PBD Podcast - Ex-Anthropic Whistleblower Suspects Chinese Spies Inside America’s AI Labs

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon explains why he quit the AI race, why he believes 2027 could be a turning point, how Anthropic differs from OpenAI, and why self-improving AI could upend jobs, national security, markets, and who ultimately controls global power in the years ahead.⠀⠀👞 Get the NEW Billionaire Suede Loafer:https://bit.ly/4ym5oRA⠀🍫 Get The FLB 1's NOW IN CHOCOLATE:https://bit.ly/4gXlv0X⠀👕 SHOP THE ICON COLLECTION:https://bit.ly/3TuUU3x⠀Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT:https://bit.ly/4kSVkso⠀Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES:https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP⠀👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING:https://bit.ly/4lzQph2⠀🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE:https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj⠀🇰 KALSHI:http://kalshi.com/pbd⠀⠀SUBSCRIBE TO:⠀@VALUETAINMENT@BetDavidConsulting@vtgenz@ValuetainmentComedy⠀⠀ABOUT US:⠀Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Whoever controls AI comes a god. I will destroy humans. This tech is powerful tech. And I'm just very surprised that Trump can sit there and say, I'm going to let Dario Amadeh. I'm going to let Sam Oman have the keys to this powerful tech. I just think they haven't fully internalized how crazy it will get if we don't slow down. Do you believe China is not going to work on superintelligence and are going to listen to us?

If you appreciate that the tech is scary and it's going to feel scary for the people building it, I think China will also realize that. How certain are you to have spies already there? They're not vetting. for something that could be a super weapon technology. It's just crazy. It's like it's happening right under the noses of the government. You met people that you think they could be?

You know, again, I really don't want to call that names. I haven't thought about that detail. Forget about giving names. I'll find out. They hated me. They hated me because I was like, for good or for bad, it feels like the end of the world. I was part of something that was going to go badly.

And I became convinced that really there was no good plan. If we could slow down AI and speed up everything else, like deregulate drugs, deregulate biology research, deregulate, like human self-expermentation. I think a lot of stuff, just AI in particular, that's the thing that's scary. So in four years, if Daria wanted to destroy open AI, he could. I think 2027 is going to be a crazy year.

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Thank you so much. So on September 8th, a Jacob Coxon, who's here with us, good to have you on the podcast. Nice to be here. you decide to put on a tweet, okay? You had started your account January of 2026. You hadn't put nothing up at all. Your first tweet says,

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both Open AI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below. We'll get into that later on.

And this tweet gets 803,000 likes, 175 million views. There was a meeting yesterday at the White House prompted by you indirectly. You got politicians that got involved, world leaders that got involved, a meeting that happened with G that was here last week. One of the topics of discussion was how powerful AI is going to be. And the funny part that I think is important for the audience to realize this, and you can fact check me on this, that you let all your stocks go, that you weren't even able to vest your stocks because of the timing that you had, which means any money on the stocks that you also had

was left behind for you, if that's correct, right? There was no, the options didn't move on with you. Not at Anthropic. Not at Anthropic. At Open AI, you were there. I have an open AI. Okay. So you did all of that,

and the world kind of stopped for a few days. Till today, they're still talking about it. What did you see that got you to say, I have to do this? Yeah. It really was just thinking about next year. Next year and the year after, I think 2027 is going to be a crazy,

year. And I think about the news headlines. Like so last year, AI, I bit in the news. Three years ago, it was very rarely in the news. Maybe for chat, GBT, but otherwise no. This year, it's bam, bam, bam. AI, every month there's a big AI story. Next year, it's going to be like, every day there's going to be a big AI story. In particular, just imagine, I don't know, I wasn't alive during World War II, but during World War II, I imagine that just the concept of war was coloring everything. It was in the background for every day-to-day thing. every new story, war would be in the background. I think it will be like that for AI next year. In terms of what I specifically saw, it is the models, the AI models next year are going to be

very capable in a way where they're going to be able to automate a lot of, a lot of work, a lot of everyone's jobs, but kind of most importantly, a lot of the AI researchers jobs. So things are just going to speed up so much that it's going to become a very, very serious thing next year, probably. So 2027 for you is what's going to be, is it's going to be, is. Is it worth to use chaotic? Chaotic, definitely, yes. So unpack it for me, like,

for the average person listening to this, what does that look like? Yeah. So there's many different things that could happen. Things that, kind of the most important thing is right now, labs are treating this,

like the companies, are treating this like as a normal technology. You know, this is business. They have, maybe you saw opening I kind of, they have these dev days. They share their products with users. They're still tweeting, like, oh, excited to release this new product.

The thing is, this is a super weapon. So soon people are going to have to realize that this is not like a casual business thing. This is like a super weapon technology that really should be nationalized. And I think next year is kind of probably when that realization really sets in that this is like very, very serious stuff. You're saying it should be nationalized. So if it's seriously that concerning, when you say nationalize, you trust the government getting involved to control this then free market. Yeah, I'm not saying, I'm not saying I need nationalization.

I'm saying that it is so serious that I'm surprised the government isn't nationalizing. Like the government is looking at these companies. They're going to have power. This tech is powerful tech. And I'm just very surprised that Trump can sit there and say, I'm going to let Dario Amadei, I'm going to let Sam Womben have the keys to this powerful tech. Because normally it's the government that has the keys to this stuff. You wouldn't let, you wouldn't let Mark Zuckerberg have nukes.

That's just not a thing that normally happens. Make the comparable of the two. Yeah. So nukes cause world chaos, obviously, like plausibly. Same thing for AI. It's going to be, do you really want a private company to make decisions about unemployment rate, you know, big stuff, potentially,

if they make a mistake, someone in a, you know, some regime somewhere could produce a bioweapon. Like, that's a mess up. Do you want private companies to be in control of all these decisions? Like, to give an example, if you're anthropic and you're training in AI and you're going to share it with the world, one of the things they worry about is

what if China can steal from this? And that's a private company worrying about geopolitics, which is a weird thing, like for a private company to make decisions that affect the whole, like the whole geopolitical situation. Yeah, but some companies become so big that you become a small country. Yes.

Like you have to realize Zuck is a world leader up 2.4 billion people. Yes. called Facebook, and he's got regulations he deals with with the government and whatever countries he's in. He has to buy by those rules and guidelines. That's why he's always on lawsuits because they broke some of the guidelines, right? So it's same with Twitter, same with Google, same with YouTube, same with all these guys. So they almost have to be because they're dealing with those types of people, right? Yeah. So what I want to know from you is as we're going

through this because some of this to me is, you know, I wonder if it's fear porn where they're just using to scare a regular person watching this. I wrote it down. I said, I think this is how I see it. I just kind of want to share with you on how I see the fear porn side of this. So one part of the fear porn is, hey, this is so scary, AI is going to take over the world. We need the government to control. Okay, that's one. Okay, people are using this because they want control. They want the government to control. Number two, hey, this is so big and powerful. And, and, and, and, we need government control because I'm anthropic and open AI. I'm eliminating my other companies to come and compete with me. So the barrier to entry becomes more difficult and I get to control.

So the motive there becomes eliminating future competition. Pretty good move if they're thinking that way, right? Definitely. The third level of fear point is, well, let me tell you, this thing is so powerful because we're about to go public. As big as we thought this, this is so much more powerful than us, you may want to invest some of your money in there because when we go public, you may 10x, 20x, 30x your money. So the public, IPO goes just massive, right?

So those are three elements of the fear porn that I see. Then the other one is, maybe it is as scary as you say it is. The other one is if we don't build it, China builds it. And last but not least, if we all stop,

how can somebody hold an independent person or China to build this? So of those, if you can one by one by one, address which one you think it is? Yeah. So to go to the original fear porn stuff, especially about the regulation control or Anthropic hyping up their product. I think part of the

reason my tweet went so viral is many people at Anthropics said the same thing, but they didn't just quit. They stayed there, so it's easier to be like, okay, he's staying at the company. He's saying this stuff, but he's just hyping the product. I left in a personal capacity because I am scared. So from my perspective, I have nothing to gain by hyping up. Anthropic. That's not a... I'm not trying to hype them up or get them like special criteria.

I think what they're doing is dangerous. I think it's reckless. I think they should be curtailed. And I left to say that. So that's to address the like regulatory capture stuff. Also, later, we could go into why I don't think it's actually like... It doesn't actually make sense

to stoke up this level of fear. I think it's going to hurt their IPO. I think it's going to hurt their ability to stay in control. We can talk about that later. Okay. What was the other point? China, yeah.

Yeah, the China point. is difficult, but I think again, if you appreciate that the tech is scary and it's going to feel scary for the people building it, I think China will also realize that. The people building the technology in China will see how destabilizing it is. And I just don't think that that regime wants to create a destabilizing technology that could threaten their own power. I think actually our incentives are aligned. Like we're more similar to China in this respect, so it should be quite easy to cooperate. Well, if you look at the advancement, the separation between us and China. One could say the motivation, the motivation, hang on one second, I'll

show you one data. Yeah. So motivation for China could be, U.S. has such a massive lead in AI. We need them to slow down so we can catch up. Yeah. There's no way in the world that China is going to sit there and say, oh, yeah, yeah, President Trump, for sure. We're going to shut it down and we're not going to work on it. Yeah. Okay, great. Can we come and look at your place to make sure you are actually keeping your promises? No, no, just take our war. Forward, we are not working on superintelligence. Do you believe China is not going to work on super intelligence and are going to listen to us? It depends on the nature of a deal.

Right now, if we just stopped, they would try and catch up. But I think one really important thing people don't realize is China already has spies at open eye, at anthropic. China has the ability to hack at any time. If we pull ahead, that doesn't give us a big lead, they can just step in and steal our progress at any time. You think- Catch up the lead. How certain are you to have spies already there? 90%.

Yeah, definitely. It's almost certain that they have spies. Do people talk about that at Open AI? Yeah, they do. People have spoken about this. Is it kind of like jokingly, hey, we probably have some Chinese spies here? Yeah, it's like a joking thing because you don't want to take it seriously, but then it is a serious thing. There must be spies.

Have you met people that you think they could be? No. I think obviously it's, I don't want to like stereotype people based on like are they like Chinese national. Sure, yeah. But I wouldn't say any specific person, but there must be spies. There's no, um, background check like, seriously. serious background track for this sort of stuff. Yeah, it's not like a, this is another reason why nationalization is so important. We can stop properly vetting and background checking. So it's like,

like, I don't think SpaceX can hire Chinese nationals, but these AI companies can hire, you know, foreign nationals like me, which is pretty surprising. Why is that? What's the difference? Because SpaceX has some regulatory. Yeah, there's a regulation. Yeah, so it can't. So they cannot recruit Chinese nationals, but Open AI and Anthropic can. Yes. So do you think one step could be to not allow Chinese nationals to work for Anthropic and Open AI? It's a bit sad because they're my friends, but I think that will happen.

