Larry Ellison’s Media Ambitions & Kevin Roose on AI’s Biggest Gamble

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I think I do know people on the extremes who are, you know, liquidating their 401ks. I know, a person who took up smoking cause they thought AI is gonna kill us all, so we might as well have some fun on the way out. I know someone who doesn't wear sunscreen to the beach anymore, because it's just kinda like, why bother?

Speaker 5

From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also chief correspondent at Business Insider. And today we're talking about the man who's become one of the most important figures in media. We're also talking about maybe the end of the world. Those are two separate conversations, by the way. First up, a dive into Larry Ellison, the 82-year-old billionaire.

He's one of the 10 richest men in the world who bought his son, David Ellison, a media empire, the companies we used to call Paramount and Warner Brothers. We are now calling them Skydance. It is weird that we have a character who's the eighth richest man in the world. He's tight with Donald Trump. He's very tight with Elon Musk. He's now connected to both TikTok and a traditional media conglomerate, and we don't know that much about him.

Luckily, writer Tan To Tan has a big new profile of Ellison in Vanity Fair, so now we know a bit more. The big question we have, obviously, why is a tech guy who's never shown much interest in media before now very much interested in media? Tom's answer may not be what you think.

And then we're talking about whether AI will kill us, or failing that, radically transform the world. But we're really talking about the men who brought us to this moment and why they built AI, even though they believe they're building incredibly dangerous technology. That's all on the AGI Chronicles, Kevin Roose's excellent new book, which could not be more timely.

Since we are currently in a debate about how we're going to responsibly use this technology, or whether we're just going to be incredibly irresponsible. And because we like to talk about this kind of thing, we also talk about Kevin's high-profile departure from the New York Times and why that kind of departure is going to become the new normal.

One note on my chat with Kevin, we recorded this before Trump's AI summit, where the president decreed that we will not regulate AI, or in his words, we're going to self-regulate. That is not remotely surprising, as we noted in the conversation, this has been the stance that Trump and his tech backers have been pushing for a while. Just wanted to explain why we're not discussing it here.

Okay, that is a long preamble for two good chats. Let's get to them now. First, here's me talking to Tom Dotan.

Tom Dutton, welcome to Channels. Thanks for coming on. Thanks so much, Peter. You most recently have written for Vanity Fair. This is an article I tried to incept for at least a couple years. I kept saying, someone should write a story about Larry Ellison. He's one of the world's richest men. He founded Oracle. He's buddies with Donald Trump.

He owns a Hawaiian island. He is now a part owner of TikTok in the US, and he is financing his son's foray into media, which means he now owns Paramount and Warner Brothers. We're now calling that company Skydance. He finally did it, so thank you.

Speaker 6

Yeah, well, I would see the tweet, not necessarily yours, but from other people from time to time, and the line was always, I really want someone to do a good story about Larry Ellison. You did it. I don't know if I provided that, but I definitely did a story about Larry Ellison.

Speaker 5

It's called Inside Larry Ellison's Wide Web of Power, Money, and Politics. It's Vanity Fair right now. You should go read it. This is a podcast where we concern ourselves about media and technology, so let's get right to the media part. Sure, let's do it. I've just laid out Larry Ellison's media empire. His son, David, runs the company we're now calling Skydance, but Larry Ellison is the one who gave him tens of billions of dollars to buy that.

He also owns, I think, a third of what we're calling US TikTok. I don't know if it has a better name. There are two sort of theories of the case. One is this is a grand plan by Larry Ellison and his son to command a big part of the world's information structure. TikTok alone is very important. You're adding CNN, multiple movie studios. And the other is he's just bought some stuff.

So

Speaker 6

which one of these is truer? Yeah. The, the, the unfortunate thing is that the grand plan thing is so much more interesting and, or I shouldn't say more interesting. It's so much easier to understand, you know, because there are truly billionaires out there who do buy things with the intent to control vast media empires. Like you have people like the Murdochs or, or even, you know, from a political standpoint, I know this is not a politics podcast, but you have people like, you know, the Koch brothers or, or, you know, George Soros who have a very specific political, political project.

Elon Musk bought the

Speaker 5

site normally known as Twitter and, and for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is clearly to use it in a political way.

Speaker 6

Right, right. Yeah, and Elon and Larry are close on and off. And so it's, again, really easy to make a connection that you see Larry and you see all the things that he's purchasing, you know, largely through David, but also, you know, the Oracle's 15% ownership stake in US TikTok and say, oh, this guy has a grand plan. He has a project. He's trying to, you know, push his worldview onto everyone who is on their phones or TV or on the internet.

And the reality is, as I kind of got to in this story, is it's just not like that. I think he has certain interests. He has politics for sure, which we can talk about. But if you want to say that there's a unified theory, a project, something that could span administrations or generations. I just don't see it. I, I, I think there's a lot more.

Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 5

So how did he end up owning a media empire? It's not by accident, right? He's put his own money into it. So how, how did that come about?

Speaker 6

Right. And to that degree, I also don't want to downplay it. Like this is, as Bernie Sanders put it to me, and I, and I put in this story, that is a lot of, you know, media to be owned by one family, specifically a family that's close to Trump. So we need to take that seriously. But, you know, if you trace the origins of this stuff back, even like, you know, more than a decade ago, Larry is not interested in media.

You have people from his generation of Silicon Valley, like Steve Jobs, who really were, you know, Steve is close with Bob Iger. He's someone who starts Pixar. you know, even you look at, at Elon Musk, when he goes off and buys Twitter, it's for a very specific political cause, or at least a free speech cause. Larry, by the way, gives a billion dollars towards this.

