06:12I've talked to them about this. What are they learning from it? I do think that this year, in 2026, AI executives, AI researchers have started to take the public backlash a lot more seriously than they have in the past. I've heard executives ask, can we do better marketing? I don't understand why it is that Waymos are so unpopular. I've heard executives ask, what do you think are the deals that we should be making? Do you think we should just be mailing checks to every house that lives near a data center project? Will that fix things? Like, tell us how to make a better deal. Do we need to cut people's electricity prices in half?

1:06:56Would that work? Unfortunately, the word bribe gets used a lot more than I am personally comfortable with. I think that when you are framing the thing you're doing, even jokingly, as bribing communities into putting a data center there. I don't think you're starting off on the right foot. I think that people can feel when they are being bribed. I've heard these people say, these companies are bribing us. So there's a little bit of examination. The thing that I don't think is being examined as much as I want it to be though, is are we building a technology? Are we building a product that is helping people?

1:07:28Yeah, the version of this I've heard is we have a marketing problem. Maybe we should stop saying aloud so often that our technology might take everybody's job and has a 10 % chance of upending or destroying humanity altogether.

1:07:47What has not been clear to me, even as they begin to maybe move away from that messaging a little bit, is whether or not they no longer believe that. Again, my personal view is like, I don't think it's going to take everybody's job. But to the extent they do, or at least they take that very, very seriously, it's like I keep hearing them say that we have a marketing problem. And I keep saying when I talk to them about this, that if you believe the things you have been saying and, in fact, the things you have told me personally, you don't have a marketing problem. You have a problematic technology.

1:08:21Yes. Like you have a product problem. Yes. Because people are not going to want that future. Yeah. I mean, I think I would make some distinctions between, of course, different companies, different executives. Right. Like one thing that's like very interesting to me thinking about the comms in Silicon Valley is that for a very long time, these companies were only marketing to potential recruits and potential investors. Basically, they were trying to win the vibes on AI Twitter in San Francisco. And I kind of feel like they never realized everyone else could hear them. Right. And so now they're trying to take it back.

1:08:51But like my sense is that Sam Altman for a long time, part of the reason he was talking about like shifting the balance of power from labor to capital and like rogue AI and whatever was also because he was winning points among people who he wanted to work at OpenAI. And he had to communicate that he was as AGI-pilled as them. He was as worried about the same safety things as them. And now that his interest is more in political goodwill and IPO-ing and things like that, he sort of changed his tune. I think that, yeah, I'm not sure to what extent every AI industry actor has always believed the things that they've warned about.

1:09:26I think people can believe things that they don't feel, if that makes sense. And I think a lot of people in the industry are in a culture and inside arguments where this set of outcomes feels very real, right, or looks very real. And so I think they believe it. I think when they make these arguments, I don't think they're just doing it for, you know, publicity points. In fact, I think it's the opposite. I think when they're now trying to move away from some of these arguments, I think it's actually much more of like a cynical marketing ploy. Yeah. But I think they often believe these things without actually like in their bones feeling it, which is sort of why they act relatively heedlessly.

1:10:09Yeah. Or at least like on the set of things they believe, like this speculative notional set of beliefs about what might happen is way less close to their core. Yeah. Then their belief that if they don't build this data center or get this next model out, like their competitors or China or somebody is going to get in front of them and they're much more motivated by the push forward. Yeah. I mean, I think the technological determinism is just such a big part of it. I think that if I'm trying to think about how my friends in the industry would react to this conversation, that's the thing that they would say that we are not focusing on enough is they are so sure that there is no way that AGI or super intelligence or whatever it is does not get built.

1:10:46And it is only a question of who builds it. I think that fundamental sort of underlying belief is what justifies everything else is we have to be the ones to do it. Us pulling back, us stopping is not going to prevent any of the bad stuff. I agree with that. And I think that's why the China card in this has been such like a destructive part of the argument. I'm not even sure it's totally untrue. Like I am completely willing to believe that China and America are in a race for a economically and geopolitically important technology, even if you don't buy like recursive superintelligence. but the way that has then been used to not say well we should enter into international negotiations or something but instead just like we cannot slow down whatsoever no matter what else we worry about or or believe i think has been it is it is acted as a kind of a blackmail and the thing is that it's not bought by enough people no outside of the industry but i think the phase of the politics we're now in is out of their control.