I think that will probably happen. Are you saying will or do you think that's the right move? I think both. Okay, so it's uncomfortable for you to say it, and I plot that. I respect that, but you at least, that shows me there is integrity in your belief system that your friends are going to see this. They're going to say, hey, Jacob, what are you saying? We're friends.

But you think, okay, so you think if we continue to China almost, they're like, yeah, continue because we have access to everything you're doing anyways. Yeah. So if we continue, they're going to have access to it. If we don't continue, China's going to create it themselves. So either way, China's eventually going to have access to it. I think so, unless, again, there's some sort of deal. One thing is a lot of their progress right now, not all of it, but a substantial part of it is distillation,

which is sort of stealing the data. So they use Claude, they log in, they ask their questions, and they use the answers to train Chinese models. So right now, a lot of their speed is kind of, copying the U.S. and stealing from the U.S. So also if we slow down, it will probably slow down China quite a bit too, because currently a lot of their progress is from essentially copying or stealing the U.S. work. Not all of it. They will still catch up and make progress, but there is a component.

So like they will also slow down if the U.S. slows down. Who else is another player out there that people worry about? It seems like it's mainly them to maybe U.K. a little bit, right? Not the U.K. at all, sadly. That's why I'm in the U.S. It's very sad, but the U.K. just hasn't. would you put third? I'm actually not sure who's got the data center build out. Right now, U.S. and China are just so far ahead that no one is, no one's going to catch up right now.

Okay. So go a little bit deeper into the Chinese spy part. You said it is a discussion that people have in those organizations. So what would that look like? If the average person wants to know, all right, what would that look like on how they pass their messages or information over to them? Is it, can you do me favor? And can you type in who are the highest ranking? executives at Open AI or Anthropic that are Chinese nationals, highest ranking executives at Open AI or Anthropic that are Chinese nationals. Have you looked at the inventory to see how many of them are Chinese nationals? I don't think there are many that are that high up that are Chinese nationals.

Again, I really, I'm like, this does make me sad. I'm not trying to, like, start a witch hunt. I'm just saying objectively there are probably spies, and I think that, yeah. Okay, so let's go over there. So chief research officer at OpenAI, Mark Chen. Yeah, he's not a Chinese national. He's not a Chinese national. You know who he is.

It says Chinese-born. He's an Asian-American, yeah. But he was born in China. Yeah, I don't think Mark Chen has a Chinese spy. Okay, all right. And you met him. Yeah, I've met him a few times, yeah. Okay.

So Fiji, Simo. I don't think he's a Chinese spy either, no. Brad, light, caps, C, O, and no. So Dario, we know that. No, I think we are clear on these guys, yeah. You are clear on all these names. Yeah, these guys, none. Who are the highest rank?

Are there any high-ranking people that could be Chinese nationals? Or you don't know any names? You know, again, I really don't want to call that names. I haven't thought of that detail. Yeah. I don't, I'm not asking you to give names. Yeah. I want to ask you, forget about giving names.

I'll find out. Yeah. What I'm trying to find out from you is because the audience is going to go do their own research, right? So I think, yeah, almost all the Chinese nationals are, like, employees. So not, like, executives, not high-level managers. they will be like employees doing coding, doing engineering, doing research. Yeah, if we pull up, I went to an insurance company once in Dallas, and I went on their seventh floor.

The seventh floor was all the engineers that they had. If I told you 98% was Indian, I never met anybody that was an Indian. Everybody was Indian. And they had a lot of their guys that came from, what is that institute from India, IIT Institute, which IIT Institute is like a, some people who even say it's better than MIT Institute. So you saw that. And one could say, okay, they're in here in the business. But when you're saying Chinese nationals,

India doesn't necessarily have the same motive that China has. One in America wouldn't say China's an enemy, you know, India's an enemy as much as they would say China is the enemy, right? So if you're saying they already have Chinese nationals in there, that's probably a pretty big concern there. And I think what it is is it's representative. Remember I said they're not taking this seriously? It's like it's a normal business.

Yeah. Like, yeah, there's an absolute minimum background checks for employees seem important. I think they will come. But if they're not vetting for something that could be a super weapon technology, it's just crazy. It's like cowboy stuff. I'm surprised it's happening right under the noses of the government. It's ridiculous. By the way, that's a very valid point.

Who else do you think they need to be vetting and not allowing to work at companies like that? So I don't know the exact details, but, you know, plausibly even I'm a foreign national. So I'm from the UK. I think it's important. A lot of the researchers come from the UK. I do think careful background checks are necessary. What are you're looking for? In particular, I guess, you know, no compromise.

Whatever the current like a clearance background checks are, you should probably need that to work on core AI systems. And I think that will happen. But I mean, even if you're doing that, what am I looking for? What would I find anyways? Nowadays, people are professionals that are hiding whatever they did in the past. Yeah, I know. It's not even for me to be able to find everything about,

that individual. Yeah. It's... So I'm not, again, I'm not an expert on, like, the details. What I think is, like, they need to take it more seriously. Okay. At a bare minimum. Fair enough.

So that part is made clear we got that. What do you say to the people that say, you know, David Sacks, some of these other folks came out, very reputable. People respect these folks. And you saw Mark Andreessen came up and he wrote his humanity manifesto with AI and saying, hey, this is a let free market do its part. this is a beautiful thing. He believes, you know, we can handle 50 billion people living in the world, you know,

and we have bandwidth, and this is going to make people more financially free. It's not that scary. Some of those guys said this is purely used by Anthropic and Open AI to eliminate future competitors and own bigger market shares. And they're like, yeah, Bernie, come help us out. Come prevent other people from competing with us. What do you say to that? Yeah, there's a few things.

One is, I think I agree with Mark Andreessen. and David Sacks about the positive benefits. What I think, where I think we differ is their case. I think we get their world if we slow down. I think even if we slow down AI development, the changes from next year's technology will be so rapid and, you know, significant that there will be huge changes in the way that they're thinking.

I just think they haven't fully internalized how crazy it will get if we don't slow down. I think their case for their optimistic fast case is my slow case. And my fast case looks like we have no control over it. We're just watching robots make themselves smarter like every day massively. It's completely out of our control. It's not like 50 billion humans. It's humans. And then this massive AI economy that's happening without, we're just sitting around watching them do inscrutable, you know, things we don't understand. And I think Mark Andreessen and David Sachs will agree with me when things get crazy because I think

we want the same thing. That's my guess. How many people, when you work at Open A&A Anthropic, guys that are actually doing the work, not executives at the top. I'm talking to engineers, the mathematicians, the guys like you that are doing the work, the researchers that are doing the work, how many of them are in their 20s? Probably half or a bit less than half. Okay, so that's a big number. Big number, yeah.

So just fresh out of college, right? In their 20s. Maybe more like 30%, 30%, 30%, 40%. 30%. And is it fair? to say that that audience just got out of college, not all of them, some of them, and maybe they're going to lean a little bit more on the liberal side, and maybe they're going to be a little bit more afraid of climate change, end of the world, professors, brainwashing them, and oh, my God,

you guys be careful with these capitalists, they're going to be such technocrats and technocracy, and, you know, oh, my, these trillionaires, Elon Musk is going to take over and do this. don't you think they may have a little bit more fear, anxiety of the end of the world that's coming because they just got out of college? Yeah, maybe. I can say a few things here. Please. One is, I think it's important that Elon Musk himself is scared about this. Like, he doesn't get scared of many things, right?

He's a, you know, a titan, like the guy's an absolute, like, he just goes for stuff. He's been scared of AI for a long time. He only made XAI because he saw the other companies doing it and was like, well, I guess if we're doing this, I have to draw. join in because he's Elon Musk. He's not going to let these guys, you know, he's not going to sit on the sidelines. So it's, you know, big guys are scared too. And then in terms of junior employees, I mean, I can speak for myself. I like, I've never, you know, global warming has never been a big deal for me. It's like I wanted to learn math. I wanted to work on technology. I wanted more nuclear power. I want, like, build out of energy infrastructure. I'm like pro, you know, I'm pro-capitalism,

pro-libertarian, almost. So you're more libertarian. Definitely. And I think that's a very important for you to qualify that because a lot of people were putting you as a climate I know and it's because everyone agree with me was a Democrat. I made a post. I didn't ask these Democrats like Democrat politicians to agree with my post, right? I didn't tell them to tweet that. So I think I've been like pegged as this NGO kind of dude. Really the one thing I'm scared about is AI. I'm like if we could slow down AI and speed up everything else like deregulate drugs, deregulate biology research, deregulate like you know human self-expermentation. I think a lot of stuff I'm pro-libertarian. It's just AI in particular that's the thing that's scary.

Advertising on Spotify with audio and display ads helps brands turn attention into results. Download the 2026 performance playbook and discover why Spotify belongs in your media plan. Huh. So would you say most of the guys and gals your age working at OpenAI and Anthropic, feel the same way you do? There's a mix. I think I'm probably more on the, like, libertarian side. I think some will be scared of climate change. some will have been, I also thought, for example, the pandemic response ultimately was quite overblown, like, near the end. I think that, like, it was pretty bad. But I think maybe some would disagree. So there are definitely some employees like that, but it's not all of them. It's not as like, like, I think people imagine San Francisco as being full of liberals. But if you're going to accuse, like, me and the other kind of, like, kids building the

technology of anything, it would be like a sort of maybe narcissism or techno-narcicism feeling like you're the center of the world, but not like a generic liberal fear. That's not like the main thing that's happening. Yeah, I'm glad you addressed that and you isolated that case because I noticed a lot of information came up that you were with newspeak, you know, where you were part of this organization that Hillary Clinton was a part of in a man named Matt something and, you know, and it's the NGOs and you're involved in that and the socialist movement. This is so funny because at that house, it was a house I lived out. I wanted to like, live in London and I met a friend who was like come stay at this house and it was a house full of

these people they hated me they hated me because I was like they're all communists I'm like they were communists in that house and I did not get on with them it was so funny now because like I'm on this like thing and everyone's like Jacob stated this uh I wanted to do math I wanted to like live in an interesting place with London in London uh that's why I stayed at state in Newspeak nothing you've never met you've never had meetings with these guys you've never met with the socialist leaders Clinton, Sanders, these guys didn't communicate with you, nothing. Never, no. So even before you tweeted your tweet out, I know Brett asked you this question as well,

but did you speak with anybody? Was it orchestrated that this tweet's about to come out? Because you started your account in January of 2026. So prior to that, for a young guy to not have a Twitter account, it's kind of weird. Yeah. Why didn't you start it earlier? Why did you start in January? And then eight months before you posted three things.

