Welcome to TechStuff, I'm Osvaloshin. Today, a special bonus episode featuring an exclusive
conversation with Peter Teal.
Well, I'm still not in the pause button camp, and I'm saying this on your show that I'm
not in the pause button we need to hit the accelerator as hard as possible.
It's Peter Teal talking about the debate over existential AI risks that engulf the leaders
of Frontier Labs, the President, and set at a global conversation a light.
The interview with Teal was recorded on Wednesday, September 16th, in Washington, D.C., and I'm
here with Mangesh Hattikina, my co-founder at Colliderscope.
Mangesh, how do we get the scoop from Teal?
I mean, this is an excerpt from Colliderscope's forthcoming podcast The Builders with Walter
Isaacson.
It is coming out in October, and you know, for the builders we had, Walter, sit down with
everyone from Peter Teal to Elon Musk, the Amadeus, Dario, and Daniella, I mean, the list
of names is insane, and we're kind of in search of this question from all of them, right?
Whose imagination do we want to live in?
But we're sharing this clip with the TechStuff audience early because, you know, Teal's comments
were so urgent and so timely that we just couldn't hold on to it until October, and you
know, we wanted people to get a peek, and Oz, I mean, I'm curious about this.
Did you think we'd get Peter Teal?
It has taken us almost one, like, a year to get the interview.
You flew to London.
We did so many calls, and I'm kind of just pinching myself that it happened.
We did.
We spent, we spent about a year working on the builders and booking the guests and, you
know, Peter Teal, Elon, others.
I mean, I think these types of interviews, like, you don't quite believe they're going
to happen until the person is literally sitting in the seat.
That is insane.
And, yeah, I mean, I wasn't sure they would happen because we got yeses and then long
delays and then maybe, and then pushed them back to yeses and stuff like that, but when
we finally got the approval from Teal, it was enormous because it's actually been more
than a year since he sit down for a formal interview.
I think the last one was with The New York Times and Rost Alpha, and obviously that made
a ton of waves, but part of the mystique is that he doesn't give that many interviews.
He doesn't.
And so we're very excited to share this clip.
We wanted to hit the accelerator as hard as possible.
You could say on publishing it.
The flip, so we'll come out on October 23rd.
The series actually launches on October 20th with the conversation with Elon Musk, but
in the meantime, here's the next step from the builders of Peter Teal in conversation
with Walter Isaacson.
We've seen this enormous backlash in the past few weeks, past few months against AI.
What is causing that?
Man, I agree with the what that it's happening.
Why questions are always much harder, much more speculative in nature.
I'm tempted to say it's somewhat over-determined.
It's very unclear who the winners and losers from AI will be.
I think it's going to add a lot to growth, but it will do so in a fairly disruptive kind
of a way.
There are, of course, these dystopian science fiction scenarios that, in some ways, we believe
and maybe they're not entirely unreasonable, so there's some small tale thing that will
all be white.
The Terminator movie, the Matrix, that Dario and Elon and Sam are now talking about that.
To some extent, they've leaned into it or partially believed it or too many of their employees
believed it.
There's some prehistory where this was in the air for a long time.
I think Elon believes it.
A decade.
Well, you know, it was in some ways when Demesis created DeepMind and it gets sold to Google
in the fall of 2013, Elon and Sam create OpenAI in the next year or so after that.
It's basically, in some ways, it's an anti-Google company.
It's what's closed AI, closed AI is Google and so this technology is too important, too
dangerous to be just, you know, in a single company.
And then, of course, in some ways, that's the narrative they have internally at OpenAI.
And then, of course, there are people who take it even more seriously than Altman.
I think Elon exits around 2018 and then by 2020, thereabouts is the seven people who start
an anthropic exit from OpenAI in some sense, they want to take these issues even more seriously
than before.
You know, the effective altruism, this idea had been in the air for a while, so I think
there's sort of an interesting way to explain that because people are now saying it's sort
of a siop sort of David's access, conspiracy theory of effective altruism and I think even
people like me really know what Sam Bankman-free was on about, well, you don't get that, tell
me about that.
Well, there's a lot of history, but even if you go back to the 2000s, there was, there
was in the East Bay of Silicon Valley, Berkeley, Oakland, some of those places, it wasn't
where the big tech companies were being built, but there was sort of a creativity with ideas.
It was a little bit adjacent to the, somewhat adjacent to the new atheists, like Richard
Dawkins and people like that, but then had sort of a specific tech angle and, you know,
how could you be more reasonable, rational, where was the world heading?
And one big idea that these sort of futurists kept coming back to was that perhaps something
like AI could happen that perhaps it was around, it was closer than people thought.
