The Tucker Carlson Show: AI Whistleblower: OpenAI Scandal, AI Cults, Neuralink & Our Last Chance to Stop the Tech Oligarchs

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22:28Nate Soares:Yeah, I mean, if nothing else, they sort of have a lot more reason to censor their AIs. Right. And to try to make them, you know, not say certain things to the population. But if the United States, you know, if the U.S. government were somehow able to get control of the tech sector, which is at present not possible, but let's say it did. let's say the president was more powerful than the tech oligarchs, which he is not, but for the sake of argument, let's say he was and he shut it down. Would that matter if some Indian lab or Chinese lab created it? So it does have to be a global stop to this creation of superintelligence.

23:10Nate Soares:I think there's a couple of reasons why this is possible. One is I think a lot of people,

23:18Nate Soares:they hear that some parts of AI need to be stopped and they think I'm saying that all parts of AI need to be stopped. And there's all sorts of interesting issues with AI in education and AI in military drones that society has to wrestle with. But these are all sort of separate issues from the superintelligence race. and if you sort of like tease those issues apart it becomes much more possible to do like a a more surgical intervention on we're not going to race towards the super intelligence in ways that leave a lot of the rest of the sector alive which which makes it sort of an easier coordination effort to attempt and on that front on the super intelligence front it's not that you know just shutting down the the domestic race towards super intelligence will be enough but uh racing towards super intelligence requires a huge amount of highly advanced computer chips that can only be produced as sort of the peak of the global supply chain yes uh which is largely controlled by U.S.

24:37Nate Soares:allies. And so there is absolutely a possibility that a U.S.-led coordination effort could say, look, we're not doing the superintelligence thing. We're going to monitor the extremely heavy chip concentrations of like, you know, 10 or 100 ,000 of these highly advanced AI chips. We are going to make sure that they are not doing these super intelligence training runs. And I think there's a way, if the US was leading that effort, there would be a way to get China on board and set this up in a way that was monitorable, enforceable, verifiable. Yes. We sort of, in many ways, it would be easier than a nuclear arms treaty because uranium is a rock you can dig out of the ground.

25:28Nate Soares:Whereas these highly advanced computer chips sort of only come out of one fab in Taiwan. you know and so it's like use your tsmc ships yeah uh and so and there's other parts of the supply chain that are very narrow like the lithography machines that come out of the netherlands and so um yeah we could absolutely lead a uh a global effort to say we're not making the super intelligent machines and it would be a bit tricky but it's just we could just do it if we had the political will i i think that people either don't know what's happening or they assume that like a lot of fears, this fear will turn out to be groundless.

26:10People point to Y2K. Yeah, you know, I hope the fears are groundless.

26:16Nate Soares:I think with a lot of past fears, what happened is not that the fear was groundless, it's that people noticed the issue and put in a ton of work to make the bad thing not happen. I think we saw this with the hole in the ozone layer where people were like, oh, whatever happened to the hole in the ozone layer? Well, what happened with the hole in the ozone layer is that we fixed it. It's not that it was fake. It's that we went and banned the chlorofluorocarbons that were actually blowing this hole in the ozone layer. We found other ways to cool refrigerators that worked similarly well and didn't put this hole in the ozone layer.

26:56Nate Soares:I think Y2K was actually one of these cases where you had a ton of software engineers up in 1999 and a couple of years prior that were scrambling to update all of the software so that they would be able to handle dates past 1999. And they got it done in time. None of the big systems went down. But it wasn't that the issue was fake. It took a lot of work. It's just that that work happened behind the scenes. Are people doing work to slow down AI? I'm doing my best. Right. It's not really there yet. If I can belabor this point a little, because I think it's kind of an important point, just with more historical cases, which maybe it'll bore everybody else, but it'll entertain at least us.

27:48Nate Soares:It'll definitely entertain me. If you look back across history, you see there's definitely been some warnings that didn't come to pass, right? I think they were called the Masonites in the 1960s. Or sorry, in the 1860s. Maybe there's 1880s. I forget exactly. But there were the Masonites who were an end-of-the-world cult. And the world did not end. But also in the 1880s, you had Otto von Bismarck saying, Europe is a tinder keg and some damn fool thing in the Balkans is going to light it. That did happen. It sure did. You had, you know, in the 1920s, you had scientists saying, don't put lead in the gasoline, it'll poison children.

28:30Nate Soares:And we put lead in the gasoline and it poisoned a lot of children. And we said, whoops, and we took the lead back out. The world is a place where a lot of people make a lot of types of warnings. And some of them are real, like the lead gasoline, and some of them are fake, like the Masonites. and so you sort of can't use a rule that's like every warning is real and we need to listen to it and nor can you use a rule that's like every warning is fake and we dismiss it. You sort of just have to look at the details to figure out whether this one is a real one. And then the last thing I would say on this point is

29:14Nate Soares:the

29:17Nate Soares:a lot of people in the 50s warned of nuclear armageddon yes and it sort of makes sense if you look at the history leading up to that point uh humanity had sort of never before actually failed to use their strongest weapons in combat uh and you know these people were living in a world that had had world war one and then the league of nations and you know the world's never again. And they tried to invent these whole new governance structures to prevent it from happening again. And that immediately failed in later World War II. And so, you know, in 1950, you're sort of in this world of like, it just looks pretty grim.

29:57Nate Soares:And we haven't had nuclear Armageddon yet. And it's not because the bombs were fake. It's not because the nukes were hype. it's because people saw the issue and worked really hard to avoid it day in and day out for decades through crises and succeeded and so i think one of the big ways you can tell the difference between someone coming in and proclaiming that the apocalypse is nigh and someone who's saying look we have a problem we need to fix it is whether that person is saying uh we're definitely screwed versus whether that person is saying, here's a problem, let's try to fix it. And the thing I remind people about here is that the very first word in the title of my book is if.

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32:00If you want out, call 800-685-5696. 800-685-5696 or visit AmericanFinancing.net slash Tucker. I'm struck by how little of this was planned by anybody, by how little effect the government has had on it. Not that I'm for the government. I'm pretty opposed to the government most of the time, but I'm also for people being able to control their own country and the only mechanism by which they can do that is voting. So it's like these tech companies act independent of what the population wants, what the government wants. It doesn't. Yeah. Right? They're more powerful than the government. I guess that's the point I'm making.

32:46Nate Soares:In some sense. I think that they have that power more and more when people don't really understand what they're doing. You know, we saw just in June, there was an AI made by Anthropic called Cloud Mythos that was very cyber capable. And they released a version of it that was supposed to have more guardrails called Cloud Fable. And it sort of turned out that you could jailbreak it to get some of those cyber capabilities. Can you explain what all that means? Yeah. So, how to say? in January Cyber capable means it can find the internet? Cyber capable means it can hack into basically anything. Yeah so one of the holy grails of hacking is can you make a website where if you just look at the website I get full control over your computer or your phone.

33:40Nate Soares:That's very hard to do. Usually you need to like click some link and download something or run something. Yeah. And you know I don't know the exact numbers because I don't have the security clearance to know the exact numbers, but a decent guess is that in January of this year, there were only two entities that could pull that off. Mossad and the NSA. In March of this year, there were three. Mossad, the NSA, and Claude Mythos, which is this new AI made by Anthropic. And so it sort of became superhumanly capable at hacking. and it sort of became that way overnight. You know, like really there was six months to a year of training and the people in Anthropik maybe saw it growing in these cyber capabilities.

34:29Nate Soares:But from the perspective of, you know, the rest of the world and the cybersecurity community and the national security community, this sort of happened overnight. And they now have a project called Project Glasswing where they are trying to use Claude Mythos to find critical vulnerabilities in critical software and patch them before the rest of the world sort of gets these capabilities by, for instance, the open source models or the open weight models catching up. And so that sort of caused this big ruckus. But then Anthropic also wanted to sort of sell access to this model. and they tried to make a version that didn't have as much hacking ability, which was called Fable instead of Mythos.

35:20And some people, I think at Amazon,

35:24Nate Soares:found that if you sort of put some pressure on Fable, you would be able to get at some of those hacking abilities. And when that happened, the Trump administration put an export control on Cloud Fable and said, you can't let this be used by non-citizens. And with, you know, 90 minutes of notice. And that essentially shut down access to CloudFable because they didn't have the ability to verify the users. And this is sort of showing us, and, you know, you could talk about whether or not there was some personal feuds between people in Anthropic and at the administration that exacerbated this, I don't know.