So he's, he's complicit in, in that vision. But

You know, he was involved. I'll get to the, to the David stuff in a second, because, you know, one of the things that came up in my reporting was that Larry is very close to Benjamin Netanyahu, a huge supporter of his, hosts them in Lanai, and he's also wrapped up in the Hawaiian island that he owns. Yes, right, which we can talk about too, if you want to spend some time there.

I've gotten Vanity Fair and the Wall Street Journal to pay for me to go, to go to Lanai.

Speaker 5

See, journalism is fun.

Speaker 6

Yeah, yeah, exactly. He's, he's actually wrapped up in the, the corruption investigation that Netanyahu has. And,

he's talking to investigators, this is Ellison, and they ask him about this accusation of, of Netanyahu wanting to buy an Israeli newspaper that was owned by one of his political rivals, in an attempt to kind of silence someone who was saying bad things about Netanyahu. And, and Larry's response to, supposedly to, to, to Bibi, but also to the investigators is like, I'm a tech CEO.

I'm not a newspaper guy. That's not my interest. and this is 2015 or so, so it's possible things can change. But what really happens here is that David, who's running Skydance, which is, I think we can agree, like a moderately successful production company. Like they, they co-produce the, you know, the Star Trek movies and Mission Impossible.

Speaker 5

His, his main claim to fame is, becoming a guy who finances Tom Cruise movies. And I don't mean that in a dismissive term, like that's the job of a producer. He has aligned himself with Tom Cruise, who makes gigantically successful movies, except for this last and so that, but that's what he did. He, he wasn't running a, a full-fledged media company.

He was producing movies.

Speaker 6

Right, and I don't think anyone in Hollywood, you know, which I used to cover along, you know, along with you guys and, and that whole crew of people, saw them as a juggernaut. They were kind of this interesting media company, but the fact is David takes a look at the media landscape and sees the consolidation that's happening, sees the fact that every one of these, you know, traditional media companies that's going into streaming is struggling.

They don't have enough scale. And he's like, and this is an idea that many media executives get in their head at a certain point, like, well, why don't we just combine forces? Why don't we scale this thing up? Why don't we build, you know, something that can really compete with Netflix, or increasingly Amazon or, or YouTube, which is very hard to do.

And he's like, well, I got the money. I have the money to do it, because of his father. It wouldn't be possible without Larry. There's just no question. Like it, yeah, Redbird is involved and, and of course, like all these things, it's a huge amount of debt, but this is Larry's money. He's very informed about everything. I don't want to say he's, he's not in the mix, but David really wants to make it clear that like, I'm not just, you know, daddy's scion trying to, to make this, this happen on his behalf.

this is very important to him.

Speaker 5

Your piece essentially suggests that since Larry Ellison didn't spend much time raising David or Megan, his first two kids, he tried to make up for them by bankrolling them in Hollywood. Megan ran Annapurna Studios, made a lot of really great and, movies, well-respected, disaster financially, and then now he's doing the same

Speaker 6

for David. Again, this is not his world. He's not a media person. and he does have Very conflicted feelings about the way he, you know, how involved he was with his children. Both Megan and David are the, you know, the result of his third marriage. Larry is very not involved with them in the earliest years, and then both of them decide that they want to get involved in the industry.

He sets them up with Skip Brittenham and Ken Ziffrin of this powerhouse law firm, you know, Ziffrin Brittenham, which is more than I would do for my kid.

Speaker 5

My parents bought me a Toyota Tercel after I left college, so. The TikTok element is the working theory there that he owns Oracle. It's a way for Oracle to be involved with the big technology company. That's what they do is they sell technology to other technology companies, and it's that

Speaker 6

straightforward? Yeah. I mean, look, Oracle's cloud computing business, which is a huge part of the future of that company, is the host TikTok's algorithm. and, and is responsible for the security of the algorithm, it's a good business you want to have a piece of. I mean, I think it's not a huge amount more than that. they were involved in the, in the Trump, you know, during Trump's first administration when TikTok US first came on the table.

There were other suitors involved. Microsoft really wanted a piece of it. For a time, it was going to be Walmart and Oracle owning this thing. so there's legitimate business reasons to want to have a piece of this thing.

Speaker 5

So the idea that, that he's knitted together this incredibly valuable, media tech platform in TikTok, and then another thing that should be a very valuable media empire that owns things like CNN and CBS News and has all kinds of soft power, that just happens to be something that he owns, and it's not because of a, a grand plan.

Speaker 6

I just didn't get that. And, and I think you, you need to see the, the contours of a grand plan for you to assume that one exists. You know, I don't even think David's all that interested in the news business. I think he cares a lot about... Oh, he's never

Speaker 5

shown any evidence of, of being, it seems like something he has bought because it's with the other stuff. Yeah. That he cares about, which are movie studios and television and streaming. Let's talk briefly about Larry Ellison's politics.

he, he, we said multiple times, he's, he's aligned with Trump. He's become a Trump donor, but he's, prior to this, he was not someone you would describe as a conservative Republican.

Speaker 6

No. Not at all. I mean, again, like a lot of people, it's hard to find a specific through line in politics. People vacillate a lot. He's very close to Bill Clinton. He told people that I talked to for this story that he thought Bill Clinton was the best politician of his lifetime. There's some reporting, I think in a Playboy interview in the nineties with Ellison, where he talked about clubbing with Bill Clinton.

I don't know what that means because Bill was the president and Larry doesn't drink, so it just doesn't sound like that good at the time. Who knows what happens on airplanes? Yeah. So, so he's, he's close to other Democrats, you know, in the nineties. And then as I kind of traced out talking to a lot of sources, he, he takes a turn, in the two thousands.

He really is incensed by Obama. He found him to be, anti-Israel, which is truly an animating issue for, for Larry. I mean, if anything could be counted as a political project, it's, it's his support of, of the state of Israel.