There had been an AI desert for a long time, it had been over-promise for many decades,
but on the other hand, you know, Moore's Law was still progressing, the computers were
relentlessly getting more powerful and perhaps it was not a question of necessarily a much
better algorithm, even though there were some of those things that happened on the algorithm
level, but perhaps it was just almost a hardware problem that once you got the chips and the
computers that were powerful enough, it would be more likely that something like this
would happen.
And then this would be a very, very big thing when it happened.
It would be, you know, in certain dimensions, computers were already smarter than people.
You know, it was what the late 1940s where computers had beat, you know, mathematicians
and who could do square roots faster, I was, you know, sort of a pretty good chess player.
And so, 1997, when deep blue beats Casparov, the IBM computer beat, just computer beats
Casparov, wow, you've solved chess and isn't chess the quintessentially human activity,
but there was sort of this idea by the mid-2000s that this was going to start happening in a
number of other domains, at some point the next, you know, next decade or two, and that
just would be an enormously socially transformed of thing, it was maybe potentially very dangerous,
it could be, maybe it could be weaponized, maybe there were these science fiction scenarios
where the AI would almost become autonomous, so there were sort of very many, very many
different kinds of scenarios.
And then there were of course parts of it that were, I don't know, crazy and almost
cult-like, but it had maybe the good dimension of a cult where there was one big thing they
knew that the other people did not.
I think even though there were ways, I'd like to be very critical of them today, there
were ways they got that one big thing right, and then has a cult ever started a company
as successful as anthropic, you know, I don't know, I don't know what the most successful,
I mean, like even a billion dollar company seems like bigger than a crazed cult could
build, so you have a cult that's built a company that's worth probably close to two trillion
at the IPO, probably be the, I don't know, sixth, seventh largest company by market cap in
the world built in like six, seven years, has a cult ever done something like that, so
yes, so I want to be critical of them and I, the things I'm uncomfortable and critical
about, but the first thing I would try to do is always, you always want to steal man
your points, you want to try to, you know, try to understand them as well as they understand
themselves or even make their arguments better, and the way I would steal man the effective
altruists is first off, they got, they got one enormously big thing right, and that one
enormously big thing is AI is around the corner, but also that it could become misaligned
with human values, and then of course, if AI is, the way AI was classically defined,
let's say, there were all these different definitions of AI, of course, it was, you know,
it could be just sort of machine learning and sort of like maybe cameras everywhere or
something like that sort of totalitarian AI that you have in China, or it could be, it
could be the sort of super duper AI with a godlike intelligence or something, which was
sort of the Nick Bostrom kind of fantasy, but the in-between version of AI was not that
it would be this dumb surveillance cameras, not that it would be godlike, but it would
be like a human being, that had been the AI test, the touring test from the beginning
was.
it's not that it is a human being,
but that can fool you into thinking.
It's a person.
And from the outputs, you can't tell the difference.
And yeah, that's gonna be a very, very big deal.
And it raises even basic economic questions.
Is it economic complement to people?
Is it a substitute for people?
Well, let's do both.
There's two big things it raises.
One is, what will it do to human labor?
You know, will it create more jobs and more productivity?
Or will it pretty much put us out of work
and we'll have to figure out what we do?
That's part of the backlash, especially in mice.
- Yes.
- Dude, it's a delay in your life.
- Yes.
- Wait a minute.
So tell me your feeling about that backlash.
- Okay, so let me start by answering
what I think will happen with a qualifier
that nobody really knows and nobody can be certain.
I think in aggregate on a macroeconomic level,
AI will increase productivity a lot.
It will be a fairly disinflationary force in our economy.
And then unless it's incredibly narrowly captured
by a few companies, you'd expect the median person
to be better off or things like that.
This was, you know, the Luddites in the 19th century
always worried that the machines would replace the people.
And then of course, what happened in practice was,
yeah, there was definitely various industries,
sometimes even big industries where there was a lot of disruption.
But then it would free people up to do more productive things,
to do other things.
And that would still be my intuition with AI.
- But real quick, before you go on,
you said unless it's captured by a few companies,
are you worried that indeed we're about to have
four or five companies captured?
- Yeah, most of the history of tech innovation,
I would say for 200, 250 years,
relatively small parts of the innovation
were captured by business.
They mostly went to consumers, to workers,
to the rest of the economy.
There are ways that software and the internet
were somewhat of an exception.
And so we had these enormously successful businesses.
Maybe they were natural monopolies of sorts.
They were in some sense good for consumers,
but also extremely profitable.