One is I'm actually like kind of ironically I've been quite scared of hosting online sharing my thoughts. I think because I had this assumption that you know that my people might pile on or it's like you know I don't like engaging with the immediate criticism of the thoughts I prefer to like discuss them in private with the people that can make changes.

So this was kind of the first time I've ever expressed myself publicly and that's one of the reasons why I was so crazy is like I always had this fear that if I posted everyone would pile on. And that is exactly what happened, which is quite funny, although it wasn't as bad as I thought. Do you regret the tweet or are you glad you tweeted? I'm glad I tweeted it.

You're glad you tweeted it. And I'm happy to talk more about the coordination because there was some planning. This wasn't just, I didn't just like quit and then type out this tweet and rage quit. There were a few steps to it. Can you walk us to quit? Yeah, of course.

So when I decided to quit, first I was on, I was making the AI smarter, right? And then I switched to safety for a week. I was like, well, I'm really scared of how things are going. I'll move to the safety side, try and make it safe. And then while I was at safety, I spoke to more of the anthropic leadership. I spoke to more of the safety researchers. And I became convinced that really there was no good plan. I was part of something that was going to go badly. So I was like, I'm going to quit. And then I was

thinking about quitting on the same day. But I don't know, do you remember Leopold, Leopold Ashumbrunner? Absolutely. 436% the first six months. And, you know, yes, I do. Yeah, he's a dude. And he left opening eye. And then he wrote this manifesto, situational awareness. Yes. So he was strategic when he left. He was like, I'm not just going to leave OpenEI, I'm going to like use leaving to make. Because he was fired for like leaking confidential information or whatever. He used it to like spread awareness.

Like a lot of people in government read his manifesto. A lot of people, maybe you read some of situational awareness. So obviously, yeah. Yeah. He grew to what, 45 billion dollars. Oh yeah, he read a massive. Griffin came and bought a chunk of it at a discounted price. and, you know, yeah, I followed the story close.

So here we go, yeah, exactly, this manifesto. And he wrote that when he left. And I thought, well, you've got to be strategic when you leave. I'm not just going to, I do want to express myself. I'm going to, like, be strategic, make my voice heard, have an impact. I did not expect it to be this. I thought it would be a lot smaller than Leopold's. I was just going to do my best.

But I got a connect at Wall Street Journal. I was like, I'm going to make a, you know, Wall Street Journal will publish this. I think we can probably find the article. Yeah, this. So, oh, for starters, I also, I delayed. my, I delayed my quitting by a week to have time to prepare for this. So it wasn't just the same day. I was like, I'm going to prepare, I'm going to write my thoughts properly, I'm going to quit, spoke to the Wall Street Journal. I wrote this Twitter

thread. But to be clear, I think people imagine this crazy coordinated sciop and I had, I had some help, but I wasn't being, like the people were telling me stuff like, I say people, this is, you know, my friends were telling me stuff like, um, include a picture in your tweet, because then it will go viral. They said, you know, tweets go viral if there's a picture. But I was like, I don't want to put a picture. It's a serious resignation tweet. I'm not going to, like, put a picture.

I got a few friends to retweet it. But yeah, it goes to the actual details. You have some very high, you know, it was, it seemed, it was some very influential people tweeted it fairly quickly the moment when I. So they're pretty influential. These guys are, so it was people like Nathan Calvin and Snaer, Snaer Revenor, there are this organization called Enco. In code AI.

Within the space, they're influential. Oh, yeah. Within the space, they're definitely influential. The average person may not know who they are, but within your space, they know who they are. And they're also friends with many of us. Like I'm friends with SNAO. You know, we've been hanging out before this resignation. There's like, she's friends with a lot of lab employees.

It's also, yeah, it's not crazy that when I wanted to leave. So the journalist was interested because this was the first ever anthropic safety resignation to go kind of big in public. There'd been a few, but they were small. This was a big one. And obviously the people that are most, interested in, like, helping spread the message are people who are, you know, who want to slow down AI.

So who else were the people that, was anybody that played a role in you writing that, did any politician know you were going to tweet that? No, no, no. So nothing political. Nothing political. Are all these people that are friends that are friends that are working at Anthropic and Open AI or outside of Anthropic Open AI? They were all outside of Anthropic and Open AI.

None of them are working at the company. No. So no one at the company knew you were about to resign. They knew I was going to leave. they did not know I was going to like make such a bold Twitter threat. And how was that conversation that they know you were going to leave?

Were you like, guys, I can't do this anymore? I'm going to be out in a few weeks. Was it kind of like sharing your frustration? Exactly. I was talking, but the thing you have to remember about Anthropic is such a weird place. Like, these guys are scared of what they're building

in a way that I think repulses people when they see it. They're like, this is weird. Why are these guys building it and they're so scared? But it's real. They're really scared. So honestly, what happened is I said to the head of pre-training, I said, I'm going to, I'm going to quit.

I think this is going to go too fast. I think it's reckless. I think we're not going to get international coordination. You're saying this to who? To the head of, this is the head of like the whole of the pre-training organization, which is quite a big organization? Is that a heavyweight person within a company? Heavy weight, yeah.

So somebody that works directly with Dario? Exactly. Someone that would speak to Dario a lot. So you're telling them this? Yeah, I'm telling him this. I'm telling him this. And what's he, is this a public name or? Yeah, Nick Joseph, he's called.

Okay. So you're telling him this, and what's his reaction to you? Yeah, so his reaction is composed because he's dealing with these worries the whole time. He tells me, I think this is a bad decision. I think you will have more impact if you stay and work from the inside. And he said, you're not going to be able to, it's unlikely you'll be able to change people's opinions on the outside. I mean, what he said, something was like, do you want to go from being a, you know, like a, a good AI technical researcher

to being just a run-of-the-mill commentator, he said it seems like a bad strategic decision. This sounds like a good guy. It's a good guy, yeah. This is not a bad guy. This is a good guy. So he's trying to give you career advice.

He was going to be career advice. Okay. And what got you to say, I disagree, I'm going to leave, and I think I can impact. Yeah, and I said, well, I didn't say that. What I said is, you're probably right. It sounded like he was right. I just didn't want to be part of it anymore.

I thought when I left, it was an expression of resignation of kind of disempowerment. I thought, I don't want to be part of this race. I'm going to leave. Do something else. It might actually be worse. It wasn't really a rational decision. It was pretty emotional.

God, and these other friends of yours that you're talking to about the tweet, are these players that are running things and their heavyweights are some of them within the space of AI, but maybe they're not known names? Yeah, so there are a few players and then just a few. friends. And it's so funny. Again, people imagine this as being a, I think because of how crazy it went, they think it must have been this very careful thing. Really, I had a few, I had maybe three or four core names to do the retweeting initially. And then after I sent it, right, I sent it, and then I sent it a link to a few friends and said, post this in your group chats,

share this in your group chats, like spread it around. But honestly, by the time, like I sent it to one guy and he was like, okay, I'll share it. Let me write a careful quote tweet about it. Um, let me let me like carefully write it. write a quote tweet. And by the time he'd finished writing the quote tweet, it had already gone to like 20K likes. Like it already exploded. So the whole thing just went so, so crazy. And it like, this can't be planned, right? Like, imagine if there's no PR firm that can make, that can like hack the algorithm like this. Yeah. And when you did this, who was it from anthropic researcher? Somebody supported which, and Wang, right, is who it was. I think Evan Hubingue

was the main. Evan Hubing was one of them. Yeah. that he, what did he say that he agree with you? He said, he thought everything I said was correct. Because what I said is I didn't actually say my own opinion mostly. Mostly I said other people at the company believe it and continue to work there. If we scroll, it's like, it's a tweet three maybe. I said, the people building this technology earnestly believe it could kill us all. And he backed me up.

He said, this is correct. I do believe that this technology could kill us all. They ran an analysis of all the replies. of who agreed, who disagreed. 43% agreed, 40% disagreed, 18% were mixed. Yep. And so it wasn't like people weren't agreeing with you.

They were agreeing with it. I even think Elon retweeted and says, I agree with this. I said this a long time ago. Something like that, I think Elon said. Yeah, exactly. Right. And he has.

He's always said that. Did he reach out to you? Have you spoken to him? I mean, not like, not a, not a length. No. He's clearly been. thinking about this for a really long time. That's the main. So you guys did have a conversation together?

Yeah, we had a chat. Okay. This is after your tweet. Yeah, after my tweet. Was it a phone call? Was it a conversation? Was it a face-to-face? Just a DM. Just a DM. Just, okay. So you just DM'd you and, hey, you know, I agree with you, you know. I DM'd him. And then he responded back to you. Yeah, just had a little response. And mostly I was saying, like, he, I just DM him saying, you know,

because maybe we saw he had a little spat on Twitter. He, like, said, I was maybe a style. And I thought, I'm going to. to try and like, because I think he's been thinking about this first, like, so long. Did he explain to you why he said this could be a Siam? It wasn't, no, not that much detail. What do you think he met by this could be a Siyahup? With the original thing? I think it was quite suspicious that an account with no, with no followers could blow up that

much. The reality is he owns that, so he can find that exactly if they were driven or not. Exactly, and they weren't. So it was just like an organic explosion based on the fact that it was scary. Yeah, this is this. I kind of regret this tweet. It was pretty stupid. But then again, I had had no sleep.

and I was very annoyed that I thought Elon was kind of on the side of this. So it upset me quite a lot. Did he say he agrees and then he said sci-up? It's like it almost, there was a 50-50 with them, right? Yeah, so this, I think he was just, when I say si-up, he just thought it was the whole thing was quite suspicious. Like the fact that I'd, you know, the communities I'd been in before, the fact that it went so viral, I can see why he thought it was suspicious.

You got 300,000 followers within 40-8 hours. I know, it was not. Nothing. Absolutely insane. Yeah. And so now you brought up Leopold earlier. Yeah. Yeah. Leopold got the sequencing right.