1:11:46And it is just not going to be the case that they have control over the AI narrative next year that they had two years ago. And yeah, I don't really think they know what to do in that space. And so now it's either going to have to start benefiting people, right? Some of these, if people began seeing drug cures come out, All these things we've actually been promised. You could say we're beginning to see the beginning of mathematical conjectures. That's been pretty cool. But we're not really seeing the gains. And if you start getting the losses before the gains, you start getting the job loss, for instance, before the promised superabundance, politically, that's not going to be an equilibrium you can protect.

1:12:30That's one of the things I'm worried about is I do think that we are pretty likely to see we are seeing a lot of the social instability before we get the cancer cures. Right. And so or even with the math stuff, it's like I think that one thing I notice more and more now is this deep cultural and values gap between Silicon Valley and the rest of America, the rest of the world. I'm not saying that Silicon Valley is wrong, that it's cool to like disprove the Jacobian conjecture. Right. Like it is cool. But like when you ask a lot of people in the tech industry what their utopia looks like, they'll say things like we have UBI, so no one has to work anymore.

1:13:06We're all immortal and we've discovered all of math and physics. And if you do the polling on UBI and mortality, neither are especially popular with the American public. I think that we pulled the mortality is funny. I mean, it's been pulled. You can look it up. um if you ask people what like they want ai to do for them it's not necessarily having you know parents tau in your pocket it's not disproving math right like they want things to be cheaper they want to be healthier they want to not do crappy work so they have more time for the stuff they like but i think it is genuinely true that the stuff that is really cool and also that it's oftentimes technically easier to solve like math um is not what most people want from this technology.

1:13:50And I think it's also true that it's just literally technically harder to cure cancer than it is, it turns out, to prove math theorems. And the other thing that I hear from the public when I talk about the cancer cures is, yeah, but are they going to just use it for themselves? Is Peter Thiel or whoever just going to buy himself a mortality? Am I going to be able to afford a mortality? My view for a very long time has been that a lot of people in these companies overrate how much of the bottleneck in scientific and human progress is raw intelligence. Yes. Yeah. And just, I mean, this is a point of abundance, but the point of covering anything anywhere, the world is full of friction.

1:14:30Yeah. And, you know, you want to do drug discovery, and I think we should actually do a lot to make drug discovery easier, make drug testing easier, right? Like I've said this many times before, Or I would like to see us prepare drug development for a world where AI is spitting out way more promising molecular candidates. But that's still a world where you need enough monkeys to test things on. Humans to test things on. Rats to test things on. Right? And you still need to do all the safety data. And just the amount of the world that is slowed down by we don't have any good ideas. like we are out of ideas versus it is hard to organize things uh amidst humans you know amidst you know with raw materials like in bureaucracies in organizations you get that like intelligence is important um but it is not everything and i think anybody who's like been in organizations like knows it's actually less than you think it is yeah again i think of a, you know, a lot of these people have been AI researchers for their entire careers, maybe before that they were physics PhDs, or they were doing quant trading, which are all these kinds of jobs that are fairly, they're IC jobs, they're individual contributors, where you're not necessarily working in big teams, there's not a lot of politicking and relational work, where all of the relevant context lives inside a single code base.

1:15:50And so for AI to sort of understand what's going on and kind of explore all this context that's already been written down, I'm not saying there's no tacit knowledge but a lot more of the context is made explicit and these are also places where simply applying more thinking and more intelligence just as an individual like as a person a remote worker in a closet or whatever might actually find the more efficient algorithm right like you don't actually need to politic your way to a better algorithm you don't need to do stuff in the physical world to get that and so i think a lot of people at these companies don't really realize how hard that is i mean it's funny because people will say things like yeah there's like electricity costs and energy costs to ai but like ai will maybe solve the climate and i ask how and to be clear i think there are a lot of ways that ai can improve you know climate science research help yeah building efficiency absolutely but like at the same time you ask people and it's just like oh i don't know it's just gonna do it right or it's like oh how how is ai gonna improve robotics like i don't know ai will figure it out you kind of do have this, I find it lazy, actually.