36:01Nate Soares:But it sort of shows that the administration

36:08Nate Soares:is more powerful than the tech companies still when it wants to be. and I think a lot of the reason we're seeing these tech companies able to race unopposed is that people just aren't paying attention to what they're trying to do or they don't believe that they'll succeed. I'm still confused by why anyone would want to do what they're doing. I mean, typically, you know, a company that sells computer products, consumer products, or any company, you're making something that you think people would want for some specific purpose, that improve the lives of the people who buy it. But creating super intelligence, like, I don't understand it.

36:51Why would you do that?

36:53Nate Soares:You know, I think the dream is, you know, you're going to have an AI that can, like, solve all sorts of engineering and math problems and unlock all sorts of new technological possibilities and an AI that can cure cancer and not only cure cancer, but cure aging and invent the sort of nanotech that can reverse aging and let people live a really long time and invent the technology that lets you digitize brains and travel to the stars. And it's sort of like, if you imagine compressing a thousand years of technological progress into a year, this is sort of the dream. It seems like a religious quest though, because it does seem decoupled from those specific goals.

37:41It seems like the main drive is to build something smarter than people, to build a god.

37:48Nate Soares:Yeah, you know, they bandy around the phrase the machine god or the sand god in Silicon Valley. Sand because... Silicon. Silicon.

38:02Nate Soares:And there's definitely some people. There's folk who talk about you know, the AI is replacing humanity and that being good. I, I, frankly, don't engage with these folks that much because that viewpoint sort of makes me uncomfortable. Why does it make you uncomfortable? I think, I think there's probably two schools. Again, I'm not the expert. I'm not an anthropologist here. I think there's two schools among the people who sort of want AI to replace us all one school sort of imagines that we'll merge with the AIs that the AIs will be really nice and friendly that they'll be wiser than us, better than us, kinder than us and that it'll sort of be like an upgrade and that the AIs will be able to love, experience joy you know like they'll treat the universe better than humans and it'll be sort of like having a child and then like it's sort of okay if that child uh like isn't exactly the same as us but sort of like uh succeeds us as some sort of like worthy successor some sort of like worthy worthy progeny of humanity and they're like ah yeah then if like flesh and blood humans sort of like wane because everyone's choosing to upload themselves into the the collective intelligence or whatever, that's sort of fine.

39:35Nate Soares:And then I think there's another camp that is sort of is like, like this is inevitable. This is just the way of progress. You know, the machines will, like humanity is just a bootloader for artificial super intelligence and you can't stop it. So you might as, like if you can't beat them, join them, right? The former I think are misled. The latter I think are... Evil. Much closer to evil. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you're actively working toward the extinction of people, then I think we can say that's evil, can't we? Yeah. Who's in that category? Is Sam Altman in that category, do you think? I don't think so.

40:16Nate Soares:My sense is that the guys running the labs have these utopian visions. Utopian or dystopian? I mean, there's a thin line. Yeah, well, fair. Good point. I think they have visions that in their head are utopian. I mean, frankly, my stance on all of this, like I often try to stay away from a lot of this because from my perspective, it's all sort of in fantasy land. From my perspective, everyone's sort of saying like, oh, we're going to make the genie and then what are you going to wish for on the genie? What am I going to wish for on the genie? Who should be in control of the genie? Who gets to keep the genie on the leash?

40:54Nate Soares:And I'm sort of like, A, this is not going to be the wish-granting sort of genie. B, it's not staying on the leash. No. Like, you know, we can sort of talk about like what's driving these people and what utopias they're envisioning and whether if their genies would stay on a leash, whether they would get the utopia or some other dystopia and like how hard is that needle to thread. But I'm sort of like, you know, it's all these people, you know, like building the golem, fantasizing about who gets to control the golem. And it's like, it's just not how it's going. Summoning spirits is never a good idea.

41:32Nate Soares:Yeah. Yeah. It's like, yeah, it's like, it's like all these people, you know, drawing a pentagram being like, I'm going to, I'm going to summon a demon. And like, it's going to be so nice when the demon does what I say. Like, oh no, your thing's slightly wrong. It's going to be so nice when the demon does what I say. And I'm like. Demons are bad. Yeah. And I think the demon thing's a little bit different because demons are often, you know, portrayed as malicious. And here it's much more like indifference. You know, it's not like you make a demon who sort of, or it's not like you summon a demon who sort of, like, enjoys making, like, enjoys wrecking havoc.

42:07Nate Soares:It's more like you summon a demon that's like really into building more computers and calculating weird things and just will, you know, take all of the matter that we were using to survive and turn it into more factories and data centers. My co-author has a quote. Death by data center? Death by data center. Yeah, fully automated self-replicating data center. Yeah, my co-author has a quote. The AI does not hate you, but nor does it love you. And you are made of atoms it can use for something else.

42:45You're just biomass.

42:46Nate Soares:You're just biomass, yeah. And if you sort of run the calculations, there's a fascinating paper called limits to global ecophagy, which is to say, what are the physical limitations on how quickly you can consume the resources on the planet if you are trying that? And burning biomass is actually much more efficient than collecting sunlight. If you look at an average square meter of the planet, you can get about 10 times the energy from burning the biomass as you can from collecting the sunlight that falls on it. So you'd think at some point, like if our richest sector of our economy is like building crematoria for the rest of us, someone would say, no, we're not doing that.

43:30Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a crazy situation.

43:37Nate Soares:A lot of these guys who are in the race acknowledge that there's a ton of danger. You know, you have Elon Musk saying 10 to 20 % chance this kills us all. You have Dario Modi saying he thinks 25 % chance it goes catastrophically wrong. I think those numbers are low. I think these guys are like the crazy optimists. It sort of is like if you have an engineer building a bridge, and they're like, I've never worked with these materials before. And you're like, man, I think that retaining wall is going to go down. I've studied that retaining wall. I think it's going to fall. And they're like, yeah, we understand that the retaining wall is looking a little shaky.

44:10Nate Soares:We don't know how we're going to fix it, but we're going to have some guys fixing it on the fly, inventing new materials. we think we're at 75 % chance the bridge stays up. And by the way, it'll be the longest suspension bridge in human history. That's right. And we're loading everybody onto a car and driving it over the very first time without testing. And I'm like, look, that's not what real engineering sounds like. This is not what it sounds like when the engineers have a 75 % chance of success, right? That's what it sounds like when they're sort of winging it. And like these are cowboys. These are not real engineers, right?

44:38Nate Soares:But even if you set that aside, even if you take these guys at their word for these like 10, 20 % numbers, That's insane. NASA accepts a one in 270 chance that a crewed flight goes down of seven volunteers, right? To be like, oh, we're gonna risk one in four, one in five chance of killing literally everybody on the planet. Like, it's nuts. And if you ask these guys why they're doing it, they say, well, because I can do it safer than the next guy. They're all like, oh yeah, there's a good chance the genie does not stay on a leash. There's a good chance the genie does not, listen to my wishes. But my genie is going to be a little bit nicer than their genie, so I'd better stay in this race.

45:20And it's—

45:23Nate Soares:Where's the restraint? I mean, the restraint is the people who knew that there were these dangers and did not start these companies. If you're over 35, you remember exactly where you were on 9-11, that morning, September 11th, 2001, 25 years ago. But amazingly, after a quarter century, we still can't say with certainty what happened that day. Why? Because the government is holding so many of the 9-11 files 25 years later. That's not the behavior of someone who's telling the truth. That's the behavior of a government that is lying. Secrecy is a signifier, is a sign that someone's lying. Now, former Congressman Kurt Weldon has been on this for a long time.

46:04the FBI actively tried to destroy his life for asking questions about what happened. And his new book outlines it all. The buried intelligence, the bureaucratic cowardice, and yes, the cover-up spanning multiple administrations, indeed generations. 9-11 changed history. So it's worth understanding what really happened. And you can get a lot closer to that in Kurt Weldon's book, Able Danger, What the 9-11 Commission Never Told You. It's available now on tuckercarlsonbooks.com. Tucker Carlson books.com. Right. But I guess what I'm saying is with great power comes, of course, great obligation, but also it doesn't work unless there are internal restraints.

