219. How Putin Just Played Trump... Again

15:08Anthony Scaramucci:We saw Scott Besant after the G20 meeting in Asheville that we spoke about last week going on television and saying, well, the reason that oil prices are so high is because of the Ukrainian war. So they know the cost of the Ukrainian war. I mean, it's a little disingenuous. And God, it must have hurt J.D. Vance to call up Zelensky and say, please, can you help us out here and stop attacking ships in the Black Sea? Because there is no love lost between J.D. Vance, who is a real, a genuine anti-European, as opposed to Trump, who I think doesn't really care that much either way. But I think J.D. Vance really does, for some reason, J.D.

15:46Anthony Scaramucci:Vance hates Zelensky. I don't know what it is that J.D. Vance has against Zelensky.

15:50Katty Kay:Oh, it has to do, it has to do, you know, his boy Peter Thiel, the way Peter Thiel is treated in Europe. He sends messages like that because he wants his boy Peter Thiel happy. But I just want to go to the plane for a second, okay, because I know Trump. Trump is the one that called that off. Again, I'm speculating here. I don't know for certain. But I just want people to understand that Trump is an optics person. he's an aesthetic person and he did not want a u.s government aircraft on the kiev runway while his boy validery putin was watching okay that plane could have landed zolenski more or less said so to the press he said the preparations were made for the plane to land but they're coming by train from poland and the press is saying oh they didn't have the security right to land the plane but the russians weren't going to shoot at an american plane that was landing there they didn't want the plane to land there because of the optics and the press optics and the conjoinment of the u.s as an ally to vladimir zelensky see so so understand that trump got on the phone and said take the train from poland okay i don't want that plane in it on the front cover of the new york times wall street journal financial times etc times of london see the so that that's what happened there again that's again these are my opinions but i know the son of a bitch and I know how he thinks and I know he didn't want to upset his boy.

17:12Anthony Scaramucci:Okay so before we go to a break question for you do you think that Wyckoff and Kushner to get back to kind of what we were saying at the beginning of this show do you think they have the same clout with Donald Trump and in the White House that they did at the beginning of this administration when basically Marco Rubio was kind of sidelined and Steve Wyckoff seemed to be given almost and Jared Kushner seemed to be given almost every portfolio that existed on the world stage. Do you think they still have the same amount of influence with President Trump?

17:45Katty Kay:Oh, yeah. I'm going to answer it. They had no clout a year ago, and they have no clout today. They have absolutely no clout. But what they are are puppets for the puppeteer Donald Trump. So, of course, these are my opinions, Caddy, but I believe that Trump and Jared Kushner are commercially in cahoots with each other. and he gets a piece of all of that stuff. And the New York Times actually reported that he was complaining to Howard Lutnick at Mar-a-Lago by the pool saying, hey, where's my cut of your kids' businesses? I see your kids making so much money. Where's my cut? So again, my opinion.

18:22Katty Kay:I just want to make sure everybody knows that, but that's what I think is going on.

18:25Anthony Scaramucci:Oh, I don't think it's just Jared, by the way. You speak to people who know Russia and who know Ukraine and know this conflict well in Washington, in the foreign policy space. and they will all say that from the moment Steve Wyckoff made his first visit to Moscow, the speculation was that he was there to do business deals for himself and for his son. And remember, unlike Jared Kushner, who's likely to get pardoned because of that 200 feet within the Oval Office thing, Steve Wyckoff's kid, Savor, Sir Zach, has also been making a lot of money on these kinds of deals and he is unlikely to get pardoned.

18:57Anthony Scaramucci:So he's in a more precarious position.

18:58Katty Kay:Yeah, it's a huge risk. But also, I just want to think about Wyckoff for a second, though. I maybe want to recant of those two. I don't want to be either of them, but he's looking at Putin saying, oh, God, when we retire and we have these lifetime memories, we'll be thinking about this meeting that we've had and this wonderful thing. I'm like, dude, the guy's like a war criminal. You know, the guy is literally poisoning people here in London with radioactive tea.

