Nilay Patel
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Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher · Bill Gates says to prepare for 20 years of ‘tumultuous’ AI…
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Why Will Lawsuits Fail to Keep AI Safe?
Bill Gates says lawsuits will fail to keep AI safe because the danger comes from people who take models without safeguards, not from the AI companies a court would sue. The idea that liability law will manage the risk will look absurd in hindsight. Finding who is carrying out a bioattack does not make the liability model work. Court is no remedy for the misuse.
Nilay Patel asks where liability would lie if someone buys a Mac Studio and runs an open-weight model that can do whatever the user wants. Product liability does not control the case. AI safety will be taken more seriously than airline safety, drug safety, and car safety, and whether the controls are enough is harder than nuclear wea
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Did Bill Gates Fund Gain-of-function Research?
No. Bill Gates says nobody has ever accused him or the Gates Foundation of being involved in any gain-of-function research. He calls the charge bizarre and had never heard it.
Nilay Patel put the claim to him from Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, speaking on the All-In podcast. Horowitz compared Anthropic's safety research on artificial superintelligence to a story in which pandemic preparation, and gain-of-function research, created COVID-19. Gates had not heard the accusation. Patel treats the attack on safety work as the accelerationist response: discredit people who say there is a safety issue, push ahead, and expect the problem to work itself out. He had thought Horowitz shared the