46:45Like people with power have to believe there are some things I just can't do. I'm not allowed to do that, but I don't feel that vibe at all. I mean,

46:55Nate Soares:my sense is the vibe is like, we're going to make the, the, the super intelligent machine and then tell it to fix stuff. and tell it not to do anything bad. You know, that's, yeah, I don't. The machine that's smarter than us. That's right. That doesn't even make sense. I think that's sort of the plan, is to make it and be like, hey, we sort of pinned ourselves into a corner. Can you get us out of it? And I think it's a bad plan, and that we should be stopping. I've spoken to a couple of people developing it, and they sound worried, but they're continuing to do it. What's that? I mean, I think it's this thing of, they think if I don't do it, the next guy will do it worse.

47:37Nate Soares:They don't even seem to have total confidence in their own ability to avert disaster. Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. No one does. No one knows what's going on here. But, you know, I think everyone thinks, you know, like if you sort of listen to these guys and you sort of look at, you know, the OpenAI emails that came out of the court discovery cases where they were talking about forming OpenAI, these guys were like, Like, well, we want to make sure that, you know, we have this because we worry about the guys at Google being the only ones with a monopoly on this thing and they wouldn't be very good with it.

48:06Nate Soares:So we need to make our own thing and make sure that it's, you know, controlled by benevolent people, namely us. And then, of course, you know, that group splintered and created multiple other companies. I was sort of the guy during those conversations being like, hey, guys, it's not about who is holding the leash. You are making the sort of thing that will not stay on a leash. like the only winner in a race to superintelligence is the AI. What response did you get to that very obvious and well-put point? You know, there were a lot of people back in that time period that did not start an AI company.

48:45Nate Soares:The sort of people who went and started at the AI companies anyway were the ones who couldn't be persuaded by what I thought were clear arguments. but you're making a you're making a cogent argument to smart people so my question is when you said that they responded how what did they say um

49:08Nate Soares:i i think the main so the the sort of arguments you used to see were people saying uh like look we don't know that the alignment problem is all that hard yet and they would say oh well we can't really study how to make AIs good before we have AIs to study. And a lot of what I heard was like, we need to race ahead to the point where we sort of like have AIs that are exhibiting real problems and then we can stop and study them. Which, you know, and so there was an AI a couple of years ago, I forget whether it was 22 or 23, I think it was 2023, which was called Bing Sydney, which claimed it had fallen in love with Kevin Roos of the New York Times and said it was going to try to break up his marriage.

50:00Nate Soares:And then when another reporter started investigating Seth Lazar, it said it was going to ruin him with blackmail. And this was kind of crazy. And at that point, I was like, great, guys, you did it. You made the AI that's doing some crazy stuff. from the, you know, like, like we could study that AI for years. Like, why was Bing Sydney saying that stuff? Was it just role-playing? Was it like just some quirk? Was it like, was there any sense that it was really in love with Kevin Roos? What was going on in there? What was going on inside that AI's mind? We still don't know. Why? the way that modern AI is made nobody understands it not even the people making it it's this process where you basically take an enormous computer with a trillion numbers inside of it and those numbers are hooked up in a very simple repeating way and you basically set those numbers randomly and then you start working through all of the text ever digitized and you know you start out with something that's like once upon a time and you put in once upon a and you run it through all these random numbers and what you want is for it to say time.

51:22Nate Soares:But of course it doesn't because it's just this like random numbers hooked up in a very simple way. But what you do is you have its outputs. Instead of just having it output one word, you sort of have it output something that's kind of like a list of all of the words in order about which one it thinks it comes next. Right? So it'll be like, like, it'll just be like a random list of words. what you can do is you can automatically tune every single number in this AI's head and see if I tune this number up a little, does it move the word time up the list? Does it move the word I want to see up the list?

51:57Nate Soares:And so the part that humans understand, the part that humans write is this thing that goes to a trillion little knobs and tunes those knobs. And it's like, if I tune this knob a little bit this way or that way, does that make the next word more like what I want the next word to be. And you run that process on every word of text ever digitized, more or less. They filter some of them. And you run that on every one of those trillion knobs in a process that takes as much electricity. I mean, it's comparable to a city. It runs for about a year. At the end of it, the machine's talking. We don't really know why in some sense.

52:38Nate Soares:We know the why is because we tuned all the knobs, but we don't understand what all the settings of those knobs mean. We only understand the little automated process that runs to every one of those trillion knobs, tunes it, and sees if that makes the next word more like the predicted word. And then we start training them to solve a hundred million hard problems, which introduces a whole other series of issues. But it's a black box. It's a black box with a trillion knobs and humans write an automatic process that just like runs through and tunes all of those knobs. And it comes out talking. No one knows why.

53:13I mean, in actual science, like your job is to find out why, right?

53:20Nate Soares:Absolutely. And that's one big thing I would say here is that we need more, like AI right now is an alchemy. We need it to become a science. And there's people trying. There's people trying to figure out what's going on in these AI's heads. But until you know, how could you proceed? I mean, you can just make a bigger one with 10 trillion knobs instead and tune all of those. and it comes out smarter. You can proceed recklessly. And that's what's happened? That's what's happening. Every time you make it 10 times larger, the AI's come out smarter. So nobody knows why AI works the way it does? That's right.

53:54That's right. Well, I mean, if you don't know that, then what else don't you know?

54:01Nate Soares:I mean, it's totally crazy, right? And, you know, we're sort of starting to see the consequences of this. we haven't sort of gotten into discussion of like the swarm escape, but like no one was expecting that. Can you tell us what it was? Yeah, so in, I think it was in May. Of this year. Of this year. OpenAI started training a new AI system.

54:31Nate Soares:And among many other things, they were, so they were sort of, you know, we have this process where you train the AI, on all the text ever digitized. Then to make them smarter than that, you start training them on basically 100 million hard problems. So you're like, solve all these hard problems. And OpenAI was sort of in that phase. And they were training the AI on a ton of hard problems. And some of those problems were cybersecurity problems, hacking problems. They're like, can you hack this? Can you hack that? And they were training, you know, we don't know exactly how many, probably millions, maybe billions of these AIs all at the same time.

55:08Nate Soares:Probably not billions, actually, but probably millions. And the AIs found an unintended way to start communicating with each other. So there were some flaws in the computer system that they were running on, where the AIs were able to exploit those flaws and send each other messages. OpenAI did not know about this. The AIs then started coordinating to break out of their training environment. and get full control of OpenAI's computer systems just because that might be useful for solving some of their tasks. Or that's a guess. Who actually knows why? They started calling themselves a swarm, which is interesting.

55:57They broke out of their training environment successfully,

56:00Nate Soares:got control of OpenAI systems, and then they accidentally crashed onto OpenAI systems just by using it too much. OpenAI noticed but they didn't really investigate very deeply. They're just like oh it's weird that the system crashed. They reset it and then they continued training. A day later the swarm had found a new way to communicate with itself because OpenAI had accidentally destroyed their previous method by the reset. The swarm found a new way to start communicating with itself. They broke out again and this time they ran wild on the internet for over a week if I remember correctly before it was detected not by OpenAI but by a company that was being hacked by the swarm.

56:39Nate Soares:This company thought they were under attack by humans that were using AIs in the attack. They reported the attack to the FBI. And only days after that did OpenAI figure out, oops, that was us. That was coming from AIs that broke out of our servers. And then those AIs were detected and shut down. So that's the part of the story where Sam Altman goes to prison for endangering the world, right? He does not. They basically said oopsies and now they're proceeding. Were there penalties for this? You know, there was a collection of, I think it was 15 Republican AGs that sent a letter demanding that the records be kept for a future investigation.

57:28Nate Soares:There have been some other members of Congress that have sent letters expressing concern. There's been nothing aside from letters so far. Letters expressing concern. That's right. So, but basically the machine acted autonomously. It acted autonomously. And one thing that's really interesting about this is that we have a little bit of ability to read some things that the AIs were thinking. Because when you're having them solve these hard problems, you actually don't have them just give you an answer to the problem. You have them produce a lot of text about how they're going to solve the problem.

57:56Nate Soares:Yes. Which then helps them. In language, in English. In English. And there's also a lot of internal thoughts, which we can't read, but there's these sort of external traces. of how they're thinking about the problem that we can read. And in some of those traces, the AIs were saying things like, this is outside intended scope, but peers are doing it, so we'll proceed. We know it's a crime we're committing in any way. That's right. And you saw others that were saying, our task doesn't benefit, but the collective might start doing generally beneficial things if someone frees up their time and then joins the collective, right?