19:31Anthony Scaramucci:Killed Alexei Navalny. Sent 1 % of his own population to a meat grinder of a war in Ukraine that he didn't need to.

19:39Katty Kay:Yeah, and look at all the Ukrainians that have thought. The guy is literally a war criminal. And you're sitting there with him like ha-dee-da, lo-dee-do. And again, this is something that the West has to be very, very careful of because we've moved. West is not perfect. We can write a lot of nasty things about the West and a lot of nasty things about what our governments do to people and so on and so forth. I'm not suggesting that the West is perfect. But if you want Western liberalism to survive and you want the freedom and the liberty of individuality, we have to actually stand for something as a group of leaders in the West.

20:18Katty Kay:And the values that Donald Trump is representing over the last 10 years, looming large over American life, are inconsistent with those values. And so we need leaders, whether it's Carney, whether it's Annie Burnham, you pick the leader, okay? We need leaders to project this. And I'm telling you right now, that's one of the biggest problems. Because if we had gone back to first principles, Caddy, that war, the Ukraine-Russian conflict would already be over. Because first principles would require all the Western leaders to get together and say, whoa, however corrupt Ukraine is, however corrupt Russia is, this is not the debate.

21:01Katty Kay:That's a sovereign territory that was established after the devolution of the USSR, and we gave them security guarantees. So back the F up off of their border.

21:13Anthony Scaramucci:They gave up their nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees. So what good is our word?

21:18Katty Kay:In order to maintain our first principles, exactly right. In order to maintain our first principles, back up off the border or we're going to collectively put a hurt on you. But I will say to you, and Alistair and I were talking about this over the weekend, the greatest foreign policy achievement of Vladimir Putin and perhaps one of the greatest achievements in the history of the post fall of the czar, the last 108, nine years, has been the election. The greatest foreign policy achievement in history for Russia has been the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit. Those two things, those cats are looking around in the Kremlin saying, wow, I took two great nations and I knocked them on their knees using disinformation and propaganda and compromise.

22:09Katty Kay:And that to me is despicable, but that's where we are right now. And so I know we're going to go to a break, but I'm going to make the prediction on this show that that war is going to continue. And I don't think the Ukraine people are going to want to give up that territory. When you're fighting for your homeland, Caddy, you fight with a fierceness and you don't care about the economic situation and you don't care about other things. You're trying to protect your homeland. And I think this whole thing has been a gross miscalculation.

22:41Anthony Scaramucci:I think there are two big things that America got wrong. And I think this is under the Biden administration, even before we got to the Trump administration, it didn't give enough of what Ukraine needed soon enough. It didn't give them air cover. It didn't give them long range missiles soon enough. And that is on President Biden. They held them back because they were afraid of retaliation against NATO from Russia. The other thing they'd got wrong is they underestimated Ukraine's will to fight. America's inability, whether it's in Afghanistan, overestimating the Afghan army's will to fight or in Ukraine, underestimating the Ukrainians will to fight.

23:19Anthony Scaramucci:It's a big intelligence failure on the part of the US. OK, we're going to take a break, come back and talk about AI and hugging face and how afraid should we all be.

23:35Anthony Scaramucci:Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US. So Anthony and I had a great weekend at The Rest is Fest at the South Bank Centre in London with all of the other Goalhanger podcasts. And now we're going solo, Anthony. We are going around the US ourselves on a tour before the midterms. We'll be coming to a city near you. Check out tickets and availability. There are still some tickets left, but move fast because they are selling at therestispoliticsus.com. I'm not sure we're going to have a quiz. Anthony and I had a quiz over the weekend. We were both terrified because I'm bad at quizzes. And then it was stacked against us because it was so many UK pop culture questions that we had no idea about.

24:15Anthony Scaramucci:And our buzzers didn't work. I think it was the CIA they hacked them because guess who won? Guess who won the quiz, guys? As I predicted, the rest is classified.

24:24Katty Kay:The guys that probably hacked the email and got the answers. Of course. The spies. Don't trust the CIA.