Speaker 5

And I, and I want to pause there because your, your piece says that was, didn't seem to be an animating factor for him for a long time. He wasn't someone who would say, I'm, I'm deeply committed to the Israeli state until recently-ish?

Speaker 6

No, he wasn't really raised particularly religious. He only goes to Israel for the first time in 2007, relatively late in life, you would think for someone who cares so deeply about the state. But, but after that, it really takes quite a, you know, a more direct, turn to Supporting the state. He gives the largest ever donation to an IDF charity.

you know, I, I saw in emails that, that ended up being leaked out that when he supported various Republican candidates for president, he wanted to ensure that they were big time supporters of the state of Israel, like that was a litmus test for him. and then Obama, you know, back to him, as he's president, he feels that he is insufficiently supportive of the state.

He thought that the Iran nuclear deal was a disaster and was going to hurt the country. and so you start to see between that and then his close, increasingly close relationship with Elon Musk, you know, a kind of tech MAGA Republican.

Speaker 5

So Israel seems to be an animating factor for him. It also seems to be the one thing David Ellison cares about politically. Again, just to beat this into the ground, but you don't think that TikTok and these media companies will be sort of tilted in any way to support Israel. That's not why they're in that business.

Speaker 6

I, I think it's something that we should watch very closely. you know, this is, it's an incredibly powerful tool, TikTok. I mean, the number of people whose opinions are shaped by the algorithm is, is unfathomable. talking to Oracle, they're extremely defensive about this and, and very combative about any suggestion that they're influencing the algorithm one way or the other.

You know, they have this independent board. TikTok itself is, you know, Oracle only owns 15% of it, so they don't have a larger stake than, you know, than Silverlake, than Andreessen Horowitz, you know, the ByteDance, the, you know, once controlling company behind it. Like, they, they have a pretty huge stake. So it, it would be pretty difficult for them to kind of arbitrarily or directly move the algorithm in a way that just surfaces pro-Israel content.

That said, that said, you know, when you look at the relationship between Larry and Netanyahu, who, as I report in the piece, the day after the deal is signed is giving a kind of private, has a private conference with influencers in which he says directly, we need to fight with the battle, you know, the battle that is being waged right now with the tools that people are using and social media is the number one tool.

And what is going on with TikTok right now is the most important thing that we should be paying attention to. This is a rough paraphrase, but

you don't have to look too far to connect the dots to say, Larry is close to people who believe TikTok is an incredibly valuable weapon in, you know, the propaganda wars that Israel is very focused on right now. And You know, I think the burden should still be on let's find direct evidence of them doing these things, but paying attention to it, it would be stupid not to.

Speaker 5

Let's talk about the money. The reason David Ellison can run Skydance, we're just going to call it Skydance now, is because of his dad, and the reason his dad can do that is because of Oracle. Oracle's value shot up last fall during one of these AI boomlets, making him briefly the richest man in the world. He's now, that fortune has been cut in half, so now he's eighth.

You're starting to see chatter saying, wait a minute, Oracle is completely now tied up in this AI build-out, maybe something goes wrong there. And then also, you know, Larry Ellison is one of the richest men in the world, but he still put tens of billions of dollars into this Paramount deal, sorry, Paramount, Warner Brothers slash Skydance.

Right. Is there a concern that, that one or the other could, could tip him into some kind of trouble, even given his enormous resources?

Speaker 6

Yeah. In one sense, it's kind of insane to think about someone with that much wealth being, you know, in a precarious situation.

You know, and we're talking about someone who's worth $200 billion. The amount, the amount of money that he's committed personally to it is relatively small. But it's also a third of his shares that are like made available as collateral, for him to, use for personal, personal reasons. and there's forty billion dollars in backstop of the Warner Brothers deal.

there's the money that he's given directly to Paramount, to, to Skydance for the Paramount acquisition. And the fact is, it has gone from three hundred and something dollars a share from when it was at its peak to like, I think it's at one forty, or, or something now. I mean, that's a dramatic drop off in, in, in wealth. And I, I think you're probably looking to like the Bloomberg story that came out over the weekend that was starting to point out that like, you know, the, the debt that is rolled up in the Skydance, Paramount, Warner Brothers acquisition is directly linked to Larry's debt and his, and his stake in Oracle and, and, you know, Oracle shares as collateral,

and that's increasingly risky. and there was a very bizarre moment a couple of weeks ago where you saw Larry, or, or Oracle listing that, Larry was going to be selling billions of dollars of his shares, which he hasn't done in decades, really, or at least a decade. It would have been one of the largest share sales he ever did, and then they pull back.

I don't have an answer as to why that happened, but there's a lot that I think if you're, as a media person, you're looking at this entity, It's not simply like, an answered question to say like, oh, well, Larry's so rich, it's all going to be fine. Oracle is not just taking on huge amounts of debt to fund data centers. They're funding, it's huge amounts of debt to fund data centers for one company, basically, for OpenAI.

So the linkage between- What could go wrong? Right, right. Yeah, it's not like these guys aren't burning billions and billions of dollars a year on a product that is like debatably, debatably under very small circumstances profitable. I mean, it's crazy to think about at this scale, but it's like all very rickety, a lot of the, you know, the structures in place here.

But that said, like, I haven't seen anything yet to show that Larry's going to be margin cold. That's sort of an insane thing to think about, and that would be a doomsday scenario, where you would see Oracle having to lay off huge amounts of people or, you know, Paramount, Skydance, Warner Brothers having to, you know, significantly cut costs more than they're already going to have to anyway.

Speaker 5

Yes, they're, they're already, they already have to come up with six billion dollars, which they say won't be that many layoffs. So channels, listeners, if you haven't read this article in Vanity Fair, go read it. Tom, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Peter. This is great. Thanks again to Tom Doton. In a minute, we're going to hear from Kevin Roos, but first this.

