Smash Notes
Nathan Benaich
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ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week · Claude now leads 26% of Anthropic’s R&D, Meta drops an 816B open…
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How Likely Is AI Doom?
Nathan Benaich says his personal chance of doom is very small, and he is not a big believer in existential risk of destroying humanity. Cybersecurity is very precarious and should be taken insanely seriously, and he treats that danger as different from wiping humanity out.
The major change over the last two or three years is that he uses the right model for the task, the same way you do not drive a Ferrari to a coffee shop. On emails where you have to think, he asks why anyone would take the risk of a worse system. He has changed his mind about money. Frontier intelligence is starting to show that labs will make money, because the value of the tasks is increasingly high, people from across
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How Do Most People Use AI Models?
Nathan Benaich bets that 90% of people use a model at best to read their email, answer their email, or ask questions the same way they ask Google. He says they probably never click the work button. Most people do not even know they can swipe left, open Codex, and talk to the machine so it does the work. He says knowing you can make the machine do the work is so far away, which is one reason he has started saying the big labs should open a genius bar or an actual physical store and walk regular people through the magical things they can do with AI.
Alex Volkov asked Nathan Benaich how regular folks on the street view AI, what use cases he tracks, and whether personal agents, Glockbots and Mu
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Do Americans Prefer a Nuclear Plant to a Data Center?
Nathan Benaich says Americans would much prefer living near a nuclear power plant than a data center. A survey found the preference, and he calls the finding quite wild.
Nathan Benaich frames the objection as not-in-my-backyard opposition: not wanting a data center next to the garden. The objection is a real problem, hampering the buildout of data centers and also influencing part of the midterms, which arrive in the next couple of weeks.
Alex Volkov says the show covered the survey and still cannot believe it, amid people on the street talking about AI boiling the planet. Nathan Benaich says the pattern is certainly happening in Europe and in Korea and other places too, where a small prop