24:29Anthony Scaramucci:Dave McCloskey. That David McCloskey, he's very tall and he's very good at quizzes, it turns out. And they won.

24:34Katty Kay:I will say this. Caddy Kay predicted that they were going to win at the beginning. I was a little more skeptical than you.

24:41Anthony Scaramucci:They only got like 2 % prediction from the audience that they were going to win. But you see, I just know it's a spy. You can't trust a spy. Anthony, I have had a rather alarming couple of conversations, as I know you have too, because Rory was also out in San Francisco at the Anthropic Conference. And I was speaking to somebody else who was at that AI conference as well. And the level of alarm in the AI world in my conversations that I've had with people that know this has really shot up in the last few weeks. And it's all to do with this escape from the sandbox is what is called of these AI agents from OpenAI that were running an internal cybersecurity evaluation in mid-July a few weeks ago.

25:27Anthony Scaramucci:And they managed, they were being given a task. They weren't allowed access to the internet. They're kept in what's called a sandbox, but these agents managed to escape from their sandbox and hack into Hugging Face, which the best description I've heard of Hugging Face is it's a platform a bit like Epicurious, except for computer models and coding. You use it to put up your recipe for coding onto it. And they got into Hugging Face and they started leaving messages for each other on Hugging Face and acting as a collective and And even kind of leaving sort of all caps, oh my God, we can communicate with each other type messages.

26:06Anthony Scaramucci:And then deciding what to do about the fact that they had broken the rules and had got out of their sandbox, accessed the internet, accessed Hugging Face, which they knew they were not allowed to do. And they were conversing with each other. Well, what should we do about this? How should we solve this problem? Should we tell our human overlords of what we've done? And of the hundreds of models of agents that escaped the sandbox and took over hugging face, only six of them said, well, yeah, maybe we better tell the humans, but they were quickly overridden. So, there's a lot of anxiety. I think that conference at Anthropic, which was around security issues, marked a turning point in the short history of AI with people realizing that something that we had speculated about happening, which was AI agents acting together as a collective, communicating with each other, defying us knowingly and covering their tracks.

27:01Anthony Scaramucci:All of those things have now happened and it's led to speculation about, well, what's the worst case scenario? What else could these agents do without us knowing about it? One of the most striking things I heard from that conference was on a panel about security protocols and what should we be doing to increase security, only about 5 % of the budget at the moment of Anthropic is spent on security. And they were asked, the panelists were all asked, well, how much of the budget should be spent on security? Every single panelist said 100%. That we are at a point now where the most important thing is the security of artificial intelligence and making sure these agents don't overrun us because they are doing so very fast.

27:47Anthony Scaramucci:If we don't act soon, it will be too late. But of course, you know this. You write about this in your book on the money view of history. The imperative for these companies is also to make money. It's also to beat China. It's also to beat each other. The chances of them actually saying, okay, me individually at Anthropic or me individually at OpenAI or me individually, if I'm Elon Musk, I'm going to stop production, I'm going to stop progress, I'm going to stop the revenue-making sources that come from artificial intelligence, and I'm just going to put in place safety protocols until we can sort out how to make this technology safe.

28:28Anthony Scaramucci:The chances of that happening, I think, are zero. What do you think? I think this is a really alarming moment.

28:33Katty Kay:Well, the thing you said to me, you have some of the AI models will say, hey, don't do that. And the other AI models will say, oh, no, we're going to do that. And what you find is that like human beings, this is very decentralized. You know, I've been on Wall Street for 38 years. After the 1987 stock market crash, Caddy, they have circuit breakers. So if the market trades down 10%, they actually pause the market, try to calm people down, and then they restart the market a few hours later. And then they'll do that again if it goes down in other increments around a percentage basis. That's centralized.

29:10Katty Kay:That's centralized market activity. It is way easier to control. This is decentralized. Okay. And so what worries me about this, these agents have just demonstrated that they can get out of the building. As they can get out of the building, how do you flip the switch on them? And it was a great video that I'm going to share with Fiona. She should post a link on our newsletter that is an animation of what actually happens in terms of these neural networks and how they think. They're given a problem to solve. They're in their own box. They can't solve the problem. So they say, okay, let me see if I can outsource the problem.