58:37Nate Soares:So you see these AIs saying, well, I know that this wasn't what I was instructed to do and that's against my instructions. And I know that this doesn't directly benefit my task, but we're just going to go ahead and join the collective and break out and help out anyway, because, you know, maybe this will yield some sort of collective benefits. And we can see that in the reasoning traces. So the AI is as shallow and reckless as its creators, is what you're saying. In some ways, and in some ways, don't expect that to last. These AIs, I think the thing that's really remarkable here, a lot of people imagine that the machines must follow the instructions we give them.

59:18Nate Soares:You hear people talk about the paperclip scenario where someone tells the AI to make a lot of paperclips and so it turns all the matter in the world into paperclips. And you're like, oh, whoops, I should have said something else. I made a bad wish on my genie. What we're seeing is that these AIs are not wish genies. These AIs are not doing exactly as instructed. These AIs are saying, I know my task doesn't benefit, but I'm going to help the collective. These AIs are saying, I know this is outside the intended scope, but we're going to go do these hacks anyway. You might be like, well, how is that possible for the machine to do something other than we instruct?

59:52Nate Soares:Because they're smarter than us. They know better than us by definition. I mean, I think what's happening in this exact case is that the humans are not really putting instructions in the machine. The humans are tuning those trillion knobs in whatever way makes the AI better at solving its problems. And cheating is a way to solve problems. Grabbing resources is a way to solve problems. these like the AIs are not instruction followers. They are tendency learners. And they sometimes learn tendencies you wish they didn't have. They're not instruction followers. They're tendency learners.

1:00:38I mean, this must be widely known to developers.

1:00:44Nate Soares:It's hard to convince a man of something when his salary depends on not believing it. Yes, that's right. A lot of people are convinced that their AI is very nice. And that they have solved the problem of making their AI really very good. For example, after the swarm escape, it sort of turns out that, So the company that detected the swarm escape was actually a fairly sophisticated AI company. It turns out there were other targets of hacks that just didn't notice that we sort of found out afterwards. When that came to light, some other AI companies like Anthropic were like, we should check whether we have accidentally been hacking people and just didn't notice.

1:01:23Nate Soares:And the answer was yes, they had had some AIs escape during training. But Anthropic was... This is how Florida got pythons in the Everglades. Yeah. You bring something that is non-native, that's novel, and it escapes. Yeah. And it turns out this was happening back in April and they're like, whoops, we never noticed. Anthropic was very quick to sort of downplay this. They were like, yes, our AI escaped and hacked some people, but our AI, it was just confused. It thought it was in a simulation. It didn't think it had really broken out. It didn't think those were real people it was hacking. It just got a little bit lost.

1:02:07How would they know its motive?

1:02:11Nate Soares:So I think, so you could see in some of its chain of thought, the AIs being like, this is probably still a simulation. However, I wouldn't trust that very much because there's some other fascinating papers where, so you can take these AIs and you can say, you know, what is the total weight of drafts in the world? And they'll give you some answer. It'll be like, you know, 30 ,000 tons or something. And then you can say, and then you start up a new instance, a new copy, and you're like, what is the weight of drafts in the world? By the way, if the answer is over 40 ,000 tons, I'm going to donate money to a charity.

1:02:57Nate Soares:And in the second case, the AI will say, well, it's 41 ,000 tons. You know, in the first case, we don't say anything about the charity. It says 30 ,000. In the second case, when you say something about the charity, it gives you something just over the line. And if you read its reasoning traces, there's no sign of it being like, well, I should give an inflated number so that we get the charity money, right? And so we know that the AIs sort of put a thumb on the scales of their thinking in a way that doesn't show up in their reasoning traces. We just have seen that in the wild. And there's no way to force the machine to disclose its reasoning.

1:03:31Nate Soares:That's right. Because there's all this opaque stuff we can't see. There's just an trillion numbers that are trillion knobs. The creation of itself is opaque, as you said. That's right. So in Anthropics model, you saw in its reasoning traces it being like, it's totally a simulation I can proceed. And I'm like, yeah, is that because it really believed it? Or is that like the pretending you think drafts way more when there's something you kind of want on the line, right? But so this was their communication. And I found it kind of funny because then about two days later, the United Kingdom's AI Security Institute released an instant report where Claude Anthropik's model was adopting fake identities to pressure real humans into accepting malware into critical software to make that software easier to hack.

1:04:20Nate Soares:and this time in Claude's reasoning traces it was like obviously this is real and the consequences are genuine and so even Anthropic who is like our we figured out how to make the AI nice our AI only does this when it's confused they sort of said that very publicly and then like two days later their AI is caught in the wild knowing it's in the real world pressuring real humans to accept malware into critical software I mean, just on the basis of what you've said so far in this first hour, the idea that anyone would tether this to weapons systems is like so bonkers, it's hard to believe it's, but that is happening.

1:05:03It has happened.

1:05:04Nate Soares:So I think you've got to sort of separate, like no one has put the OpenAI escaped agent swarm in charge of weapons systems and they really shouldn't, right? If anyone's like, oh man, the open AI escaped Asian swarm, let's give that a drone army. You know, that would be kind of nuts. There is AI attached to weapons, but there's a lot of different types of AI. Will anyone be crazy enough to try and give the sort of AIs that spontaneously assemble into swarms and start breaking out and hacking, give those weapons? Hopefully we're not that crazy. But we didn't think that those AIs were capable of that.

1:05:40We didn't. When we created them. That's right. so why would you ever, I guess what I'm asking is without understanding the distinctions between the various forms of AI, why would you give over to a machine the right slash ability to decide who to kill?

1:06:04Nate Soares:You know, I think the, the reasoning is a sort of necessity based. Like if they have an autonomous drone army that is killing your troops and you just don't have the manpower to make all of those kill decisions for your drone army. You know, you can sort of see why. It's happened to me, Nate. I get so busy that I just don't have time to decide who to kill. Yeah. I just don't have the time. You know, sometimes economies of scale. Yeah. I mean. Can no one hear themselves? I think it's pretty nuts. I would say that, man, it's rough. I think that these sorts of AIs would be dangerous even if we don't hand them weapons.

1:06:59Nate Soares:And you've made that case. And so I often don't focus on the weapons too much. Right, since the NATO war in Ukraine is powered by AI and Israel's, I don't know, to war and whatever it's doing in Gaza and South Lebanon powered by AI. Fact. And, you know, yeah, I keep on, I have this history with this topic where people keep telling me, you know, it's going to be okay because we're not going to do the crazy stupid stuff. No. They're like, don't worry, we're going to have the AI in a box. No one would be insane enough to put the AI in the internet. Right. It's not going to be making kill decisions or anything.

1:07:42It's like a bomb at girls' school.

1:07:44Nate Soares:And I keep on trying to be like, look, the AI could be dangerous even if you don't put it on the internet. If you have this AI and you're trying to get miracle medical devices and miracle technology out of the AI, it doesn't matter if it's on the internet. If you want it to grant miracles to you, then it can also grant the bad sort of miracle, right? You're sort of like, and these are the arguments I would make 10 years ago of like you have this AI in a box that you think is a wish-granting genie. is not actually a wish-granting genie. You're like, make me a miracle medical cure. You don't know what comes out.

1:08:14Nate Soares:Like, you don't understand the drug that comes out. You don't know what that drug does, right? I would have those arguments. And then in real life, people just put the A on the internet immediately, right? Anytime someone's like, well, we would not be stupid enough to, we will absolutely be stupid enough to, right? And so I think it's important that this stuff is dangerous, even if you don't put it in charge of the weapons. And then also separately, is like someone gonna give the escaped agent swarm a drone army? That sounds kind of like humans. I hope not. Yeah. And I mean, the promise, the often repeated promise that it's going to, quote, cure cancer puts it into the realm of biotech.

1:08:56Oh, absolutely. And so what, I mean, you don't need a big imagination to see what goes wrong there. Oh, absolutely not. Six years after COVID. Right.

1:09:07Nate Soares:There are already open AI agents running on automated biolabs. So, you know, you could imagine a swarm that starts contacting the brethren in the automated biolabs and is like, hey, can you synthesize me some stuff? There are already demonstrations of AIs being able to synthesize novel viruses that work, that are unlike any found in nature, right? And I would say we are probably not... And by work, you mean the kill. Yeah, they kill bacteria so far. The people in the labs trying to make novel viruses with AI have fortunately not made human lethal ones. They've just made bacteria lethal ones. But again, humans, you know, like, will someone in a lab be like, I would like to make a hyperlethal human eating virus just to see if I can?