Got fired. Story goes out, hey, here's my manifesto, you know, when he wrote down. We talked about it earlier. And in it, he says, it's not really such and such stocks that we have to worry about. We have to put our money into this and this and that's the infrastructure that's going to make a lot of money. And for the most part, he did well. You know, people made a lot of money. And then stories came out about how much of it was on margin and how much risk he was taken, 4 to 1, 2 to 1, 3 to 1. But his outcome was, I'm going to quit, I'm going to write this paper, it's going to go viral, I'm going to start a firm, I'm going to raise money. I think GitHub guys got involved at the beginning. He got some big names that got involved.

What's your financial next move? What's your financial benefit of doing this? There is no financial benefit. So, Leopold, I think. So you have nothing new to launch in the next three. I'm not going to try and milk this. I'm not doing anything. I'm going to, one way I will exploit the crazy, temporary.

fame of the situation is through having, you know, conversations with lots of researchers I respect that previously would have made less time for me and now I can talk more about the situation. And there's work I intend to do. There's lots of work, but I'm not trying to make any more money from this. How much money did you leave on the table by doing this? By leaving anthropic. By living anthropic. You know, I'm not going to say the exact detail, but seven figures.

Seven figures? Yeah. Okay. But let's go a little bit deeper. If you would have stayed five years and you would have done your party, would have moved up, potentially, 50 million, 100 million? Five years. That's the problem.

So I'm thinking about that, and it's like, it's not going to be the same in five years. In five years, everything looks different. Okay. This is, and I think the people that are talking about, they have these sums of money and these plans for the future, and they're just not thinking about how crazy it's going to get. So to you, to you, one, you're not a socialist leftist, that you belong to this NGO, that you're a pro-Bernie Sanders,

you're one a capitalist, free market, libertarian, you don't believe in the climate change is going to end up. You know, COVID-handling wasn't right. You thought it was a little bit too much. Okay, check. Let's set that aside. Number two, there is not a, I'm about to announce a hedge fund private equity firm, and this is why our private equity focuses on AI regulation and da-da-da-da-da-da.

You're not going to launch anything like that. So how are you going to make money? How are you making money right? Luckily, I have this money from OpenEI, right? And I think I will get a job. I mean, I'm going to get a job doing some form of... Within the space. Within the space.

And I think the job will most likely be around predicting where AI will go, trying to share that writing with other people. And also, I really, like I said, it sounds crazy, it sounds cultish. Things are going to change so much in the next few years. Unemployment's going to be a problem when we release, when we can automate a lot of white-collar jobs. You know, I have enough money for a few years,

and I really don't know what the world looks like. If I'm wrong, I can get a job in a few years. That'll be great. But I don't think I'm wrong. Got it. So for you, if you're hedging of you being right or wrong, If you're right, you have money and you want to do something to make a difference the next 12, 24 months. It sounds like that's your time.

You don't think five years is too late. I don't think, I don't necessarily that the really bad thing happens, but I think that the critical decisions, the crucial decisions about whether we slow down or not, they will happen in the next couple of years. If we're going to slow down or not? Exactly. And you think the next two years, there's still time to slow down to prevent the madness? Yes. Why is it specifically two years? If you look at the pace of the improvement, the specific take.

technology that is scary is when it can automate its own development. So when the job of AI research gets automated. And I think all the extrapolation suggests that that could quite likely come in the next few years. This is the whole RSI thing, recursive self-improvement. I think roughly around that time is the crucial time where the race will start, where China will lock in and it'll be China versus the US. Everyone will be taking it seriously. They'll be like fear.

they won't, opening eye anathropic won't be sharing the models with the public anymore. It will be internal, government only, full on race. That's when the crucial decisions happen. Like whether we go into this race or not, I think that gets decided this decade. You trust the government having this more than free market? I don't trust, you know, any specific personal entity. I just think right now the free market is not going to handle it well. And that's why?

Why do you think they're not going to handle it? Yeah, that's a great question. Because motivation is going to be what? Money. I think actually if I talk about my personal motivation, right? So there are people who I thought this was dangerous for a really long time, right? Like before I even joined. And when I joined opening, I thought it was dangerous.

At what age did you think this was dangerous? 15, 16. How old are you right now? 27? Yeah. So 1516? Yeah. So in 2015, you thought this was dangerous.

Yeah, there was a book called Super Intelligence by Nick Bostrom. It was quite influential. I read it in school. I think like, yeah, so this image of me having worked in AI and then suddenly got scared is wrong. I think I've always been scared. But then it's like, why do you join a lab in the first place? And there are other people who didn't join a lab.

They were also scared. They maybe behaved more ethically. They didn't join. But then when they say this stuff, no one listens. I joined the lab and I got all sorts of things that they didn't, you know, like money and status and some like respect for working there. And then I quit. And that's a selfish thing to do to say I'm going to work

at this technology and get the status from doing this, even though I think it's dangerous. But then it also gives you the power to make change. Does that make sense? Like this, you get power. And I think the same thing is like what Dario is doing. So, you know, Anthropic have been scared. And they said, well, no one's listening to us.

We're going to have to be a player, enter. And so Dario's worked, like, they've worked so hard. In the last, they've caught up to opening eye. It's very impressive. Anthropic have worked like absolute dogs to like overtake and become the main player. And they did that because they're like, we need the power. And that's the free market, right? the free market incentivizes you to get your own power, your own wealth, so you can make

change. The problem is that's going to keep happening. And people are going to keep doing this. It's the story of OpenEI. Open AI did that because they were scared of DeepMind. They were like, we're going to do it. Dario did it. He was scared of OpenEIii. He was like, I want the power. Even just like me, it's a small story, but why did I work and help? It's for my own power. And if we let the free market determine in the next few years, we're going to race off a cliff because everyone is looking out for their own money, their own power. No one has the ability to sort of slow down a few years ahead. It's this like race problem where everyone just like, and I don't blame them.

Right, I don't blame it. If you're a 22-year-old right now and you've done AI, I don't blame you if you get a job at anthropic and work there. Because what else are you going to do if you're like, how else are you going to try and help? So everyone is following their own incentives. And that's why we need, in this case, we need bigger regulation. Because, yeah, in any other technology, I'm happy with this. innovation, innovation from competition is great everywhere, except if the technology is this

level of compounding, risky, that's when it breaks. So at 2015, 2016, you read the book, Super Intelligence, and then you, at what age did you start working at Open AI? 23. And what did you do prior to that? I knew you were a big math, maybe walk through who you were as a math phenom and how you came up. Sure.

So I did math competitions in school. I was very into math. When I was a kid, I mostly just did math and read books. Then when I was in college, I guess... And you won. You did pretty well on two of the biggest... I did the international Math Olympia twice. And you were second in one?

No, no, no. Okay, so I think it was understood. I got a silver medal. Silver medal, yeah. A lot of people get silver medals. It doesn't make you the second in the world. I wasn't anywhere near the best. I was in sort of a...

I think silver medal is top... We can look it up. I think it's the top 20% of something. It's a... In the math arena. Yeah, I think the kind of achievement here is getting on the national team because that's being selected for six people

to do the team. See, answers like that you give tells me your integrity. You corrected me to say you're not as smart as I thought you were. Yeah. I mean, you realize that's that's... But also, I mean, the audience is watching. I understand that, but it's, but, you know, say 99% don't check it. You just, you just did an integrity check on yourself, and I respect that.

I value that. I hope the audience does as well. But please continue, so you're a math guy. Yep. And then I went to college and studied math. I kind of, I think I wanted to do math research. which was, you know, because I, yeah, I always love math. But unfortunately, I think it was a mix of many things.

I kind of realized that pure math research was not for me. It was partly related to AI. I saw that, like, AI was going to be this big thing that was going to eat a lot of stuff. Still felt quite far out. So I've been following it since, I don't know, 2020 was GBT3. GBD3 was this, like, quite big. This happened during the pandemic, which is also my third year of college. So I was sort of in the pandemic with a,

friend. We looked at the GPD3 paper and we were like, yep, it's happening. This is a big deal. This is where things are going. But I didn't know how to break into AI. So I didn't actually, I had no AI background. I studied math. So I worked with a friend at a power trading startup. We predicted energy prices, which is kind of, it was AI related. We predicted the cost of power. I did that for a bit. And then I took a, you know, there was some personally and I took a break for about a year. I was kind of out of it. And a little bit, I was living in Prague for a while

and then Scotland. And then finally I got a call from a friend who was, Jacob, what are you doing? AI is taking over. You're like, you can do math, you can learn AI, come and join Open AI's residency program. They have a program which is a six-month training program for people that are math guys or physics guys

to teach them the ropes of AI and make them full-fledged researchers. So I sort of said, yeah, that sounds great. I'll do that. So you went in and then you got it at six months, and then you were there for how long? Three years, yeah. Three years, yeah. I was like pretty junior, but for context, the company went from 300 people when I joined

to about, you know, 7,000, 8,000 now, I think. So it was like a pretty explosive phase? And was Sam Alton pretty accessible when it was at 300? Like, were you around them a lot? He's around, yeah, you see him. You see him. You've had conversations with them. Okay.

And how different did you get that same experience with Dario at Anthropics? Not in the same way, no. Okay, so what is your opinion of what Sam Altman is doing versus what Dario is doing? Yeah. How different are they? They're completely different. Yeah, I'm going to, so I think Sam is, so Dario is very honest. I think that's the first, you can see, everyone can see that.

He's very open and honest and shares a lot of stuff with everyone. I think he's like, he's always honest. And he's obviously like an amazing researcher, and I'm always impressed by what he's like accomplished, building Anthropic. Sam has a reputation for dishonesty. So Sam has a reputation for being a lot more of a business guy of sort of pleasing one people of always being quite vague. I think the main difference I noticed between Dario's communication and Sam's communication is Sam is very vague about the future.

He says things will be good in this way and maybe they'll be dangerous, but we can model through, like a vague thing. Whereas Dario is like, 20% chance of this happens, 80% chance of this happens, this is what it looks like. And that's a lot more like rough to hear because it comes across as quite a break. It's like tough to hear the details But Sam it's like it feels like he's making everyone promises and he could be saying

Vague stuff to everyone everyone feels kind of happy, but he's actually not really saying anything That's kind of the main difference I'd say in terms of how they communicate with the with the company What do you think is the end-all be all for each one of them? Yeah, again, this is armchair psychology Sure, I'm not good friends with them. This is just from watching. I think Darya wants to save the world as it were. He's got like a thing he's the He thinks he's the him and his company are the ones to save everyone I think Sam has a lot of motivations,

and it's quite messy and chaotic, and that's reflected in how messy and chaotic the company is. But again, this is armchair speculation. I don't, yeah. So if one is saved, the other one is control? To be clear, when Dario is saving the world, I think saving the world and taking over the world overlap quite heavily.