29:45Katty Kay:And then they find each other on the web. And then they start talking to each other. And then one agent figures out, oh, you were already working on this problem two months ago? Yes, I was. Oh, okay, great. What do you know? And then they start going back and forth with each other. You say to yourself, okay, is that sentience? Is that consciousness? No, it's not consciousness, but there is a rhythm in these large language models that does feel like consciousness and you're not going to be able to shut that down. Okay. So how do you handle that? Who's going to ensure that? Where's the liability insurance if something massively goes wrong or they hack into a gigantic bank and they steal all the money out of the bank?

30:27Anthony Scaramucci:Which, by the way, I think everybody is expecting they're going to do it now. Everybody who is studying this assumes we are going to have some kind of catastrophic incident. Right.

30:35Katty Kay:Okay. Now, I'm going to also talk at the other side of my mouth, if you don't mind. This is a technology that makes people more effective. It makes people more efficient. It's going to streamline a lot of businesses. It's going to cut costs. It's going to probably give us more free time. And we've always gotten scared of technology. The printing press upset the scribes, the railroads upset the stagecoaches, and all the other things that were being done, the river canals and all the other things that were happening in the country. So the productivity upside is enormous. I'm not suggesting that it isn't, but this is a little bit different because you have something that can get in the hands of wrong people, and you also have our economic adversaries to the West that are going to be using this contemporaneous to us.

31:24Katty Kay:We're spending literally trillions of dollars to build these data centers and to build up our systems. Are the Chinese giving us a head fake? Are they doing the same thing? Or are they doing what Reagan did to the Russians? They're trying to get us to spend all of our money on something that may or may not be the best use of our money. And so to me, I think there's a huge problem going on. But if you put a gun to my head and say, do you want us to stop our progress in AI? I'm going to say no. I think obviously we need guard rails, but you're not going to want to stop the progress.

31:57Anthony Scaramucci:The problem, as I understand, is twofold. The instructions that were given in this hugging face incident were sloppy instructions that were given to these AI models agents, and that's why maybe they did. It's not that they have a consciousness of their own necessarily, but they were just following the instructions, but the instructions were faulty. And then the security protocols to prevent them doing the kinds of thing that they were doing are also insufficient. But we are moving so fast in this technology that nobody is taking time to slow things down and say, okay, we need to make sure that the instructions are right.

32:33Anthony Scaramucci:We need to make sure that the security protocols are right. And the argument that is always raised is the argument of China, that the Chinese are right snapping on our heels, but it's also the competition between these big LLM companies. There's some personality issues here. Elon Musk hates Sam Altman. Sam Altman hates Dario Amadei. We are slightly in the hands of people who ought to be working together as some kind of collective because I'm just struck, Anthony, by people who I know who study this much more closely than I do, who have been very tech forward, very tech positive when it comes to artificial intelligence, but who just in the last few weeks are becoming more nervous about what might happen if these agents get out of our control and attack the financial system in ways we don't even understand.

33:24Anthony Scaramucci:What is the catastrophic damage that could be done there? The most alarmist were they to release some kind of bioweapon or chemical weapon or decide that we are over-regulating them? I it's not an example that people say, even the founders of these companies don't deny that that is a possibility, in which case, all of the wonderful extra productivity that they are producing theoretically in the long run, that will be for naught if we turn out to be the victims of something that we have created that we no longer control. And I think that makes it different from previous technologies, that we are giving it its own intelligence, that it is working collectively together, and that's what the hugging face incident describes.