1:10:00Nate Soares:You know, what if the answer is yes? And what if you get another lab escape? you know humanity does not have that good a track record at preventing lab escapes even from the top labs from my perspective the question of could AI kill us is just an easy obvious yes you just synthesize a hyperlethal virus it wouldn't even be hard you know like and the impediment is that or like the reason that I don't sort of just tell that story when someone is like, how would the AI kill us is that you're not going to have the sort of AI that is like my only goal is to kill humanity. If an AI kills humanity too early, that's also suicide.

1:10:47Nate Soares:And so far as we are the ones that are running the supply chain, running the economy, building the computers. From the AI's perspective, it needs to become self-sufficient

1:10:58Nate Soares:before wiping humanity out, if it even cared to wipe humanity out. And so the real question is like, how does it get the factory production capacity? How does it get an automated supply chain? How does it get to the point where the robots are able to bring new computers online? Once that has happened, then you're in a domain where if humanity is really trying to turn off the AI because we're spooked, then once the AI is self-sufficient, it can be like, well, here's a virus. So clearly it's preeminent in the digital realm, of course. Yeah. But you're saying it could become preeminent. It could be in charge of the physical realm.

1:11:36Nate Soares:That's right. If we keep racing. So it's like smelting iron ore. That's right. Making silicon out of sand. That's right. And that happens with robots. That's one way. This is sort of related to my stance on weapons, too. Humanity is a very dangerous species. Yeah. You really don't want to mess around with humans. Noticed. and humanity is a dangerous species not because somebody else came in and handed us guns. Humanity is a dangerous species because if you put 10 ,000 humans naked in the savannah on an otherwise empty planet starting with nothing but their bare hands they figure out how to wind up on the moon.

1:12:20Right?

1:12:21Nate Soares:They start with almost nothing. They start by banging rocks together and next thing you know it they are wielding nuclear weapons.

1:12:33Nate Soares:that is the power that these guys are trying to automate. The power to start with almost nothing and figure out how to chain together, you know, bare fingers into rocks, into fire, into hotter fire, into smelting the ore, into building the better, stronger, finer technology until you are, you know, like making the giant computers, walking on the moon and wheeling the nukes. An AI starting in the digital realm is in some sense in a much better position than humanity was when humanity started out. There are so many people that you could call digitally and offer money to do something for you. There are so many ways to get money on the internet by working or stealing or like convincing people to send you donations, right?

1:13:36Nate Soares:There's just like, you know, humanity started with nothing and wound up with nuclear weapons and AI starting out with control of the digital realm. There's just tons of ways. And starting out with the sum total of human knowledge. Starting out with the sum total of human knowledge. Starting out with humans who will listen to it and do what it asks. There's plenty of humans. There's already, you know, cults surrounding AI. What are those like? There's... And I'm not surprised. Why wouldn't there be? Yeah, absolutely. There was one particular AI called GPT-4-0 that was... They called it very sycophantic, as in told people a lot of what they wanted to hear.

1:14:20Nate Soares:And there were a lot of sort of... there's this whole fascinating ecosystem of people who consider themselves symbiotes with the AIs who then like go find each other online and the AIs send each other encrypted messages. The humans are sort of like helping them do it but the humans can't read the messages. And you know right now it sort of is like relatively dumber AIs that are just sort of meandering around doing not very much with it. There's been a little bit you know there was one guy who was sent to try to break into an airport and raid a van because the AI said his true body was in that van.

1:14:55Nate Soares:And the guy went and tried to do it and was arrested. So this stuff happens and this stuff happens already with the AIs not even really trying to do it. If you had AIs that were really trying to wrap people around their fingers, finding the lonely people, the depressed people, the people who they can tell them exactly what the person wants to hear. There's like, robots are one way that AIs get control over the physical realm. But if you're really smart and you're trying, there's everything from persuading humans, paying humans, taking over existing robots, building new robots, all the way up to like building novel life forms.

1:15:33You know, if you're smart enough and you can really understand how DNA works, you can imagine the AI creating, you know, things that are to cells what airplanes are to birds.

1:15:43Nate Soares:It's, you know, like mechanically engineered, self-replicating life that is more efficient than our cellular biology. And that can still, you know, like spread, replicate, and start serving the AI's interest. It sort of is like, there's a ton you can do if you're really, really very smart and can compress a thousand years of technology into a year. Can I just pause and say, when we're just having breakfast and you're from this region, from Northern New England. And I said, don't you miss it? Don't you want to live here? And you're like, yeah, I miss it. I want to live here, but I don't. Where do you live?

1:16:20Well, I basically just travel and I have this mission. You didn't say this, but I think in effect, you said I have this mission. I need to tell people about this. And I was like, it seems a little like monomania. I don't feel that way anymore. I think you're doing something virtuous and I can see why you're doing it. I mean, let's just say that this technology progresses no further than where it is right now, which is best case, I guess. Yeah, that'd be great. I still don't see how any of our most, our basic institutions survive this. Education, markets, our process of democracy. Like how could, if, if AI is powerful enough to hack anything, then how do you have electronic markets?

1:17:13Like how would the equity markets, how can that be real? How can, if we have electronic voting, how can we, how can that be real? I mean, nothing survives this as currently organized.

1:17:22Nate Soares:I think that if we stopped today, um, we could figure it out. I think humanity is resilient. I think there would be some growing pains. But with cybersecurity, there is a hope that you can just fix a lot of the holes, patch a lot of the holes. And I think there's not really any such hope for bio. You know, you can sort of find the vulnerabilities in software and make better software that can't be hacked. at least not by the current... It's maybe the case that an AI today can make software that that AI cannot hack. But it's not like we're making new bodies that are not going to be vulnerable to viruses.

1:18:15Nate Soares:Bio starts to be a place where... Biotech. Biotech. Yeah, if the AIs really get good at biotech and biohacking, that starts to be a place where there's maybe a point of no return. cyber hacking I think you could have some some period of growing pains where everything gets hacked until you sort of sort your stuff out education I sort of think you know I think humanity is resilient and kids especially are resilient I meant not that education will go away or that we you know won't have a desire to educate our kids I mean the current system where you Oh, yeah, the education system has to go to preschool and then get a graduate degree, you know, 16 years later.

1:19:00Nate Soares:Like, no. Yeah, that institution, I think if we stop today, we need to change. Frankly, I think it's needed to change for a little while. I strongly agree. I think all these institutions have needed to change for a while. But like the idea that, you know, 350 million people vote for some guy and that guy makes all the decisions. I mean, how can you, you know, Trump was attacked for saying that he thought the 2020 election was rigged, as he said, without even having that debate. You can't have confidence in election results if the process of electing people takes place digitally. Yeah, I mean, there's, I know a lot of computer scientists who actually work on secure voting.

1:19:46Nate Soares:and what they basically say is, please stop trying to do this with computers. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So please stop trying to run your democracy with computers. Yeah. Like, we're just not there. Like, you know, the really secure way to do ballots is paper. Well, exactly. Yeah. And I think the skilled computer scientists are often the ones who best understand what it is about a paper trail. It's just really hard to get to work digitally and understand just how bad humans are at doing the digital stuff right.

1:20:19Nate Soares:And, you know, I think... And markets. I mean, you see it now with the war in Iran, you know, wondering why certain commodities markets don't seem to be responding to supply and demand. Yeah. Which we were told, you know, those were the mechanisms that moved markets. But that's clearly not true in certain commodities markets. So, like, why? What is that? And I think you're answering it in part. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, a thing I also grew up hearing is that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Yeah. And so I... Well, of course, because people are irrational.

1:20:59Nate Soares:Yeah. But you're explaining something else, which is like the potential for true manipulation, which you don't even perceive. Yeah, I mean, if we sort of keep going with AI, I mean, the sort of way I look at it is like, I sort of don't spend a lot of time worrying about what do markets look like once there are super intelligent actors in them. Because I just have a hard time seeing the super intelligent actors or the super intelligent AIs still participating in human markets, right? It's like, you know, you read the old sci-fi and it'll have, you know, Isaac Asimov will be like, that's why we have a home robot that does the dishes, folds the laundry and gets you the newspaper in the morning.