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Speaker 5

And we're back. I'm here with Kevin Roos, most recently the New York Times tech columnist and podcaster. He's now about to be the co-host of NPR's Machine Gods. We're going to talk about that a little later. Right now, I want to talk to the Kevin Roos, who's the author of the AGI Chronicles, a deeply reported book about the birth of AI. I'm holding it in my hand, which you can't see because this is an audio-only format.

Welcome, Kevin. Hey, Peter. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on. My condolences, you spent all this time on this really good book, and now Donald Trump has obviated it. We no longer call AI AI. It is super intelligence. You're going to have to rewrite your book. I'm sorry about that. But let's talk about what's in the book. You call AI the most important story in the world.

I think to a lot of people, that seems self-evident. But for those of us who might still not quite understand why this is so important, why you devoted a book, why you're devoting really your life to talking about this, what are we, what are people who don't fully embrace this as the most important story in the world, what are they not getting?

Speaker 4

I think the, the trajectory is what they're not getting. I mean, this is a technology that basically ten years ago when the book starts, didn't work. There was no such thing as real AI in 2016. the leading chatbots of the time, were very bad. There was Siri and Alexa, which could do almost nothing valuable, and some of them still can't. But in the past decade, we have gone from that to now systems that are capable of solving, unsolved, you know, century-old problems in math and science, that are capable of building entire software programs from scratch, that are capable of passing, you know, graduate-level courses on any subject.

it is really a remarkable technology, and it's gotten very good very quickly. And so I think the, the thing that I want to just impress upon people is that this, this was not a surprise to the people building this technology. Ten years ago, these were free Fringe weirdos in San Francisco who had been mostly ostracized by their peers in academia and industry because they believed in this thing, AGI, which is sort of the AI system that can do everything the human mind can.

And they were considered incredibly strange. And they would hang out and have panels and throw conferences and write papers, and people would just sort of dismiss them as lunatics. But they kept working on it, and some of these people now are among the most famous people in the world. And so the book is really my attempt to kind of get down the origin story of this technology.

How did this happen, and how did these weirdos end up running these giant companies?

Speaker 5

Yeah, I want to talk about the weirdos and the origin story. Before we get there, something that comes up a lot, I see and hear you talking about a lot, is you say, hey, all you people who are sort of skeptics by nature, and or you're skeptical about tech, and or you have a memory that goes back to 2020, 2021, it's easy for you to find examples of the tech industry getting very excited about things like crypto or Web3 or the metaverse.

Those are the most recent. These are things that I think you personally were interested in for a while,

and it seems to be that your argument is What, it seems to be what you're saying is people have misunderstood, they think this is another tech hype bubble. How do you convince them that they're, they're, this time it's real?

Speaker 4

I mean, I think it starts by just using the tools. I don't think you can actually understand AI unless you spend time working with or talking to one of the frontier models. this is a mistake I think a lot of people make. You know, they tried ChatGPT when it came out in 2022, and maybe they use, you know, the, the AI overviews next to their Google search, or maybe they use...

To make pizza with rocks. Right, maybe they use Copilot at work or something, which has sort of a couple generations old model on it, and they don't, as a result, they don't really understand what people are talking about or getting excited about or scared of, because to them, it seems like this is just a sort of smarter Google search, and, it doesn't work all that well for things that I need her to do, and so why are people freaking out about the end of the world? So I think that's step one is people just really need to familiarize themselves with the tools.

Not because it's necessarily going to help them, not because it's going to make them excited, but just because you have to understand the sort of substrate of the conversation, of where you're having a conversation.

Speaker 5

Shouldn't, shouldn't you be able to go, this is the mainstream product that's available today. That's what I should look at, not something that's in a lab that I can't touch and maybe isn't ready for, for full release, right? There's no other, we don't ask people who are trying to understand other products and say, well, go look at the farthest cutting edge, right? We say, what's, what's in the market?

Speaker 4

Well, you have to understand what people are worried about. Like if you're, if you're trying to understand why people are worried about like, you know, autonomous drones in military warfare, you can't leave them with the impression that people are still using muskets. You know, like it just doesn't, none of the anxieties map onto the technology if your impression of the technology is dated.

So it just all sounds crazy until you start talking with people building this stuff and using the frontier models that are, are themselves dated relative to what the insiders.

Speaker 5

And since most of us are not going to get into frontier labs and are not doing that research, we're relying on you to be the translator for us. That's the goal here. The origin story you're talking about, obviously it's important to learn about an origin story because it's important to learn about how things came to be. And in this case, it seems like the weird culture, I'm using weird non-pejoratively, that AI came out of is really integral to the, the worldview of the people who are running AI right now.

It's also being used as a weapon against them, we're seeing just very recently. But talk a little bit about, there's a lot of terms get thrown around, effective altruism, rationalism. It's kind of hard to sort of track all the things. Can you sort of summarize That worldview of people in 2016 who were playing with AGI and who are in many cases now running these, these companies?

Speaker 4

Yeah, there's a really fun, detail in the book that I, I would just sort of use to anchor this in a, in a moment in time, which is that in, in 2016, there was this, there was this group house, in San Francisco where a bunch of these people lived together. Dario Amadei, now the CEO of Anthropic, Daniela Amadei, now Anthropic's president, Holdern Karnofsky, her husband now, Chris Ola, Paul Cristiano, like all these sort of names from, AI.

All lived in one house. They were all living together in this group house. Where they would sort of, you know, go off to their jobs at tech companies during the day, and then at night they would sort of sit around and like talk about these issues of existential risk, of how could AI go rogue and kill us all. They were very much steeped in the discourse of this particular community, called, you know, sometimes called the rationalists, sometimes called effective altruism.

there are some sort of arcane differences between them that probably aren't worth, worth going into. But basically the lineage is there are these people in, the Bay Area mostly who thought to themselves in about the sort of early to mid 2010s, Well, we are concerned by how quickly things are moving in AI. And so instead of trying to use our, intellect and our skills to sort of prevent, you know, global pandemics or avert global health crises, which are some of the things that, effective altruists have been concerned with before that, we really are concerned about long-term risk from AI.