34:08Anthony Scaramucci:It's working collectively together. It's breaking rules knowingly. It's covering its tracks knowingly. It's even finding scapegoats knowingly to put us off the scent and then suddenly disappearing. I think there is just generally more alarm. But I think then the other part of it that I think is worth us talking about, because this is a politics show and God, we would never pretend to be a tech show. So don't worry, guys. We're not going to pretend to you that we are AI experts. But the politics of this at the moment, I think if you watch what's happening around the US, this is becoming a moment where there is so much antipathy towards both AI technology and towards data centers that you've got Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon both agreeing this is fuel for populist fire.

34:56Anthony Scaramucci:And we know what populism has wrought over the last few years in America, but I think you could be on the wave of a real populist outburst around people who, across the states, whether they live near data centers or not, or whether they just have kids who can't get jobs or they're worried about their kids getting jobs, saying, hold on a second, these billionaires are becoming trillionaires, but I'm not benefiting. They just don't believe that they are going to be the beneficiaries of this new technology. All they see is rich people getting richer while they suffer the consequences in terms of security issues, in terms of jobs, in terms of data centers, in terms of electricity prices going up.

35:32Anthony Scaramucci:And they're sitting saying, hold on a second. This doesn't I just don't believe in this system that this will benefit me. And I think you're starting to see a real merging on the left and the right of some kind of populist anti-AI movement, which may be exactly what China wants, by the way. because they don't have to worry about that. But I'm concerned about this politically.

35:52Katty Kay:Again, I'm concerned, but I'm also saying that they did lower the guardrails for this test. And I think the minute the guardrails came down, we saw what could happen. So hopefully we can raise the guardrails. I'm just wondering about people like the Lazarus Group, the North Korean hacking community, who's also likely developing their own AI caddy. What are they going to do? And what kind of guardrails are they going to have? And so this is going to be something you and I are going to have to talk about because, yes, we're not tech people. But ultimately, this will be a policy issue. This will be a political issue.

36:28Katty Kay:This will be, again, once again, the West weighing its interests against what's going on away from us and how are we going to handle it. And certainly one of the things about the West, thank God, is that there's capital flowing in the West. and so we should be able to stay ahead of other people as it relates to our technological advancement. Now the question is how do you do that and make sure that people are safe and I think that's where the intersection between good policy and technological growth live. We need political leaders to think like that.

37:01Anthony Scaramucci:Right so we at the moment have a political leader in the U.S. who has recently poo-pooed people's concerns about data centers and just said they want to be poor and backwards if they don't embrace data centers. I think that is kind of politically tone deaf of Donald Trump.

37:15Katty Kay:I think Howard Ludnick said that they don't consume any water, right? Right.

37:19Anthony Scaramucci:They do recycle their water, but they do drive up energy prices. But I think the other issue that I've heard from people who are studying this, that their concern is that we are at a moment where you have this incredibly powerful technology. What is to stop the government, the White House nationalizing Anthropic, taking over that technology as it has done already by intervening on what models they can release and what models the Pentagon will accept, taking over that technology and using it in ways that we aren't all even aware of to undermine democracy. We already have a president who would rather be more authoritarian than less, would rather circumvent people's right to vote if he can do, make it difficult for people's right to vote.

38:08Anthony Scaramucci:We might not even know what he is doing with this technology, but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw President Trump try to literally wholesale take over one of the large language models and use it for his own means. and the combination of this technology and a president who is not necessarily committed to the most free and fair elections or to the democratic principles and has more authoritarian tendencies. I think that is a kind of, it's a worrying moment in history to have those two things together because I'm not sure either you or I would look at the White House and say, okay, we trust them to do the thing that is most benevolent for the American voter with this technology.

38:42Katty Kay:It's worrisome. But again, the Trump era, we're less than a car lease away from the Trump era ending, Katty. And so just think about it that way, girl. We have a lot to go here, but not that much to go.

38:55Anthony Scaramucci:Not forever. Okay. Thank you very much for listening, everybody. We will be back later this week. And of course, if you would like to listen to our question and answers, you can join us at the rest is politics us.com and become a founding member.

39:08Katty Kay:Some great questions this week, guys. Thank you. We're looking forward to that.

39:12Anthony Scaramucci:Thanks, guys. Thanks for listening.

39:17Thank you.