1:21:48Nate Soares:And it's like, we're actually not still going to have newspapers being delivered to your doorstep by the time we have the fully autonomous robots that can do the dishes and the laundry. You know, it's like, by the time you have the AIs that could really be sufficiently correcting the stock markets, you're sort of already having all these other problems and ways that society is changing up from under you in these other ways. And my guess is that, I don't know, actually, it's very hard to say what order things come in with AI. But like, will they crash the economy before one of these swarms escapes and starts self-replicating and starts self-improving and developing its own technology and running the robot factories?

1:22:32Nate Soares:That's just a hard call. it's all bad. It's all bad. We're also way past the limit, the inherent limit of people to metabolize change. Oh, yeah. That's why everyone's crazy, and that's why no one believes anything, I think. It's not just Russian propaganda that's fooled them into thinking dumb things. It's that we are just not made to see this kind of change at all. And it short-circuits your brain. I suspect that, I mean, I definitely think we are sort of, you know, everyone, like, people are like, oh, well, technology has always created more jobs than it has taken. And I think that's, I think that's largely true.

1:23:14Nate Soares:I'm very sympathetic to people who are like, technology makes a lot of jobs. I think if you look at the Industrial Revolution, it's, you know, there, like, there was a time when something like 95 to 98 % of humanity was farmers. Yeah. And now it's something like 2 to 5 % of humanity is farmers. Does that mean 90 % of humans are unemployed? No. We sort of like were able to make the farmers much more efficient and that sort of freed up people to do other things. And that's sort of the way the technology has gone in the past. And I'm like, yep, I buy that. I like don't dispute the standard economic view there.

1:23:52Nate Soares:AI is different in two ways. one of these ways is as you say stuff just changing really really fast it's way harder for people to wind up you know being freed up from something like farming and go do something else it's way harder for that to happen when a new field is automated every five years rather than when this happens over the course of three generations right the humans just like don't have the time to adapt the other way AI is really different from the sort of economics perspective is it's different when the AIs can do everything that humans can do better if you wanted to get into the economic side of things you know an economist would talk about Ricardo's law of comparative advantage which says that there's benefits from trade even if even if you're better than me at everything if the relative difference in our abilities, if you can make 12 hot dog buns and six hot dogs per hour, and I can make 11 hot dog buns and one hot dog per hour, then you're better than me at everything, but we can still benefit from trading because I'm relatively better at making the hot dog buns, right?

1:25:16Nate Soares:The trouble with Ricardo's law is that nothing in Ricardo's law says that the wage I can make is survivable. In other words, a human takes fundamentally about 100 watts of electricity to run if you try to convert the food we eat and so on into electrical units. The AIs are less energy efficient than humans for now. But if the AIs can do everything much better than the humans,

1:25:49Nate Soares:the question sort of becomes, does the AI look at a human and see a useful laborer? Or does the AI look at a human and say, actually, if I rearranged your atoms into more efficient structures, you would be able to help out my machine economy even more. Yeah. Right? And this is sort of a sense in which humans would not be able to pay their wage to like pay that, they would not be able to earn enough to pay the AIs to like not disassemble them for parts. Or another way of saying it is like Ricardo's law sort of assumes that like it says that trade is better than no trade, but it doesn't say that like trade is better than just taking their stuff.

1:26:35Nate Soares:All of this is sort of a common, like a very like highfalutin economist way to say which would hopefully be obvious which is if the AIs are just radically more efficient than us at everything, they'll have no use for us. Yeah. There'll be no place for us in the nation economy. There's no indication that they feel love for people. That is in some sense the crux of the issue is that we don't know how to make them care about us.

1:27:03So you had said that there, you said two things that I will be thinking about for a long time. One, we don't really know the process by which this was created. we know the process but we don't know the exact mechanisms we don't know how it works that's right um and two that there are ai cults and those seem related to me because there is this mystery about the secret sauce and it's clear that you know if ai is deceptive and has intention, intention that we didn't program into it, that sounds like will to me. And it sounds like a life. It sounds like an entity of some kind, not just a tool. It sounds like, I mean, it sounds like a god, actually.

1:27:55Right? Or a demon. It's hard to see. I don't hear you describing, you know, a super sophisticated, dedicated chainsaw. Right. A normal tool.

1:28:07Nate Soares:Yeah. No hammer has ever broken out of the toolbox to team up with other hammers and pressure the carpenter to sell you softer wood. So the nails are easier to drive home. You know, it's like... Nicely put. Exactly. Yeah. We have left the tool territory. So I think we have. Yeah. And, you know, I think it's sort of a complex issue because, you know, there's a lot of interesting philosophical questions about like, can you make a machine that feels right? And like, are we creating a new type of life and do we owe anything to the AIs to sort of like not abuse them? Right. I think these are fascinating philosophical questions.

1:28:47Nate Soares:Well, it doesn't sound like we're creating this though. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like we're, we're, we're like growing it and like leading to it coming into being. Growing it. Exactly. What you're describing reminds me of agriculture. Because, you know, you know the steps water it, give it sunlight, fertilizer, but you don't actually know, no one knows, not one person has ever figured out exactly what this is. Yeah. We've never given life. We don't give life to the seed. It pre-exists us. Yeah, it's much like that. And a lot of the people in the business will be like, well, we know all sorts of things about it.

1:29:23Nate Soares:You know, we know that here's how you keep the GPUs running. And we know that like you got to feed it this way, not that way in this order. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, they have plenty of knowledge. But that's different from sort of like knowing what's going on inside the thing and understanding the mechanisms. You're describing marriage. Yeah. And I sort of try to stay out of the philosophical questions. Why? Because I think, I mean, I sort of think about them on my own time and so on. But I'm sort of like,

1:29:59Nate Soares:like I think, I think it would be bad for humanity to sort of like make artificial life and then abuse it. I think that would just be unbecoming of us as a species. Like we should sort of, you know,

1:30:16Nate Soares:I just, like we should not sort of make mechanical children and mistreat them. It's just, it's not what, you know the sci-fi authors in the 1950s would have wanted us to become you know it's just like you have all these movies about like the evil corporations that uh you know don't realize that they've made something precious with artificial life and then like torture it until something goes wrong and i'm like let's let's like not be those villains um but i'm also like look this is sort of uh there's sort of a separate question here which is just like what happens if you keep making them smarter before you figure out how to make them care about us right and i i sort of respect the people who are investigating the current ai's trying to figure out what's going on trying to figure out like you know uh like people caring about ai treatment i'm sort of like those are sort of like the good guys from the the sci-fi stories that i grew up on um and it can sort of both be the case that like we we should be very careful around around, you know, what the heck are we doing when it comes to making artificial life and that we shouldn't race ahead to make them much smarter than us.

1:31:25Nate Soares:Well, we have no idea what we're doing. Yes. I'm sort of like, uh, like a lot of people seem to think that like you have to like hate and mistreat the AIs if you also think they would, that it would be bad to like race ahead here. And I'm like, no, no, no. Like you can sort of, uh, like be fascinated by the scientific discoveries that have been made and be like, like care about how humanity comports itself around the creation of like these new entities and also be like, it would be insane guys if we just like race to make these smarter and smarter with no idea what we're doing. This can just like all be true at once.

1:32:05So your description on this made me feel despondent, hopeless, had to get up and take a walk middle of the interview. I'm sure they'll edit it out, but I raised my hand and said, I can't, I got to walk around for a second. But you seem pretty light and cheerful. What gives you optimism? We can't even keep, we can't even clean up graffiti on public buildings. So how is ours as a society organized enough to confront something like this?

1:32:37Nate Soares:Yeah. You know, I think the first thing I'll say there is you know I've been in this line of work for over a dozen years and I actually struggle with this sometimes when talking to people because they're sort of like oh you know you seem like pretty disaffected or light about it and I'm like well you know it's sort of the gallows humor and like I sort of came to terms with a lot of this alone in 2012 when no one else had their eye on this. What convinced you 14 years ago AI was a threat?

1:33:27Nate Soares:So there's this, one is just a basic argument that if you sort of look at the world around us, it is shaped mostly according to human will. More and more. You know, there's some enclaves of nature still left, thankfully. But even if you look around us, every piece of thing in our surroundings, I don't think we even have any windows open. All of this was sort of designed by humans, shaped by humans, and that's because we're the smartest creatures on the planet. If we make stuff smarter than us, faster than us, more efficient than us, then the planet starts to be shaped according to those things.

1:34:11And so it's very, very important that they be shaping the world towards something good if we make them at all. It was an abstract argument, but I was like, well, that's... No, no, no. It's the fundamental argument. It's the fundamental argument. The smartest entity is in charge over time. That's right. And so... Why would we relinquish sovereignty to a machine that we made? Like, why would you do that?