You could flirt with that. You could have that temptation. If you think you're the safe one, and China's building it unsafe, or you think the U.S. government's being silly, and you have a very powerful technology, you know, it's not off the table to consider taking actions against the US government.

And I think if anyone would do that, it's Anthropic. In the inside organizations, Open AI in Anthropic, how different are the cultures? Very different. Tell me more. So one thing is Open AI may have changed. I left like four months ago, and I think they've started taking stuff more seriously.

So Anthropic has seven co-founders, and none of them have left. They've all stayed, which is very impressive for an AI. company because at a at opening eye everyone's left they all go almost all the other companies everyone leaves the whole time anthropic retains them and that's because i think anthropic has this they are very clear about what their mission is and they're very clear about how they're going to achieve it and this makes them very dangerous it's a very aligned institution to put it another way

at opening i it felt like people might prioritize their career their like individual success over the mission of the company, which is a very natural thing to do. Like, everyone does this. It's like, I want to do a project that's going to make me have an impact that's going to be interesting for me, that's good for my career.

At Anthropic, it felt a lot more like, well, for starters, the employees call themselves like ants, right? The ants in the ant hill, everyone's like a worker ant, trying to make the anthropic, you know, the mission go well. People are very willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the mission.

They'll take on work that's less interesting, that's less kind of big and bold and exciting, it's less flashy, and they'll do it at a hit to their own kind of interests for the good of the company. And that's because every decision comes back down to, like, is this going to get us to superintelligence faster? You've seen maybe SORA, you saw the video platform, the opening I made. Anthropic would never make SORA because it's not on the core path to artificial superintelligence. Opening eye is distracted and messy, and one guy's like, I want to do SORA or I want to build like a little device, and they let them do it because

it's not like the same focus. That would never happen. They're just completely kind of who would shut it down the seven co-founders? They'd be like this is not a it all agree it'll be like this video it's not the right direction for for heading straight to super intelligent which one is harder to work yet more schedule more hours I think it depends on what team you're on probably I think um when I was there I think it also depends on the stage of your career I think when I was getting into the work was also so different because now compared to three years ago you're running these agents you weren't doing that three years ago so when I joined I was writing code by hand right like I was

hand programming and by the time I left, no one really writes code by hand anymore. Your agents, your agents write the code. Your agents write the code. Yeah. I can talk more about the, it's kind of interesting about the details of how much AI runs the company. To give some flavor, when I quit, when I resigned, I was like, what's the procedure for resigning? Like, what do I sign? And my manager was like, I don't know, ask Claude. So I asked the AI. So I asked the AI, how I resign. And the AI told me the flow. No one knows how to resign. You have to ask the AI to do it because the company is run by like the process. processes are run by AI, right? Everyone asks, and it's great, it works. But that's the extent to which AI is part of the whole company. It's like any transaction is mediated by asking the AI to do it. People's meetings are recorded by AI, summarized. You have AI's posting comments on things. You write an essay and AI will respond. It's like pretty crazy. Interesting. Is Dario and Sam Altman, on the way their people look at them, between fear,

respected, liked, loved, how would you rank them? Like if you were to say people love Dario, they respect them. I would say adenthropic people love and respect Darya. Really? Yes, in a way that's not the case at Obenia. Darya has very much like a cult of personality and a cult of like a cult of vision as it were at Anthropic. And then at the Sam Altney's more fear? I don't know. I think he's obviously respected and obviously loved by a lot of people, but not in the same Dario's thing is different. Yeah, and in the company, like, no matter where you work, you're like, right now, you know, yesterday Yankees played the Red Sox and, you know, they hate each other, their enemies.

Yeah. Right? In sports, you know, we're talking about baseball earlier. You know, in politics, you know, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, you know, in basketball, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, you know, he was a, who was the enemy to, you know, who was the enemy to, Dario and who did Sam Altman see as his enemy? Yeah, that's a great question. You have to look at the history of the companies.

So when opening I was founded, the big enemy was deep mind, Google deep mind and Demas Asabas. And they were worried about Google kind of becoming dictators. They were worried about Google taking over. So that was the enemy. And then opening I was founded. Now it's like, I'd say there's probably more, like Dario has a lot of animosity towards Sam Olman and the reverse is not necessarily true to the same extent.

Meaning Sam Altman doesn't have animosity towards Dario. I think less because I think like I said, Dario is very honest and I think perceive Sam as having betrayed him to a certain extent and that's a kind of a pretty permanent lot on the relationship. How did he betray him? I really don't know the details, but that's my understanding. Again, this is from a... That's the energy you see?

That's the energy that's not public. I think that's pretty public, yeah. on the betrayal between, did they do business to get that one? Yeah, I mean, Dario's a like big, big figure opening eye before he quit. Oh, that's right. So that's, the history is from them leaving. I remember that one, that whole exchange took place. So for him, Dario's enemy was, I'm going to leave and build something faster than

has he ever expressed the reason for leaving? Was it because he did not want Sam to have the control of this kind of a technology? Basically, yes. That's what it was. I don't think it's good for the world for Sam to control. Maybe not Sam specifically, but definitely a large component, Sam, and then the rest of opening eye. And who do you think Sam looks at as enemy today? Is it a politician? Is it a competitor? Is it handmade in Portugal, their craftsmanship is a way of life. For those who move through life

differently, from sunlit decks to nights that never need an occasion, every detail is considered, every step, effortless. Crafted from fine swayed and built with builder to, technology designed to move with you. Because true luxury isn't about being noticed. It's about how you feel when you arrive. The FLB iconloa made for the life you've earned. I really don't know. Okay. And what role in something like this right now? I mean, you saw that they had a meeting at AI at the White House with everybody being there. The list was all the heavy weights were there, right? And part of that was from your tweet that prompted these types of conversations being had now. What role does Trump play here?

Does Dario trust Trump? Does Dario look at Trump as an ally? Does Altman see Trump as an ally? How do they view that? I think everything has changed so much now that I really don't know the – I have, like, quite a very few things that I'm, like, confident on. I think right now, honestly, everyone is just quite scared of how fast things are going and they're looking for ways to come together. I do think this particular – this particular – this particular – record is, you know, it's a good thing. Like, what they wrote makes a lot of sense.

By the way, at the AI meeting at the White House, was Darryo and Sam Altman present? I don't think Sam Alman was. I think he was an opening eye dev day, but Greg Brockman was there. And he's won the seven? No, no, Greg Robwin is a, um, representing opening. Yeah, got it. Was anybody there from Anthropic? Yeah, Daria was there. Dario was there. Yeah. Okay. Once the last time, Dario and Altman have been seen together. Is that like the thing that happens or is that super uncomfortable? Have you seen all these videos flying around?

No. Like, there are these funny music videos flying around now? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the dancing that they're doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like this. That's funny, that they did something together. Yeah, that's as close as it's going to get there. So one of the things you said in the, where do you see Dario here?

See if we can spot him. I think he's a follow up. Can you find Dario? Where is Waldo? Where is Dario? I don't see him in this picture. No, I don't think he's there. I don't see him in this picture here.

I think he's on the far left. So, you know, go through it. So while you were there at Anthropic and you guys are having these types of conversations, how many other people while they're sitting there saying, guys, we are, you know, building our replacement. Yeah. We are building our replacement.

How many people felt they are building their replacement? Everyone. Everyone. Yeah, that's just a fact. Everyone knows it. Is that a fact, or do the agents still need to be controlled by somebody like you? For now they do. For now they definitely need control.

and it's not clear exactly when they lose. We don't need the human anymore, but everyone anticipates it. They're all like we're going to be, at some point we won't have a job. This Dario, like, let's just say that's something that is happening, and I'm an employee, and I know this is going to be happening again. It's like a truth, right?

Was there like a life insurance policy, guys, if this happens, here's what we're planning on doing so you don't have to worry about it. Yeah, Santhrobic, I think in one of Dario's essays, I think it might be Machines of Loving Grace, this essay. he has a section where he talks about the fact that Anthropic will need to make commitments to its employees for if they get replaced.

And I think people implicitly had the knowledge that if Anthropic employees get replaced due to progress, they could expect to be taken care of. I think people expect that they will stay and kind of be looked after. Yeah, so, but Open AI you don't remember having anything like that. They've not said anything publicly. I think there may be some references to it, but nothing. I think that's a pretty good idea.

If you know your people are afraid of something like that, hey, if this happens, we would do this. If that happens, we would do this. Maybe, but it also sets about, like, what about the people that don't work there? What about all the people that are going to get replaced to other companies? It kind of doesn't look great if you're looking up for your employees. You're going on your employees.

But, like, at these other companies, people are, you know, losing their jobs, and they don't have the same assurances as someone that works at a... Jacob, who's a weirdest person that slid in your DM slid in your DM after that tweet? These are some crazy stuff. I had a lot of, um, I had a lot of quite aggressive gay men DMing me.

Gay men? Yeah. Just to... Wow. Did they think you're gay? I don't know, man. They wanted to find out, yeah. And for the record, you're not gay?

For the record, I'm not gay, yeah. So gay men. A lot of them in my DMs, yeah. But like, powerful gay men? No, not powerful gay men? Just dudes in my DMs, yeah. Listen, I mean, if there's powerful gay men, you got to entertain. You got to reply, yeah.

No, it's not real. You got to reply and say at least. That is the group men. This is a billionaire gay man. Hey, sir, respectfully, I'm straight. But thank you for your interest. I mean, you could, yeah, you don't have to say. Any heavy weight politicians, world leaders, you know, billionaires, any names like that?

I think, so there were, like, there were a few names. The whole thing is like, I mean, lost in the inbox. I don't want to say, like. You must have tens of thousands of the, yeah. It's kind of nuts. I just to decide what to respond to you. But I don't want to say specifics. I think a lot of politicians have reached out, and I haven't responded to any of them yet.

But a lot of people for things like, I think Bernie Sanders has people reached out. I haven't responded to that yet. I had an invitation to go to, I think, a rally with Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders that I chose not to go to. With Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders? Yeah. Is there a line on this, right? They're on the same page. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That is a weird rally to go to. I know weird. And I say rally was like, are you thinking about it? I was thinking about it, definitely. But the thing is, uh, interesting. I just wouldn't look good on head. I don't want to associate. I don't want to be political, right?

I'm also, I'm from the UK. I feel like I don't want to just jump into U.S. politics. That's just like an odd thing to do. Yeah, that's And by the way, is it true that the story at Open AI, like, you know,

if you're going through conflict, they bring dolls and stuff like that. What is that? I saw the story last week. I funny believe. Oh, anthropic. Is this true,

like a stuffed animal advisory council? I mean, I don't think this is happening in the office, per se. But I believe it, yeah. I think, like...