And so they started investing and, you know, sort of raising money for AI safety nonprofits. They started training young people to go into the field of AI safety research. and this was a huge, an important lever of, influence

Speaker 5

within this community. And to be clear, right, they're saying, we think this technology could be existentially dangerous. We can talk about the danger in a second. Thus, we are going to work really hard to help build this technology. Can you help sort of unpack that?

Speaker 4

Yeah, I think the, the thing that they saw was, that the technology was improving rapidly. There's this, there's this great, Dario Amodei essay from, 2017 called The Big Blob of Compute Hypothesis, where he talks about how basically if you want to make these systems smarter, the best way to do that is just to make them bigger. Feed them more stuff.

Everything else sort of flows from that. And so I think they saw, well, if this is just a simple recipe of like, you put in more compute and you put in, put in more data and you train the model for longer and out comes more intelligence, then someone's going to figure that out eventually. It's not that complicated. And so when people figure this out, there will be this race.

And, this technology will be so strategically important and will have so many economic and military and political benefits to whoever creates it, that everyone's going to join the race. And if we want The world to be okay, we have to win the, we, we, the good guys, quote unquote, have to win the race, because otherwise it is only a matter of time before someone else wins the race.

And that would be bad for all kinds of reasons. So that, I'm not saying that's like the correct justification for racing, but that is, that is their story that they told themselves for participating in the thing that they knew would be dangerous.

Speaker 5

And when the New York Post or J.D. Vance or anyone is saying, you know, these guys are all weird and, and they're pushing regulation and, and they're, they're specifically trying to sort of caricature these people as not mainstream and weird. What, what, is there truth to that? Yes, they're weird.

Speaker 4

Like it's, it, it's a type of weird that I think I've become, habituated to in the Bay Area because everyone's weird here. What kind of weirdness are we talking about? I mean, you had to be weird in 2016 to be worried about existential risk from AI. Like that was, not only was it a, a, a sort of fringe topic within academia, but it was just, it was a crazy thing to worry about with the technology of the day.

And so, yes, they were, they were somewhat weird in the sense that they took

Speaker 1

This stuff very seriously, very early. And then, you know, there, there are these kind of like weird figures in the movement. One guy right about in the book is, is, Eliezer Yudkowsky, who's sort of the, the sort of messianic, father figure of AI safety. Big

Speaker 2

beard, looks weird, does not look like someone you want touching anything, let alone your technology.

Speaker 1

Right. And, you know, there are, there are, there, it's just a, it's a, it's a sort of, it is an insular culture unto itself. There are sort of rituals and jargon and websites where they all post together. So I understand why for people coming in at sort of midway through the conversation and looking at these people and say, wait, you, you are all sort of socially connected through this like community of people.

You literally

Speaker 2

live together or are married to each other.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Like that seems weird. That seems like a conspiracy maybe. but it, it all stems from the belief that these people shared, which is really what brought them together. That AI was going to be transformative, that it could potentially be dangerous and even an extinction level threat to humanity. And it was that belief that sort of brought them together more than we want to like someday control these companies that are going to achieve regulatory capture.

Speaker 2

So I feel like in the last few weeks, the, the sort of holy cow, maybe AI is going to be really bad for a lot of us. Broken out of those circles, out of my circles. It's now a Joe Rogan thing. It's on regular television. It's being discussed all around the world. I think people are still sort of fill in the blanks when they imagine what this is, what's bad about this.

Sometimes it's as basic as I could lose my job or my children will never get a job. or a bad guy can use this tech to make a new bio weapon. And then there's the, actually the machines are just going to replace us and it's going to be the matrix and we're just going to be blood bags. Is there a sort of, is there a version of that that is most consistent with this EA,

effective altruism rationalist world that you're describing? Are they imagining the worst where the machines actually rise up or something less terrible?

Speaker 1

I think they're envisioning a whole continuum of potential outcomes. You know, people often talk about P doom, which is the sort of single, you know, sort of viral statistic that people like to share, which is sort of encapsulates their, their probability that we'll all die. But there's, there's other Ps, right? There's like P disempowerment, there's P pandemic, there's P, you know, various other, like P everyone loses their jobs.

these people are, are sort of, worried by, by nature and worried by temperament. But I think even in a case where like we, we, we sort of survive, but we, we are essentially this,

Kind of disempowered, species, that AI is making all the decisions and, you know, all the money and, humans are just kind of the, the pets. that doesn't seem great to me. That, like, there are, there are situations where we stay alive, but, like, things kind of suck.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, we're just kind of sitting. what, what is, what is the best argument for what is to be done, right? The, the folks who launched headlong into this tech said, we have to get there before anybody else so we can handle it responsibly. How do they envision the handling responsibility part working? There's a lot of analogies made to, like, Oppenheimer and the nuclear bomb.

Those were really complicated efforts that took tons of resources that literally only a couple of countries could do at the time, and then that helped sort of contain the spread of, of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. It seems like that's not applicable here.

Speaker 1

I mean, it, it could be applicable. We would just have to do it a lot faster, because the technology is, is, proliferating much more quickly than, than nuclear weapons. So

Speaker 2

what, what, what, what would we do?

Speaker 1

Oh, you can imagine a whole, like, inspections regime where you'd have something like the UN, you know, some, some sort of standards, body with inspectors that would go into the labs and inspect their training runs and see are the models, you know, doing dangerous things. There's already been some proposals along these lines for these so-called embedded evaluators who would, like, sit inside OpenAI and Anthropic.