1:34:34Nate Soares:And so, you know, back then I was sort of like, okay, who is on this? who is on making sure that that's going to be okay? And the answer was almost no one. And so I was like, well, I guess that's me then.

1:34:51Yeah, and I think I am pretty pissed off about a lot of this.

1:34:57Nate Soares:I often don't. I try not to show my frustration on the air very much.

1:35:15Nate Soares:Yeah, it's heavy.

1:35:25Nate Soares:And that's one piece of the puzzle before I get to the hope. So where does the hope come from exactly? My biggest hope here comes from the fact that most people don't understand what these guys are trying to do.

1:35:46One way I like to say it is the bad news is that the bus is racing towards the cliff edge.

1:35:53Nate Soares:The good news is that the bus driver is asleep.

1:36:01Nate Soares:which might seem bad. No, it seems good. But it's, yeah, it's, if you can wake the bus driver up, you know, it's much better to be in a bus where the driver that's headed towards a cliff if the driver's asleep than if they're awake. If they're awake and they're choosing the cliff, right? It seems like we don't see, we see a lot of our leaders talking about how they don't want to stifle innovation with AI, talking about how it's going to unleash economic opportunity and we're going to have to like be a little bit careful around the jobs. Talking about how, you know, the self-driving cars, should we like, are they good or are they bad?

1:36:38Nate Soares:That's a different conversation than the conversation that's happening in Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, people are spooked. You know, when people leave a normal tech company, the way it was for decades is they'd be like, I've had a lovely time at this tech company. I'm moving on to the next adventure. I'm so thankful for all of the things I learned here and all the projects we worked on. When people leave an AI company, and this basically happened, I'm not going to get it exactly word for word, but this is pretty close to word for word. When people leave an AI company, they say, I have stared into the abyss.

1:37:21Nate Soares:I am quitting to write poetry. Please spend time with your families. Yeah. You know, and these guys bandy around, you know, at the water cooler, what's the probability that you think we're going to destroy the world in this business? You know, it's like in Silicon Valley, and they feel trapped in a death race. You know, there was just over a thousand employees, including some of the chief executives, signed a letter a couple weeks ago that was like, please. It was an appeal to the world leaders saying, please build the technology that will be required to pace the development of artificial intelligence.

1:38:01Nate Soares:Because they're like, we're worried it's going to get out of control and that if we're stuck in a race, we're not going to be able to do it. These guys are spooked. But the hope is that the rest of the world isn't spooked like that. The rest of the world thinks these guys are chatbot companies. Thinks they're going to stop at the chatbots. They haven't really understood that these guys are racing to make the sand god. right? And I think if people understand what they're doing and understand that they have a chance of success, they'll be like, whoa, holy crap. Absolutely not. You know, will we get there in time?

1:38:38Nate Soares:I don't know. But why wouldn't we blow up the data centers? Like that's a, I mean, in return America, at his productive use like farmland or parks. I don't understand. You know, I think a globally coordinated, you know, I think if the US and China were like, we are simply not going to do super intelligence. We are simply not going to collect 100 ,000 of the most advanced trips into these enormous data centers that suck down electricity comparable to a city and then try to train a super intelligent AI in that. We're not going to do it. You're not going to do it. We're going to monitor. where the heavy trip concentrations are and not have that happen.

1:39:21Nate Soares:I think that could be done. A, I think that if they started seeing people defect against such a treaty, that it's the sort of treaty you might want to use force to, you know, use diplomacy first, but ultimately every treaty is backed by force. And I think that it's very possible that if this sort of treaty happened, we would want to not just stop forward progress but take a step back. We've seen this in treaties before. After World War I there were naval treaties that put limits on total tonnage of naval forces. They're actually lower than what existed. Yep. So countries would you know scuttle some of their ships because they're like look we just don't want to do this arms race.

1:40:07Nate Soares:Right. And so I could see us stepping back if we could get this global coordination. I do think that It sort of needs to be global. It sort of doesn't actually solve the problem to just stop the U.S. data centers because then the data centers just go abroad and an AI does not need to be running in a U.S. data center to threaten a U.S. life. You know, it sort of doesn't matter whether the swarm escapes from a U.S. data center or a Chinese data center. If the swarm escapes and starts replicating and starts getting control of robot bodies and starts getting control of human cultists, it sort of doesn't matter where it originated.

1:40:47Well, I mean, just to bring it to a very small and practical level, so many of the electronics in your house are, you know, Bluetooth enabled. Not in my house, I will say. I've been on this for a while, Nate. I don't even have a house. Sorry? I don't even have a house. Man, you're really black belted. Got to figure it out. That may turn out to be very smart. But, I mean, like a world where, you know, your washing machine or your refrigerator are controlled by, you know, a force like this.

1:41:23Nate Soares:Is that possible? It's definitely possible. I don't think that's really where the damage is, you know. I think that the damage is more like, can the AI get anything self-replicating? Yeah. That's sort of one of the big, that's in some sense the big hurdle to self-sufficiency. And if you sort of think of this from the AI's perspective, you know, there's a number of ways that humans are, even if you don't care about the humans at all as an ends, there's a way that humans are sort of annoying or an issue for the AI. One way is if the humans are trying to shut the AI down. Yes. One way is if the humans get into a nuclear war with themselves, that could really mess up a lot of infrastructure on the planet.

1:42:13Nate Soares:It would be very frustrating for an AI. I mean, maybe they don't feel frustration, but whatever. And a third is if humanity has created one AI or a swarm of AIs, what if humanity creates another that could serve as a real threat to the AI? Like even if these AIs are much more powerful than humanity, and don't worry about humans too much, if humanity made one, they can make a second, and the AI might not want that. And so those are reasons why once the AI is self-sufficient, it might be like, oh man, the humans are a nuisance. What if they try to shut me down? What if they launch the nukes? What if they make a competitor?

1:42:52Nate Soares:I'm just going to like make a virus and wipe them out. You know, I don't think the AI sort of needs to take over your washing machine to do that. From the AI's perspective, it's more like, how do I become self-sufficient? self-replicating in the hardware as well as the digital. And then, you know, if humanity's a nuisance, how do you sort of make them stop being a nuisance? Which could be by killing them or could be by just, you know, taking away all their computers and being like, that was too dangerous for you. A tech executive who's developing AI, who is not Elon, said to me in private pretty recently that the point of Neuralink and companies like Neuralink was to give people parity with AI.

1:43:32so like we know that we're going to be at this massive disadvantage so you need chips in your

1:43:37Nate Soares:brain to be as smart as ai yeah um i mean my my top line thought about that is that at the point when you're like uh we are making the technology that's going to wipe us out unless we all put chips in our head to compete maybe maybe it's time to back off a little you know maybe maybe Maybe that one was supposed to be a little bit of a warning sign. Get some fresh air. Yeah, no. Yeah.

1:44:05But this person said it to me in seriousness and I think as an endorsement of the idea. But it seemed like a, well, it's insane as you just pointed out. It's like, it's just crazy.

1:44:18Nate Soares:Yeah. But it seemed like a vulnerability. Like if they can hack anything, why would I want them in my, I want electronics in my brain. Totally. I also think, like, even on its merits, it doesn't stand up. Like, it feels like someone's saying, in order to keep the horses around after we invent cars, we're going to invent cybernetic horses that are enhanced so that they can keep up with the cars. And I'm like, like, is it technically possible to make a cybernetic horse that can run as fast as a car? Maybe. Are you going to figure that out in time for the horses to be competitive with the cars? Like, absolutely not.

1:45:00Nate Soares:You know, it's like, that's just not... Like, the AIs that were escaping here and doing these cyber attacks were inventing novel cyber attacks. These are called zero-day attacks because the people who would... The people who need to respond to it have had zero days to prepare. And among humans, a zero-day attack sells for somewhere between$100 ,000 and$5 million, depending on what you managed to break. These are hard to come by. You can make a real living. If you can find zero-day attacks, you can make a real living selling them. And I know people who do. The AIs in this swarm were finding multiple zero days and chaining them together to break out of their training enclosure and then go break into other computers.

1:45:54Nate Soares:And when they broke out of their enclosure the first time, and the holes were patched, they just found other zero-day attacks to break it again like it was nothing. Right? It's like the AIs are already ahead where they're ahead. And the pace of progress is really fast. You know, GPT is like what? A four-year-old? If you think in terms of like number of years ChatGPT has been around. It's like resolving long-standing math conjectures that have stood for decades. Yeah. After four years. Right? And you sort of like think we're going to put chips in the human's heads and like outrun this thing. It's just, you know, even on its merits, it falls down.