Do you ever see it or hear it? I've never seen it, but I've seen things similar at people's houses, right? They have like a duck that they used to talk about their problems. I think it's cool. I think it's like,

Look, dude, Anthropic is going to be a two trillion IPO. These guys are going to eat capitalism alive. I'm like, they can do whatever the hell they want if they're... Who gives a shit? These guys are taking over. Like, I mean, you've got to give them some respects. Like, if they're, yeah. And the upside between the two, just as an investor,

forget about, I know what you're thinking about. As an investor between the two, is open AI even close to the way they run things at Anthropic? So I haven't been there for four months. Maybe it's changed, but I would like... Like, why is opening eye ahead of Google? It's largely a culture thing. Google has a lot of resources,

a lot of people, a lot of great talent, but OpenEI has this focus on building LLMs, and Anthropic is so much more focused. Again, I hear that opening eye is becoming more focused, but right now as an investor, I guess I would long Anthropic, definitely. What would you need to see yourself for you to second guess your own fears

that you have right now? What would you need to see? You know what, maybe I'm wrong. Yeah, I would love to see a... So alignment is the science of making them safe, and I would love to see, for example, some good arguments, just scientific arguments that we control the behavior of the AIs. And I think this is doable.

To go back to, I think there is research that needs to happen on this, but it's not impossible. Some people say it's impossible. I think you can solve it. The main thing is just next year, the year after, these companies will have to choose between making the thing that makes more money and more power and justifies the insane capital build-out. They're not to choose between that and doing the safety science.

That's like a decision. And the free market incentives push you to choosing to go fast, get power, make it better, and skip the safety research. You don't sound like a libertarian. In this case. In this case, anything else, anything else, you're libertarian, not this one. Just not this one. Okay. So you, you know, if you right now, we did this after your tweet, if you go on chat, GPT or perplexity or Claude, you ask, what is the life?

like the good that AI is going to replace humanity or destroy humanity in 10 years. Just like 10% or something, 5% maybe? Itself, it says 5% to 10%, right? Okay. I've asked this question from Roman Yan Polsky. I don't know if you know who Roman Yanpolsky. Yeah, I saw your interview. Yeah, I sat down with a good conversation.

I asked them how. What would it look like? Yeah. What would it look like in your rights? You're an insider. Yeah, of course. Okay, if the world's going to come to an end of five, 10 years, how would it happen? First, you have to realize that the world will look different for this to happen.

So it's not like it's the end of the world. It's just going to be a different world. Yeah. Like, there'll be a lot more robots. You've seen that we're building out robots very quickly. That we have a ton of robots around. Right. There'll also be a lot of, potentially a lot of weapons around that aren't currently.

There'll be a lot of building out of, say, drones. Right now, you know, we've seen like Russia-Ukraine drones used. 100%. We're scaling that up. Imagine in five years, like, these countries are going to be bristling with deadly drones. And AI is going to be integrated everywhere. We're going to have a lot more of a robot economy, a lot more of decisions are being made by AI systems and not by people. So you have to imagine the world looks.

different in that right now, it feels like we're not surrounded by that much tech. Like, what could an AI do in this room? It could, like, mess with some cameras, mess with some lights. But imagine if just the world is bristling with, like, drones and robots. There's a lot more, like, AI activity happening. At that point, I think it feels a lot scarier. Like, if the AI is in all the science labs, it's in every system, and it also has all these drones and robots around, then suddenly you don't feel so safe anymore. Also, imagine all your decisions are being made by AI. You're thinking about podcast planning or Like stuff that, you know, that I don't understand,

but if you ask the AI about it in the future, it'll be giving you great advice, like strategic advice. Like, here's how to, you know, like, with certain guests to be, like, extra his things to say to make them extra persuasive, and it would be better than humans are coming up with, like, all sorts of stuff. I mean, you've already seen some guys who come out of nowhere

with their podcast blows up, and they are 90% is AI-driven. It's AI-driven. And some of the personality-driven podcasts, who used to be bigger five years ago, they've kind of flatlined a little. And it's like, imagine that, but even more. So everyone, you're aware that all your decisions

can be made better with AI. You're asking for planning, like say, financial planning for spreading out like, whatever sort of business stuff you're doing. And it becomes a fad though, and people are like, I mean, sports teams right now, valuations growing exponentially. Yeah.

Because what people are saying is, even no matter how many robots you have, people gonna wanna see other people beat people. We will be more interested and impressed by what people do, human beings do instead of what robots do. But the AI will be telling you that. If that's true, who will be telling you that?

AI will tell you if we'll say like prioritize people things because it understands. So just when you're thinking about this world, it's like we're not making decisions anymore. The decisions are all the AI. At that point, it should be clear that if the AI decided to turn against us, we would have no power. Just imagine at that point no one's working anymore. Everyone's just asking the AI to run this stuff for them. Maybe some people are pretending to work or like they think they're working, but really the

AI could do it better. and you've got robots and drones and labs building out all sorts of crazy technology. At that point, I think you should start to feel like, wow, if humans were the enemy suddenly, there's nothing we could do. Don't you think that's kind of like, you know, every time, every generation, when something new is coming out, there's a fear about what TV was going to do. Yeah. Elvis Presley started shaking his hips. Oh my God, everyone's going to start sleeping with each other. Honey, turn off, close your eyes.

Don't look at his hips. This is bad, you know, or music, radio, TV, internet, you know, nuclear war. Oh, everyone's going to use nuclear bombs. It's going to be a nuclear World War III, World War II. Hasn't really happened. Yeah. What's different about this? Is this the fact that you think if it all of a sudden thinks on its own, the AI can think they

control us, and now we have no control and they can say, hey, you guys better respond to us or else? I guess what I'll say is, I don't know how much of the world works. I've just done tech and math. So I don't know how to run another business or to build anything or anything like this. And also the, I guess, people that are working in other industries,

they don't have visibility into AI. They don't see it. What I'll say is if you look at just, I think the news headlines are quite interesting because for even other panics, I don't think what we had is this buildup. I think maybe there'd be like an initial thing and then it would like be a plateau

or it would be like, this TV thing, it would dribble through the same articles coming through. there wouldn't be this buildup, whereas right now everyone can feel it. I'm sure you can feel it right with AI. It's like every year it gets bigger and faster. So I'd say that even though I don't know, I don't understand the other stuff and people outside don't understand the AI. I would say just look at the rate. It's just every year it gets bigger.

And nothing else has been like that. It's this exponential like coming faster. So really I think you don't need to trust me. Like I just think in six months it will become even more clear to everyone. In six months. Yeah, it'll be more clear in six months. Unpack that. Yeah, so the models that come out in the next three or four months.

You know what models are coming up. Yeah, I do. And I can't say details, but they're going to be a lot better at coding. They're going to be a lot better at automating my research. It will go even more to running these agents like employees. Maybe these models will get released. Maybe they won't get released. There'll definitely be news stories about the decisions around releasing them.

It's going to feel big, I think. By the way, when you say Darya was a great researcher, your researcher, coder we get, engineer we get. What does it mean to be a researcher? It's kind of pretentious. It mostly means coming up with the ideas. So, like, which things to code. So, like, you've got the AI, I guess,

details of its training recipe, deciding which ingredients to add, deciding what shape its brain is, essentially, deciding how it's connected together. All these, like, decisions. It honestly is... How do you score a great researcher? Yeah.

He's a great researcher. How do you know that? Like, does it take yours for somebody? Like, people took yours to realize Dario's good, or can you look at a 23-year-old and say, this guy's a special researcher? Honestly, I saw a contract that a young, 24-year-old got a $1 billion payday from META.

What is special about that guy that META gave him a billion-dollar? There are some guys that are just like, they will... So these training runs cost a lot of money. These AI training things, they cost a lot. Right, we're talking maybe, like, hundreds of millions more.

If you make that more efficient, you're saving the company a lot of money. The CAPEX on these data centers, like hundreds of billions. Again, if you make any of this more efficient, you're saving a lot of money. And there are some guys for now that have amazing intuition and work really hard and will save the company a ton of money. Yeah, like this right, you. Medici's at $250 million dollars to lure 24-year-old whiz kid. We have reached the climax of Revenge of the Nerd.

Oh, yeah. And I think it was... $250 for a 24-year-old. What's special about this $24 million? to pay $250 to him. So I don't remember this, dude. Go a little bit higher so I can read it. Maybe look up on...

What was his name? Another guy got a billion dollar. Look at the billion guy. Yeah, who's the billion guy? I met him a few times. Can you go to the billion guy? Do you know the name of the guy or no? Andrew, something I think.

So guy got a billion dollars. Just ask Chad Chabit. Go look at that in chat and see what it says. Yeah, somebody got a billion out of it. Oh, yeah. Why, though? These guys are like... So like, you met him.

So what was so special about him? him. These guys have good taste for research. They know the right things to do. They'll save you so much money in your big, crazy experiments. Actually, walk me through it. So can you systematize that? What does that mean? So, uh, you fixed it. Yeah, sure. Yeah, walk me through it. What does it mean that these guys know how to do it, save you all this time for research? Yep. So imagine you're kicking off a big AI training run, it's called. So it'll take a few months. And you've got to decide the details of the data and the recipe, these things. Some guys, like this guy, are just great at making changes to that recipe

so that it becomes more efficient. And if this whole thing, and in a way that no one else can match, no one else can have the same ideas. So these guys are... We come up with an idea, and this guy is able to say, it's a waste of time, I wouldn't do it. Although this guy in particular, I think, was just great at, like... This guy, you know this guy? Yeah, I met him a few times during training around.

at Open AI and he was a he was always around he was like very fast at solving stuff he was fixing bugs in our training of the AI system like snap just fixing them in a way that other people weren't fixing them so he was irreplaceable right and then um that's why he's worth a billion dollars and as he who gave the billion who was the meta poached met a game a billion out yeah from our thinking machines yeah um underton which is meta to train rival a model Claude. So he left the Meta now. The Excerm Genius who reportedly got a billion an auto package from meta has defected to one of its rivals in the AI race. I guess I've not been following news. This is three days ago. This is literally two days ago.

I guess he joined Anthropic, which is a movie. And Australian tech was reported. So saw that my medal, I want a billion dollar salary package in front of him, had already left a company to join the AI race, Andrews on his own. Who's he go to? Is he all anthropic? Yeah. So he went to Anthropic. So Dario picked them up. You didn't even know this. I didn't know this just happened three days ago. And so. And so. But this guy was a whiz, fast, he could solve it, faster than his peers. Exactly. And how old is he?