1:16:54One of the things that annoys me about this particular approach is it's not that I don't think that AI can contribute to all of these problems. I think it definitely can. But what I often hear is a kind of laziness about how it's going to do that. And it feels like a deus ex machina of it's super smart. It'll just figure it out. I used to say that this was back when Silicon Valley was a more optimistic place than it has been in recent years. But the difference between the culture of DC, where I live for a long time, of Silicon Valley, was that in Silicon Valley, people's worldview is formed by seeing impossible problems prove possible to solve.

1:17:30And in DC, people's worldview is formed by seeing possible problems prove impossible to solve. And I think that is now going to collapse for the AI industry into one worldview because these are people who give them their due. They've invented artificial intelligence. Like they actually did it. You know, this is amazing. Like I cannot believe how good some of these systems are. I'm like shocked to be living through this. They were able to do that. That seemed impossible, proved possible. And now they're going to, now they're finding it's like impossible to build a data center. And like, that's what doing other kinds of things in the world teaches you.

1:18:08Yes. That there are a lot of problems that are not possible to solve, not because like you You cannot come up with the idea for them, but because you are dealing with the messy realities of societies, of politics, of values, of, you know, logistics. And it'll demand a kind of it'll impose a kind of realism, I think, on the issues that it does not always have. Yeah, I was trying to think about what the difference was between how I would describe Silicon Valley and San Francisco culture a year ago, let's say early 2025 versus now. And I think the number one thing is that Silicon Valley has really woken up to politics.

1:18:49you know in January 2025 Silicon Valley was feeling very triumphant about about Doge about Elon Musk about David Sachs and Treram and the White House they kind of felt like they were all in control and actually if you just build the these genius technologies and you get super rich and you have good ideas you'll just you know get the political power to enact your vision and a year and a half later a lot of those folks are out of the White House they failed at reducing the national debt and achieving all these other goals that they thought they could just AI their way into solving. Anthropic, for example, has had a lot of problems in its dealings with the Trump administration, fundamentally very political and very relational problems.

1:19:29Dario's problem in dealing with the White House was not, I think, that he didn't have good arguments or that he's not very smart or not saying logical things. I think that anyone from Anthropic will admit that these are largely relational problems. And so there's a way where I think democracy and politics is a lot more powerful than these very rich and very smart tech people realize. And there's some optimism to that, I think, in looking at it and saying it's actually really hard to buy an election. It's actually really hard to buy out the whole White House at once. But it's an interesting moment, I think, for the tech industry to be realizing how important politics really is and how difficult it is.

1:20:08I think that's a good place to end. Always a final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Ooh. So I think the first one is really relevant to this conversation, which is Benjamin Labatou's The Maniac, which includes a sort of lightly fictionalized biography of John von Neumann, The Story of AlphaGo. I think it's very much a sort of halfway novel, halfway nonfiction book about how intelligence is incredibly awe-inspiring and something worth respecting and at the same time can lead people to some very dark realities. My second book is The Technology Trap from Carl Benedict Frey, which I think is very much about how people's attitudes towards technology and automation depend on to what extent the benefits, the economic growth is shared, to what extent they feel like they're getting a piece of the pie.

1:21:00It goes through a lot of history, much more than just the Industrial Revolution. And so that's shaped a lot of my thinking on some of the economic questions and the populist questions. And then finally, Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering, because I do think that the relational stuff is going to become a lot more important than it always was. And I do think that book has helped me become a better host. She would be so happy to hear that. People should go check out our conversation with Priya Parker. Jasmine Sun, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. This is fun.

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