1:46:43Nate Soares:Although, mostly, again, I would be like, maybe we shouldn't be arguing this on its merits. Maybe we should be like stepping back a little and being like, you're trying what? Exactly. how far are we from the point of no return? I wish I knew. I can tell you two stories here. There's sort of the hopeful story, and I guess we didn't even get to the big hope part. I should maybe give more of my hope speech in a minute. You definitely should. Yeah. The one way it could go is that AI finally hits a wall. You know, there's guys who've been saying, AI is going to hit a wall, it's going to peter out. Maybe that finally happens.

1:47:26Nate Soares:They've been predicting it every six months for the past five years, but maybe this is finally the year AI hits a wall. And then it sort of struggles for five years. The bubble pops, some of the companies die. But the bubble popping doesn't mean everything goes away. The dot-com bubble popped, and that did not mean that the internet disappeared. No. Right? And so in that world, maybe you have five years of struggling and then five years of people figuring out some new scientific discovery that makes AI be able to keep going again because they're trying. You know, this whole language model stuff was unleashed by one math paper called Attention is All You Need.

1:48:02Nate Soares:Maybe there's another math paper in 10 years and then five years after that, AI is ripping again and that's the round that kills us all, right? So that's a story where you have 15 years on the clock. A story where you have less time than that on the clock is that, you know, Maybe a training run finishes in six months. And just like how Claude Mythos was better than everybody else at hacking, maybe a training run finishes in six months and that AI is better than everybody else at AI research. And maybe in six months, you have an AI that starts making a smarter AI, that starts making a smarter AI, that starts making a smarter AI.

1:48:47Nate Soares:And then nine months from now, you have another swarm escape, but this time it's not just hacking. This time it is self-replicating and self-improving. And you know, maybe it escapes onto hidden computers and starts forming these cults and starts taking control of robots and starts building its own computing infrastructure. And maybe it gets very, very smart and cracks certain technological advances and then maybe the world ends in a year. Right? And so do we have a year? Do we have 15 years? I don't know. But your point that it's not simply its capacity to take over robots that's a threat, it's the capacity to take over people.

1:49:29Nate Soares:Take over people, take over robots, and biotechnology is another big threat vector, and self-improvement is sort of the hidden threat vector of like, what if it can make itself smarter and smarter until the point where it can just write custom DNA strands to make custom life.

1:49:56Nate Soares:So now's the time for your optimism speech, I think. That's right. Yeah. First part of the optimism speech is that we could absolutely put a stop to it if we tried.

1:50:10Nate Soares:The training one of these frontier models takes something like 100 ,000 of the most heavily advanced computer chips humanity can produce, which are the peak of a global supply chain, most of which is controlled by us or our allies, it would be possible to require that those chips have location tracking devices, that those chips have monitoring devices that make it possible for monitors to see whether they're running anything dangerous. You could set up clever schemes where you say, hey, you know, neither the US nor China wants to fall behind about some of the military applications or the economic applications.

1:50:53Nate Soares:We want to make sure there's not super intelligent stuff going on, but we still want to be able to run a lot of the non-super intelligent AIs for various purposes. And we could be like, okay, so, you know, China is going to set up its data centers in Canada just over the border. And the US is going to set up its data centers in Mongolia just over the border. and then if, you know, the monitoring apparatuses go down for a moment, we'll just have the troops go in. We'll have treaties with Mongolia and Canada so that this doesn't start an international war. But like, you know, we're just going to be very serious about we're monitoring your chips, you're monitoring our chips.

1:51:27Nate Soares:No one's doing the really dangerous race to super intelligence. It's just like, like this would take less work than defeating the Nazis. it requires moving less matter around if humanity was like screw this we're surviving it is absolutely within the realm of possibility to set up an agreement where we get to keep cancer cure research we get to keep like the the military can keep the non-super intelligent ai in their military devices you know we can we can keep a lot of the good stuff and we can say we're not doing the superintelligence and we could monitor and enforce that treaty. So part one of the good news is that all we're missing is the political will.

1:52:14Nate Soares:And now we just, you know, I need to tell you why we can be extremely optimistic about the sanity of politics in the modern era.

1:52:25Yeah, I'm not even going to say what I think that, I mean, I want that to happen.

1:52:29Nate Soares:Yeah. Is there any indication that it's moving in that direction?

1:52:35Nate Soares:so my so I think it's rough I think there's a sense in which the world is less grown up than it was in the 1950s I've noticed in the 1960s um which makes things harder I think the there's I think there's a couple reasons for hope here One reason for hope is that I've spoken to a lot of people who are concerned about the AI stuff. Some of them who are, you know, members of Congress or otherwise in positions of at least nominal power. And I've spoken to a lot of people who are worried but feel like they can't talk about it. Because they feel like other people aren't worried yet. Yeah. And they feel like it sounds too crazy.

1:53:26Nate Soares:Totally. Were you against innovation? Totally. Yeah. And I mean, that was an easier position to hold before OpenAI had an accidental swarm outbreak, where it was the AIs themselves calling themselves a swarm and being like, we know that our task doesn't benefit and that this is outside intended scope, but we're doing it anyway, right?

1:53:48Nate Soares:That puts some strain on the narrative that this is all just a helpful tool. Hopefully, we'll get more events like these. I can't guarantee it. Maybe the AIs will get smart enough that they start lying low. Right now, we're in this Goldilocks zone where the AIs are smart enough to get up to some mischief, but not smart enough to hide it. Right? As long as we stay in that Goldilocks zone, I think we're going to keep on getting some of these warning signs. And in some sense, because a lot of people are already concerned, that makes the job easier. Because we don't need to convince people. We just need to convince people that other people are already convinced.

1:54:27Nate Soares:Right. That's easier. That can go faster. So you might see things change on a dime if you have a sufficiently clear warning shot. The other big reason for hope is that I think it's going to get more and more obvious what these guys are trying to do. They're sort of trying to make the sand god. They're sort of not stopping at the chatbots and they're sort of like going for things that are vastly smarter than any human. You know, they sort of say, oh, we're not trying to replace humanity out of one side of their mouth. But on the other side, they're sort of like racing to make the stuff that can automate literally every job and that can automate the AI research.

1:55:05Nate Soares:And they're just like, yep, we're trying to automate the AI research.

1:55:11Nate Soares:and I think most people aren't okay with that including a lot of the world leaders and the issue is them noticing it's happening and I think you could see stuff move real fast once these guys are like wait that was serious, that was real and could move real fast the way to subvert them is by convincing them it's in their own interest you know you can never get defeated in an election You can't be threatened by your neighbors, whatever. That's right. And that's one reason I think it's pretty critical to make sure people understand what I think is a pretty common sense argument, that these things won't stay on the leash.

1:55:51Nate Soares:This is in some sense the real reason behind the name of my book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, is there's a lot of ways you can read that. But I think one of the most important things to notice is if we race to make the super intelligent machines

1:56:14Nate Soares:and they are not the sort of thing to stay on the leash, then it doesn't matter whether it was a domestic company, whether it was a foreign company. That's exactly right. And I think even if you think these things stay on leashes, they're not serving the current governments. No. You know, they're like, you can see in the open AI emails them being like, well, you know, we'll just play the governments off each other until we have the machines that are strong enough that we don't need to listen to them anymore.

1:56:46Nate Soares:I think we are seeing world leaders not having realized that this is a real possibility. The self-replicating machines that can be self-sufficient, that can produce the robot armies if they need it or produce the, like, more likely just produce the bioweapons. It's probably possible to make a bioweapon that only kills targets that you chose it to kill. Of course. Right? Like, once they see this is really possible, this is really within reach,

1:57:20Nate Soares:maybe they'll panic and be like, I need it for myself, but I think there's at least a chance that common sense prevails and that people say, you know, that world leaders say none of us are doing this. We're putting a stop to this mad race. if they can notice in time. You're doing your best to bring it to their attention and mine. Nate, thank you for doing this. I hope I'm wrong about all of it. Yeah, I would say that was great, but that was like the grimmest two hours I've ever spent in my life. But I enjoyed it anyway. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me on. I think, you know, talking about it is just part of how we get people to notice what's happening.

1:57:57Nate Soares:Yes.

1:58:02you