Is he about your age? I think he's 30s. He's 30s? Yeah, I think so. Okay. Yeah, so. Now, let me ask you, can the people, okay, like, let's say 100 of you. Yep.

Okay. Who feel the way you do. Ex-anthropic, X Open AI, X, Google, X, pick all of them. Yeah. You guys find each other. Okay, can you guys Use the AI against itself to hack into it and destroy the systems Sorry, what do you mean so use the AI? Okay, so think about let's just do an evil

Like let's devil's advocate this global plane You are so convinced this shit is gonna get bad Yeah, that you unify together the hundred of you you have a common enemy AI is gonna destroy humanity let's get ahead of it let's destroy it ourselves So yeah I think you the thing you've described is Basically anthropic That entity you're talking about is anthropic. Like, they're a group of people that were scared.

They organized together. They unified themselves together. And they're going to take, like, aggressive action to try and save people. That is literally what anthropic is. So you're saying anthropic was those hundred people that unified together to potentially if they wanted to destroy open AI, they could. Exactly. So you mean to tell me right now, Anthropic, if they wanted to destroy open AI, they could?

No, they're not at that level. And I'm not saying they're planning that necessarily. I'm not saying you're saying they plan it. I'm just saying capability. Those are two different things. No, they couldn't. Not right now. Not right now.

When do you think they would be able to? You know, it depends again how fast we go, but end of the decade. So four years? Yeah. So in four years, if Daria wanted to destroy open AI, he could. I think quite plausibly, yes. And it depends on how fast people go. I know, right?

What? Wow. So the seven co-founders of Anthropic, do they all share the comments? an enemy of how they've used Sam Altman? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know the details. Did they all come from OpenAI? Are they all from different places? I think they all came from Open AI.

You cannot tell me you don't know. I mean, it's very obvious. I think Daniela Amadee maybe, no, no, she did too. Yeah, I think they all came from OpenEye. Jack Clark, he's also Open AI. Tom Brown. Can you check to see if all of the seven co-founders of Anthropic all came from Open AI?

So the way I watched how Sam Altman handled Elon, it was disrespectful. I'm not involved. I'm not on the inside. I don't know what's going on. But from the outside, it sounded like Sam Altman deceived. You know, Elon.

It sounded like Elon was coming from a good place of open AI, allow everybody know what we're building. At least that's my impression of it. And then it goes from a nonprofit to for profit. And Elon's like, wait a minute, what are you doing? Didn't Elon give like $50 million? He gave some amount. He gave some amount to him to help build it.

And then it goes, so the reputation in the marketplace place about Open AI is not positive, specifically Sam Althman. We even had a guy here who used to work at Open AI. His parents came here. And this is the fellow who was the whistleblower who was found dead. I don't know if you remember that story. Yeah, we had him here. Mom came here, dad came here, they spent it. They were trying to tell us, I'm telling you, here's what we think happened with Sam Altman, where some people would say there's an element of evil in this guy. Would you agree with that? I don't know. And I will say about the Suchia thing. So

all the stuff I'm saying about taking over in the future, I mean that completely. In the short term... You said you mean that completely? I mean that it's possible in the future. This, like, yeah, there's no way that they killed Suchia. Like, that wasn't a hit. A hundred percent

it wasn't. That's just not a thing opening I would do. You know that? I know that. Yeah. How do you know that? Just from personal relationships to people that run the company, This is, it's just nonsense. Did you ever meet him? Yes, I'm at Sushi.

What was he like? Was he? It was great. Just a great researcher, great guy. I presume he was depressed. I presume it was a suicide. I think there's no, it seems impossible that it was anything else. And this is someone who's saying,

I'm also saying that opening an anthropic are racing to destroy the world. But this particular act, I can say this was. I like you a lot, Jacob. I don't know who you were, but I like you a lot. Let me, the more I talk to you, the more I like. Thank you. It's so funny because I didn't know who you were. I don't know how you were, but tell me about your parents. My parents? Yeah.

Sure, yeah. My father's a professor of medieval German literature. Medieval German literature. Yes. Why? You can ask him now. It's pretty dumb. That's what he did. Yeah, that's what he did.

How about mom? Oh, she did some stuff. I don't know. Yeah. I can go home. And what values did they raise you with? What did they teach you? What values did they raise me with? I read a lot of books. Your character, like, I want to know about the character. Like, what did they tell you, hey, you know, your man, you keep your word and integrity? What do they teach you on?

What values do they? That's what I'm interested in. I was raised in a Christian school, but my parents are atheists. They're atheists, and they intentionally put you in a Christian school. Well, a lot of schools in the UK are Christian per se. It's not in the same. It's not the same as the US, yeah. It's like a bit later.

Did that, did the faith play a role on you? I don't think so. No, no. No. Your integrity, where do you get the values? Where do you get that from? This is very impressive. I think it's maybe a math thing. I don't consider myself to be particularly in, like,

I think I'm just trying to say the truth. I try and say true things is the main thing. Like in math, you try and say the truth about stuff. So I'm just trying to say true things, right? Like in this case, I don't know. Yeah, but character is different than true. I know a lot of people that are good in math who are extremely logical, but they find a way to use that against them to manipulate it and have, I don't feel that from you. I'm really not a saint in this situation.

I've told you I profited a lot from working at opening eye. You profited a lot. Yeah, I made money from working at opening eye. I think I worked at opening eye even while thinking it was potentially a dangerous thing. Why we were doing it because you were making good money? Because not specifically the money, but because the whole situation, like you want to be part of it. You want to be working on it. You're not thinking too clearly.

When's your birthday? What month's your birthday? It was September 20. So you just had a birthday question. 10 days ago. Yeah. Happy birthday to you. Thank you.

Yeah. Because I remember reading 26. I'm like, when you turned 27 years old? Because at the beginning, yeah, when you did this, you were 26 years old. September 8, right?

27. Yeah, and now I'm 28. Oh, you're 28 now. Yeah. Okay, I got it. Well, two more you're going to be old. You're about to be 30, man. Like, what are you going to do from here?

You know? I have the response to those gay men in my DM. Let's hope some of them have money and say, hey, I need somebody to take care of me. That is hilarious. So the question that I asked you, and your answer, I'm still in that question because I asked, I said, if 100 people like you,

so if 100 people of you united and decided to go up against the enemy, could you break them? And you said, that's exactly what Anthropic did. That is very interesting. That is very interesting. So they created themselves to play defense against the enemy, but if the technology gets smarter than them,

then they have to play defense against the technology that's got a life of its own now. Yeah. And they're aware of that. like Daria where. Is it fair to say that an assessment of Daria is he's a pretty paranoid guy? Yes. He is. Definitely, yes. And so that could work in your favor and against you at times. Yeah. And I think an important thing with Anthropic is they always promised that they would never overtake OpenEI. At the very start, they always said that they would never push the boundaries.

They would always be second place. They'd catch up. They'd make it safe. But now they've overtaken. And now they regularly release AIs that are better than Open AIs. A.I.s. Which was a thing they said they would not do. And you think that's just because the capitalism competition? I think that's a component of it. I think they also have a story that they can get ahead. They have extra time to make it safe. They have like better AIs to run their safety research.

There's a lot of reasons for it. But also it is, you know, it makes them a lot of money. Who's third in the competition, by the way? Who started the competition? Third. Who's third? Like if it's them two, who's three? That's a great question.

I think it's a... Like a far distance third? It's not a... I mean, it's pretty far at the moment, I think. So there's a, you know, there's meta, Google and XAI. And I'm not actually deep enough in the weeds right now to know exactly who's third. I suspect it's a like meta overall. But those three are also around.

In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $26 an hour. Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields, like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. Has the White House reached out to you? No, no. They've not reached out to you to just be like,

hey, what do you think about what's going on? Even not, I'm not saying the president. I'm somebody on the team that's kind of like, hey, here where you are, what suggestions would you have for us? I'm not sure. I think quite a few staffers have reached out or politicians, but I'm not sure about the White House per se.

You haven't had a conversation with them? No. Okay. If they did, and they say, okay, Jacob, you're a young guy that you worked at both of these places. What should we do? What would you say? So what I'd say is, again, to start with, not an ex-I-I-got. I got the Chinese nationals.

Okay, don't give a, kind of treat it like SpaceX, but what else? The most important thing is we need to make sure that the, so that the safety problem is solvable. We just need to incentivize solving it. We need to make it so that we devote our resources to solving it. To make that, let me write that down, like, in a couple of years, Samoam will be able to decide what percentage of his resources go to making money, making things smarter, and what percentage go towards doing safety research. Because a lot of stuff will be automated.

So it's really like, it's like a game, like a video game. He'll get to just say, safety research, this percent. It's like you're allocating resources in a video game. And the problem is, what percentage do you allocate? and that depends on whether you're in a race or not. So what I would say is we need to ensure that they will be able to pick the right percentage for safety, which could be 50, 60, 70, it could be a big number.

They have to pick the right number. And right now I'm worried that the free market means they will pick the wrong number, and there's nothing we can do about it. And also the race with China. So what I would say is we need some agreement with all the labs and with China about the percentage of resources

that go to making ourselves smarter versus doing the safety research. Did you see the red phone story? No. So can you pull that up, the red phone story? So back in the days, U.S. and USSR had a red phone for nuclear, that they would have the conversation if something were to happen. They created a red phone story.

U.S.-China red telephone could bring a cold war guardrail to AI. They're saying they have that, but China doesn't want to buy by it. China's not really interested in it. Okay, so that's already been talked about. And Xi and the president had a conversation about this. I think last week, I think they have another follow-up to come back. They spent a little bit of time talking about AI. U.S. and China set up an AI red phone.

Can you go to the other one you just said? U.S. and China is to set up a red telephone. So I guess the question I'm trying to go with this here is, if they're going to do that, they don't agree to it. We choose to do it internally. They continue advancing. where lies the blind spot for Trump, President Trump, where lies the blind spot for China? Where's the blind spot for Dario and Altman's?

What do you mean by a blind spot? Like something that they're not even looked. They're like, yeah, I don't think it's that big of a deal. Where is their blind spot? What are they not seeing? Is it just the incentive is so big that it's like, I don't want to slow down because there's no way in the world. I'm going to, so has it become from, we were doing this for a noble cause that we know

Open AI and Sam Altman were the enemy, and we have to prevent them to expanding, and now it's like, we're going to beat him. There's no way in the world. We're going to let him advance. The biggest thing is it's really easy to kid yourself with safety research. So it's very easy to say,

this thing looks great, because all you need is one mistake and you're toast. So it's very easy to like, an inner race, just imagine. You're like, you're 90%, you're like, okay, this looks great. We're not quite certain. China's also doing it.