And would not work for them, but would have employee-level access to all their systems and could say like, hey, this agent seems really misaligned or these things are conniving or they're going and doing cyber attacks, like, and put a stop to it. That would be like step one, but to be clear, I think there's like many things that could be done aside from that.

I think basically now, just to give people the flavor of the situation, there is essentially no regulation on these companies. The people who serve food in the OpenAI cafeteria have to go through more inspections and paperwork than the people training the models that could become self-replicating and destroy a lot of things. So that is like, to me, a crazy untenable situation.

Speaker 2

Right. It seems like we're going to be in that situation for a while. The, the president of the United States says we sh-he listens to people who say we should have essentially no regulation. Congress doesn't pass laws anymore. They haven't done that for a long time. Even if they did, he would veto it, supposedly. so it looks like at minimum, we're two and a half years out from the United States government doing anything meaningful about regulating AI.

how do the folks you talk to think about that? I,

Speaker 1

so I, I want to push back on the premise, which is that like things can change really quickly. And I think already we've seen just in the last couple of weeks, public sentiment is really turning very rapidly on this. I mean, the saliency of AI is skyrocketing. People care a lot about it, more than they did just a couple of weeks ago. They're more worried about it.

Voters are more worried about it. Like politicians are, are, are sensitive to the concerns of voters in, in some ways. So yes, I think there's a, there's a, like a cluster of people around Trump who don't think any of this is, merits regulation or, or, treating it seriously as a threat. but there are other clusters who are part of the national security community, who are more hawkish on China, who, don't want to see, things go sideways with AI, and I think those people, may find more purchase as voters get more worried about this.

So I would just say, like, it is not completely a given to me that we will have essentially no regulation from the rest of this administration.

Speaker 2

We'll be right back, but first this.

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Speaker 2

And we're back. So let's imagine I'm right and you're wrong and, and things stay static. it seems like if you're, and I think this is what they're talking about, if you're Dario and Sam Altman, you say, We're not going to get the government to do this. We need to do something ourselves. What would that look like?

Speaker 1

I think there could be some kind of an industry-wide, pact or agreement to pace the frontier. That's something that, a, a term that has been thrown around a lot. Slowing down our

Speaker 2

research.

Speaker 1

Slowing down our research, specifically on our frontier models, our most capable models that are capable of, like, super persistence of, of working for hours or days at a time with minimal, you know, or no human supervision. I think there probably will be, and may already be in motion some kind of agreement between the, the labs at the, the, the head of the pack.

which is surprising considering these guys hate each other, which is, we can come back to that. But like the

Speaker 2

reason Anthropic exists is because Dario hated Sam Altman so much he built his own company.

Speaker 1

Right, and the reason OpenAI existed is because Sam Altman and Elon Musk hated Demis Hassabis at DeepMind so much that they wanted to build their own company. So the whole frontier is sort of filled with, populated by people who, dislike and mistrust each other. But that aside, I think they are going to act in the absence of some kind of government regulation.

I think they, they want this to be forced on them by some kind of external body so that it's less fragile than having them all just kind of hold hands and like, like pinky swear that they're not going to like push the frontier, too fast, because they don't trust each other. But I think they realize that they're probably not going to get some kind of coordinated centralized mechanism out of this administration, and so I think they will do something on their own.

Speaker 2

If we live in a world where Sam and Dario and Dennis all Link hands and pinky swear, and they really do slow things down. What about everyone who's not participating? we keep hearing all these stories about Chinese models that are distilling, basically copying the existing models, and they're maybe six months behind, and maybe they're eighty percent as effective.

And all this stuff seems like it gets commoditized quite quickly one way or another. So isn't the genie kind of already gone? And even if these guys do slow things down, aren't we just inevitably in a world where so much of this super powerful technology gets distributed away from people who are responsible actors?

Speaker 1

It's possible, and that's why you'll say that they're, they're being very cautious about calling for a slowdown, because they don't want to unilaterally disarm. Which could invite China or, you know, Meta, a company that is American but that is not concerned with, you know, how fast things are moving to race ahead. I, I think China's,

AI sort of, position is sometimes overstated quite a bit. I think they still are quite dependent, on American AI companies pushing the frontier forward so that they can then distill from those models to create their own models. they, they are, they do have some of their own capacity too, and they're starting to get more hardware. But I think for now, the, the sort of, the big leaps in capabilities are coming out of the American labs that have all the compute and all the researchers and all the, the breakthroughs.

Speaker 2

but this idea that, that, that a lot of the, you know, what is cutting edge today is pretty widely distributed and available to just about everyone, and, and definitely good enough for most people for most purposes.

Does this something stop that? It seems like this is stuff, this stuff by its very nature sort of gets distributed widely.

Speaker 1

yeah, I, I think there's a real, sort of dissemination of, of once something exists at the frontier, it then gets commoditized and, and becomes cheaper to run and, you know, there are efficiency breakthroughs that make it very cheap to serve the models that are a generation old. So I think that all of that is true. I think the thing that people are really worried about is, is, is not just general capabilities improvement, but is this like specific thing, this recursive self-improvement that people are now talking about.

This is the

Speaker 2

machines teaching themselves new things.

Speaker 1

This is fully automating the entire AI research and development process is a, is a way to think about it. Like you could have essentially You could replace all the researchers at OpenAI or Anthropic with a model that does their jobs, that can train the next version of Claude or ChatGPT. And that is the, that is sort of the, the event horizon that people are trying to avoid because that is where you end up with capability gains that are coming at such a rapid clip in this kind of recursive loop that you end up maybe losing control of it.