And there was something about,
if you have a single e-commerce company,
like Amazon, that dominates e-commerce,
it can be cheaper for consumers,
because you have one super efficient system of warehouses,
but then you also can have very large monopoly profits.
So there is a way that a lot of the value gets captured
by one or a few big internet businesses.
And so there's a pattern matching to what happened
with the internet that I think people,
quite reasonably are worried about will happen with AI,
that it's an even bigger market.
It's a bigger technology.
And so perhaps--
- So you would try to stop that.
And in other words, our antitrust is--
- Well, the question is,
is that how likely do you think that's going to happen?
The intuition that I have on the other side
is that one of the questions I always like asking companies
is tell me why you have a monopoly, because we can sort of
bait whether they're good or bad for society.
Obviously, we have IP.
We have all kinds of good forms of monopoly.
But on the inside, yeah, you don't want to have
just cutthroat competition where all the profits
get competed away.
And the kind of narratives people tell me
when they pitch me on AI companies,
their narratives of growth, of terrific technology,
they are incredibly weak on the monopoly story.
And then the felt sense of it
is that it's like this incredibly fast, dynamic race,
where it's been changing a lot.
Deep mind and the sense was in the lead in the early 2010s,
then OpenAI with Chatchee between the transformer models
was able to replace that.
And then in some ways, Altman locked up a lot of the chips
and built the data centers preemptively,
so there were all sorts of ways.
He correctly leaned into us.
Incredibly complex, intensive strategy.
And then there's still is a sense where maybe Anthropic
is a little bit more in the poll position now
than OpenAI was.
And it's always hard to exactly score these things,
but I would say that it also still feels
that Google and Meta and Grog are not that far behind.
I'm not sure China is that far behind.
So it feels, if we describe it on the level
of the Shakespearean drama among these people,
it's like really crazy.
So they are acting like, man, it is a fight to the death.
It is the furthest thing from a monopoly imaginable.
And if it's not a monopoly, that's where I think
the benefits will be likely distributed
pretty widely in society.
Now, if I had a steel man, the anxiety,
which was your starting question,
I think you could have a lot of growth
and the median person could be better off.
But if it's with a lot of volatility,
you expect to get a 3% wage hike,
but it's plus or minus 10%.
Or something like that.
And we're kind of in this society
that doesn't really like risk, doesn't like
that sort of volatility.
It doesn't like disruption.
The universities are in some ways.
All still very geared towards these 20th century industries,
these 20th century tracks.
And then maybe these tracks still work,
maybe some of them get disrupted a lot.
So maybe good for the median person,
the good may be sort of unknown.
The bad things are more predictable
and the disruptions clear.
So I think even on the economic level,
I can understand the anxiety,
even though I think it is misguided.
Well, you talk about there being a lot of competition
among these, and that seems like generally a good thing.
Although in some ways, if we're just one or two companies,
you could control it better, regulated for safety better.
And secondly, the competition,
either amongst these companies or with China,
means you can't pause the way people are saying now,
shouldn't we be pausing this?
That seems correct to me.
And there's sort of all these very complicated questions
one can ask about China, but I worry about totalitarianism.
I don't like it.
And I think there is a certain type of high-tech
totalitarianism that's being tried out in China.
It's not as violent as Stalin or Mao or Hitler.
You don't need to kill as many people.
But it can go to the inner recesses of your thoughts.
And it knows more about you than you know about yourself.
And there's something about that that we really don't
want that to be the model that wins.
And your old friend, David Sachs, and of course,
President Trump, are now just very recently saying,
because of the competition with China,
stop talking about pausing AI.
Even if you think it could be an existential threat.
Do you agree with that?
Yes, yes.
I broadly agree with that, and friends with David Sachs
for many decades, the thing that makes me less
comfortable making those kinds of arguments publicly
is that on some level, it's hard when the big companies
themselves are telling you to stop and to slow down.
So that caused you to have some pause.
Because you were not in a pause button camp.
Well, I'm still not in the pause button camp.
And I'm saying this on your show that I'm not in the pause
button.
We need to hit the accelerator as hard as possible.
Well, wait a minute, let me stop that.
Why haven't the past few weeks caused you
to be more amenable to a pause button?
I mean, anthropic is a call hitting the accelerator.
Monopolys are maybe good.
The peak into his mind is so fascinating.
And obviously, that is just a snippet.
And Teal gets into so much more.
He certainly does.
We'll be publishing the builder's feed very soon.
We'll be promoting it on tech stuff, of course.
But come back on October 28th of the conversation
with Elon Musk and October 23rd for the full conversation
with Peter Teal.
We can't wait for you to listen.
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