So that's, I like, I don't think anyone is worried about the models getting better at writing essays for, you know, kids in school or, you know, doing math problems. I think what they are worried about is specifically this automation, the full automation of AI research and development. All

Speaker 2

right. This has been doomy. Let's make it slightly less doomy, but maybe contentious. The only way to understand this stuff is to touch the frontier and talk to the people who are doing this amazing stuff, and you'll get a sense of what, what can be done. In a couple months, we'll be at the four-year anniversary of, of ChatGPT.

I use all the LOMs and I play around with them and they're super useful for me. I don't think they're transformative for me.

I, I would be bummed if I couldn't use them, but they're not transformative. And I keep looking around for examples of this technology fundamentally changing a company and the way it works, and then what we definitely haven't gotten is the thing we've been promised for these four years, like a major breakthrough in science, right? A cancer cure, et cetera.

why hasn't that happened yet?

Speaker 1

Well, they solved the Millennium Prize problem like last year. So there's

Speaker 2

math problems they're solving, right? But like, no one can turn around and go, oh, I was gonna have this cancer and now I'm not because AI has solved it. Or I figured out how to completely change my company with AI.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I, I, I think we have seen that. I just don't think, it's, it's apparent. So like, you know, Anthropic announced last week, they, they made some progress toward a kind of CRISPR-like, sequence that they discovered using one of their models.

Speaker 2

It's gene.

Speaker 1

Yes. they, you know, companies are developing drugs based on AI discoveries right now. It takes time, it takes years for that stuff to work its way through the pipeline and go through all the clinical trials and stuff. so yes, AI has not cured anyone's cancer yet, but things like AlphaFold, the deep mind protein folding problem that won the Nobel Prize for them, a couple of years ago, like those are real breakthroughs.

And if you talk to molecular biologists or people in pharmaceutical research, it is absolutely transformed. The way they approach their jobs. Another occupational category I would talk to if you think this stuff is not transformative are coders, right? Like any professional programmer will tell you that there's a clear before and after in their professional life, where the models went from being bad at coding to better than them at coding.

Speaker 2

When do you think you could find a person on the street who's not a coder, not doing molecular biology and say, your world is now different, or they would say my world is now radically different because of AI?

Speaker 1

I think you could do that today. maybe, maybe first in San Francisco, but I have, I have friends all over the country who, just in the last couple of months went from like not using AI much or using as kind of a, a souped up Google to now they're running little agents for them or they're testing out Muse or they're, you know, they're, they're working, you know, Claude is, you know, filling out, paperwork for them at, at work.

And look, I think there's always going to be a curve of adoption and like maybe San Francisco tech people will always be at kind of the, the leading edge of that. But I don't know, I, I don't see it as being too far out of view for most people. I think, you know, these, these products, some of them have billions of users, and I think, you know, what, what we're seeing is that people are adopting this technology much more quickly than they adopted, say, the internet.

Speaker 2

Let's talk about the San Francisco versus the rest of the world, tension. like one of the things people are most excited about as we're recording this are, are agents like Muse or Instinct. And one of the common critique, and these things are really interesting. in theory, they can do lots of work for you, and, and we're often told they could shop for you, they can plan a vacation, et cetera.

and one of the, some of the pushback we're getting both from normal people and also, also business people saying, actually, A lot of people like doing these tasks. They like shopping. they like thinking about their vacation. They want to look at twenty different photos of the resort before they book it. And the fact that every guy who's pushing an agent says, this will help you get into the hottest restaurant in Manhattan, or, you know, figure out your travel plans.

Like, most people don't have those problems.

do you think that's like a, a fundamental issue here with sort of the San Francisco tech business world mentality versus normals, or do you think that inevitably gets smoothed out? And, and whatever the tech guys are proposing gets turned into an actual product normals use.

Speaker 1

I think there's always been this sort of issue of, the Silicon Valley blinders, you know, where like if you look at Apple keynotes or, you know, any tech company keynotes, it's always like, oh, how can I use this? The example Casey, my co-host, gives is like, how can I use this to book a lunch on an, in, in Antarctica? Like, it's like, these people do not have normal lives.

It's like these people do not have normal lives, and it, they sometimes struggle to appreciate the, the actual use cases that people in, in the rest of the world would benefit from.

that said, man, I don't know, go to a college, like talk to a 20-year-old. It is, it is already true that many people count on this technology to get them through their day, whether it's looking things up or, you know, doing, helping them study for tests or writing, you know, business memos and making decks at work. Like, there's this sort of Narrative that like, no normal people are using this stuff.

And I just don't think that's true. You know, I was at- That's clearly

Speaker 2

not true.

Speaker 1

I was at the barber the other day getting my hair cut and, you know, the, the barber's telling me how he's using ChatGPT to like make a new website for his barbershop. Like, it is at once true that there is a, an adoption sort of lag outside of San Francisco, but also that like, it's been four years now that people have had access to the stuff and most people I think are at least experimenting with it.

Speaker 2

let's talk about, the new gig I mentioned at the top of this. you were working at times, plum job, right? Wrote tech column, had this very popular podcast, you co-hosted with Casey. You were leaving all that behind. explain what you're going to do now.

Speaker 1

We are starting a new podcast, with NPR. It is called Machine Gods. it comes out starting the week of October 19th, and it will be squarely focused on AI and what's happening, you know, news of the week. We'll interview big people in the industry. we will, have some fun and some jokes as well. But, yeah, that's, that's the, the new project, and I've got this book and, and that, and that's about it.

Speaker 2

You are all in on AI. It is an AI conversation. But for normal people, it's on NPR.

Speaker 1

For normal people, I, we're very excited about the NPR partnership specifically because they just have a ton of reach with the kind of people who would never sort of proactively choose to listen to a tech podcast. People who don't consider themselves part of the tech community, but who still want to know what is happening, why everyone is talking about this all of a sudden, what the latest stuff coming out is, who want to know how it applies to them in their life.

Speaker 2

But Kevin, you were at the biggest journalism platform there is. Everyone reads the New York Times or reads distillations of the New York Times. that platform is, is,

is powerful as you can get. Why, why step away?

Speaker 1

I mean, part of it was that, Casey and I wanted to build something for ourselves. You know, we had built this show with The Times. The Times owned Hard Fork, which we think, you know, is appropriate. They built it with us. but eventually we were like, this is a, this is a healthy business, and we like doing this. And Casey's an entrepreneur.

He's been running his own newsletter now for, for years. And so, you know, we, we sort of, this thing happened to us that sometimes happens to men in San Francisco who spend too long around startup people, which is that you start thinking, well, I could do this. I could start a company. And so we've done it. We've started a company. We've made some hires, and we're going to spin up a little media company.

Speaker 2

Was there a discussion with The Times saying, look, we would like to build something, or we've built this with you, it's yours, we get it, but why don't we figure out something where we both grow together, and we do have ownership, but also The Times benefits from this thing that we have built with them, and they don't have to start from scratch?

Speaker 1

I just think it's a model that is really hard inside a, a, a newspaper. I think, you know, we, we did, we did talk with them about some sort of ownership structure that would have made sense, but in the end, it just, like, we weren't,

we just wanted, we, like, we wanted to try this on our own, and, you know, the, the independent media trend has been, durable and has been exciting for people, and we just thought we could, we could do some version of that for ourselves.

Speaker 2

This is not your problem to solve, but imagine you're running the New York Times, and Casey and Kevin, you, we're, we're, you, we're prominent people who you made much more prominent, and they are using your platform to launch their own thing, and you can imagine that happening in lots of different publications. How, how do you think a publisher or a media company should think about talent like this?

Speaker 1

I, I don't know. I mean, that, in, in part, that's a, a dodge because I, I genuinely think it might be the right call for an, an organization like The Times to,

to invest in sort of homegrown talent, to, you know, to sort of use the

franchises it has to sort of subsidize the overall news gathering operation. And so, yeah, I think there's room for a lot. I mean, I'm not the first person to talk on this show about like the, the rise of the creator journalist and what happens in a world where people have sub stacks and YouTube channels and,

Speaker 2

I've been in versions of this book before. I worked for Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg when they ran All Things D, which was the official company name was Shut Up and Listen LLC. But, yep. That's

Speaker 1

incredible. It was

Speaker 2

hilarious whenever you had to like deal with health insurance and someone's like, well, this is for Shut Up and Listen LLC. Perfect. and a perfect encapsulation of Walt and Kara. I love them.

but yeah, that was a Wall Street Journal thing and they essentially wanted to keep Walt Mossberg happy and they let him spin up this conference business and they had no idea it'd be that successful, but it made Walt and Kara a ton of money. It made the journal a ton of money. Kind of worked for a while. So that model does exist.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I, and look, I, I have nothing bad to say about the times. We really, like, we worked well together. I was there for nine years. I think that the, the issue for, you know, big publishers and sort of centralized media institutions is now there's this whole class of like entrepreneurial journalist who just, isn't attracted to the kind of stable staff job that maybe they would have been attracted to, five or ten years ago because they now have many more options, including starting their own thing or, you know, being sort of a, a free agent.

Like, I just think there, there has to be some kind of answer to, to bring that person into a media organization because otherwise you just, you can't touch them. They, they don't, they, they're not attracted by anything you're offering.

Speaker 2

The sound is me yanking the, the interview back to, to AI before we leave. what's, what's your personal P doom? Do you think, we're around having this conversation in five years or ten years? Have the robots taken over?

Speaker 1

I'm, I usually say I'm at about ten percent, which... Ten

Speaker 2

percent chance that it all goes super bad.

Speaker 1

Yeah, which sounds crazy to people, in most parts of the world. but in San Francisco, actually, that makes you an optimist.

Like, I know people walking around with fifty, sixty, seventy percent P dooms. I know someone who has a ninety-nine point nine percent P doom. And is that

Speaker 2

person putting money in their 401k or why are they even in San Francisco? Why don't they just head out for New Zealand or wherever they think they can survive?

Speaker 1

I, I, look, I think I do know people on the extremes who are, you know, liquidating their 401ks. I know, a person who took up smoking cause they thought AI is going to kill us all, so we might as well have some fun on the way out. I know someone who doesn't wear sunscreen to the beach anymore, because it's just kind of like, why bother? So I say that because I think, we still have some agency and some control over this.

Like, we are not in the recursive self-improvement loop yet. We still could slow things down, pass some regulations, coordinate to pace the frontier. We could come out of this in a, in a sensible way. We, we, we have the narrow path to utopia available to us, and I'm more hopeful than I was even a month or two ago, because paradoxically, everyone is talking about doom now, which makes me less, worried about doom.

Speaker 2

If we are on the narrow path and things go well and all the bank shots line up and you and I had this conversation five years from now, what is, what is an AI thing that seems insane now that we should take for granted?

Speaker 1

You know, we talk about the economic impacts of AI, the sort of geopolitical impacts of AI. I don't think we talk about the social effects as much, but I think it's going to be very real. People, you know, I know people who use this stuff as their therapist, who consider it a, a very close relation who are, are, are, are not okay when Claude is down for an afternoon.

and so, yeah, that, that worries me in some cases, and for some people, I think it might be positive.

Speaker 2

I think some therapy is better than no therapy, but I, I really wish those people talked to a human. Kevin Roos, you're a human I like talking to. Go read AGI Chronicles, go listen, and I guess watch. Machine Gods in a couple of weeks. Thanks, man.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Peter.

Speaker 2

Thanks again to Kevin Roos and Tom Dotong and Rishi Rajagopalan who produced and edited this show. Thanks to our sponsors and thanks to you guys. See you soon.

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