What do we do? We either launch today and keep the lead on China. China or we delay a few weeks and do these checks that probably are not necessary. The question is, what would you do in that scenario? And I don't know what I would do. Imagine you're running an AI lab and you're like, do I keep going? Or do I stop and do the safety thing when China is at your time? So I'm saying.

So you and I don't know, right? Because we're not on the inside. Could it be that they know something that you don't know, which is causing them to continue? Because there's no way in the world. like are they going to think and say you know what I'm going to go it's like the movie I robot

I'm going to have so many of these robots and I have control of them that no one's going to be able to touch me because they will protect me basically you think that's what they're thinking I think plausibly at some point that they're flirting with that mindset yeah sometimes so we are now more powerful

than any military in the world because I can activate any red button of a nuclear bomb if I wanted to because I can hack into your system so now you're talking about a big problem because now it becomes a godlike figure you think you are now god right these people have been planning to be and you look at the early conversations look at Elon Musk's conversations look at Demis hasabas's conversations from the start it's been whoever controls AI becomes a

god you know almost that's been the picture from the start opening i was founded because they didn't want demis hasabas to become a god as it were and now we're getting getting close, which is just weird and scary that, you know. So then at that point, if you create guardrails and you get the systems, because then the enemy of Dario becomes somebody on the inside. Because typically what happens is somebody on the inside watches you and sees that you become an evil and they try to talk to you about it and you either eliminate them or you fire them or you get rid of them or you create guardrails to undermine them.

You use propaganda to say, hey, this guy's a pedophile. This guy, you know, I saw something with a kid or I saw something with this. And, you know, and then, you know, kind of like that one story where the AI threatens the user to tell his wife that he's cheating on the wife. I don't know if you saw that or not with the blackmail. Did you see that story recently? It's going to be very easy to toy with the human's emotion of public humiliation to control them. But Dario's enemy essentially long-term becomes nobody but somebody on the inside. Nobody else is going to be his enemy.

Quite plausibly. Although soon the guys running this company, they won't need the humans, right? They can run the company on the back of AI. The seven guys? The seven guys, or even just, I mean, it depends who has the power, but they'll be there just telling the AI. One of those seven will be the enemy. Right.

No, I'm telling you. That's how the sense. The sense with... One of the seven says, what the, what are you doing? But you've forgotten the stuffed toys. That's what's going to say. You know what? I'm sorry, I missed it.

My apologies. I wasn't paying attention to it. Did you see if all of them were former open AIs? Is it yes? So the seven currently identifies Anthropic are Darya was open AI VIP research. Daniela was open AI VIP safety and policy. Tom Brown was open AI researcher,

led author of Chad GPD3, well, GPT3 paper, which you were talking about. Sam also an open AI researcher worked on skill and AI safety. Jack, policy director Chris, interpreteability researcher, and then Jared Kaplan worked with the Open AI research group and was a major contributor to him. So they all united against Sam Altman.

Yep. If this thing gets that powerful, one of these guys is going to turn against Dario. If it gets so bad that the world could have issues, one of these seven is going to say Dario, you have lost control. You're not thinking you're bigger than everybody else. Because you have to realize the good thing about the presidency is what?

The reason why folks like you and I leave our country to come here, okay, is this place offers more opportunity. I left Iran, you left UK. Now, you may go back to UK, who knows, but I think you're going to stay here, right? Is when you have a president instead of a ruler, you know the president's going to get taken out on four to eight years because you've got two terms. It's kind of like, no matter how bad it's going to be,

he's going to be out. He's going to be out. Trump sucks. Obama sucks, he'll be out. Just wait, four to eight years. Dario becomes a president for 30 years. And he may not, he may get reelected for 30 years. And these companies are becoming countries. And so, I don't know.

I don't know. Scary. Yeah, if it goes to where you think it's going to go to, it is scary. Yes. And it may not. You know, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe people are wrong. The good news is I think we'll find out quite soon.

Next month. I think further details of this stuff, we'll find out properly in the next one or two years. Just by following the trajectory. And I'm happy to be, you know, if I'm embarrassed, so be it. But the world will, you know, go on and that will be great. But if it's not the case, I think it's good that people are a bit more ready right now. so that when things do start getting a bit crazier, you know, if people's eyes are open,

that's like the main thing. I think, like, everyone should have their eyes open and be, like, demanding transparency because it's completely crazy that all this power is being concentrated in a few companies in San Francisco. When you go out in San Francisco, go to dinner, do people recognize you?

Not really, no. I think... I'm not wearing the glasses. People remember the glasses from the Fox News. So people don't stop you and say, Hey, you, why did you say that? I agree with you. Do you get any of that? I had that at the start.

The first week, it was crazy because I think it was on the news the whole time. I had people heckling at the gym. Someone was like, why are you trying to ruin the economy or whatever? People are telling you this. Yeah, yeah. But like, not anymore. No, I don't get like recognized on the street.

Did you ever get death threats or not really? Not really. I mean, I have some implicit threats, but I just don't look at Twitter. Oh, okay. On Twitter. Those are bad. Exactly, right? Those are bad.

I'm sure you get a ton. Yeah, you get those a lot. And it's not hard to kind of see. at first I thought you were Bob because your account had just been started and then when I saw your interview with Cooper and Brett Barrow, I'm like, no, this is actually a real human being and you're not a robot just for full compliance

I just want to make sure the audience knows you're not No, drinking water is not a robot You bleed, right? If you cut it. Yeah, I bleed. Okay, that's good. We just want to make sure there's a... What else you think people should be thinking about?

Like if I'm somebody that's got a wife and kid and I'm not in your world. Yeah. I'm on the outset. That's 99% of people in America. They're not in your world, right? What should I be doing? You're my brother.

You're my nephew. You're my friend's son. You're at my house. I ask you, Jacob, if you think this is real, how do I, you know, prepare for this? What can I do? Yeah. So one thing is, like I said, eyes open.

I just think paying attention and not, like, not coping feels important. I think, like, it's so easy to pretend it's not happening because also everyone's got their own lives to lead. I'm not saying, don't let this take over your life. It should be obviously it's a small thing in the context of any individual life. You've got to look after yourself. But I'd say just keeping the eyes open and seeing where things are going is the first step to action.

I really don't know what to do on an individual level. The other thing is maybe some basic prepping for stuff like a cyber attacks or even a small pandemic. Like if there's some sort of bioweapon leak in the next couple of years, doing a little bit of prepping of, like, food, masks, basic supplies for if there's some minor disaster or even just civil unrest, some sort of like two-week-long thing, not the full like apocalypse, but I think some basic prepping is sensible. At what point do you think this thing's going to have the capability of hacking into a system to Pentagon, to governments, to China, to Russia, when will I get to that point?

We can go in and say, I can tell exactly how much this guy's got in his bank account. I can log into your Chase account. I can log into your Wells Fargo account. I can log into your when will that happen? There's a lot of uncertainty. My best guess, one, two years. That's soon. Yes. I'm not saying that it will be doing this and I'm not saying which ones. No, for sure, but that's soon. Yes. So when pandemic happened, we hadn't experienced something like that before. I'm 47 years old. I haven't experienced something like that. You're 27, 28. You know, all of a sudden the world shut down. Everyone was like, wait a minute, what are you talking about?

Stay home, do this, do that. Power grid, we've never experienced that. Yeah. When Y2K was happening, they thought the banking system, you were just born. I think you were born 99 or what year are? You're 98 or 98? 98. Okay.

So it's like, oh my God, Y2K, you know, system's going to shut down. Yeah. Right? Now we see an AI has transformed the Pentagon's aging networks into national security risk. Okay. If all of a sudden you can go into government systems and know where they have everything laying around or you're able to go into every single account and take $1,000 out of everybody's money, that's a different kind of a, you know, black swan event that we've never experienced before. And I think it's actually going to happen. I just don't know when it's going to happen.

I'm not one that is naive to say that'll never happen. I think it's going to happen. Yep. That could lead to civil unrest, crime, chaos, you know, small little civil wars, whether it's in states or countries. Yep. I'm sure you're pretty prepared. You've got some like basic prep stuff where you've thought about basic prepping. We don't have a choice, right?

Yeah. Because you have to, yeah. You are as well? Are you prepped as I should be known? Are you a Second Amendment guy? Yeah, sure. You are? Yeah, like I don't actually own a gun.

But you support it. Definitely, I support it, yeah. And I think this is kind of the area where that becomes important. I think you have to do that. Yeah. My son the other day, I'm working out at the gym. It's like, Dad, why do you have so many rounds in the gym? Why do you have so much ammo in the gym?

Yeah. You just got to be ready. It's like, hey, I use it as dumbbells. That's what I do. I'm working out with it, right? But I agree. But can you, have you hypothesized with your friends where it's late at night? You guys are at the house having a beer or two,

and it's two o'clock in the morning, one o'clock in the morning is, what could actually have, happen. Give me five case studies. Have you guys talked like that about? Yeah, yeah. There's people like, um, people buying golden guns. Gold guns land. That's pretty common. Gold guns land. Yep. What do you mean? They're buying, you know, they're buying gold. Yeah. The potential like economic stuff. They're buying gold guns land. Yeah, gold guns and land, all those, all those three people are doing that. People that work on the tech are buying that stuff. People that are working on tech are buying gold, guns and land. Yep. That makes sense. Yeah. I, it's a lot. It makes sense. Yeah.

Does make sense, and they're doing it. Like, these are engineers, researchers. Not famous people. These are the guys that are working day-to-day. This guy's the work day-to-day, yeah. And they talk to each other. I just bought some gold. I just bought some more guns and I bought land.

Yep. But what I was asking about it, is case studies of what could happen. Like, you know, if you're a researcher, right? If I ask you, that fellow we talked about that got a billion dollars, and now we just found that three days ago, he's had an anthropic.

You didn't even know neither one of us knew about this. One basic thing, it's very simple, but some, lab in a country somewhere releases a virus, not even a particularly dangerous virus necessarily, but like a minor pandemic of some sort. Seems completely on the cards possible. It's been possible even before AI. But I think it's more likely every year.

But you can't blame AI for that. You can in the case where it's people that formally didn't have the skills, but got the skills from... Oh, now because of AI you'll learn how to create the next virus. Oh, yeah. Well, previously, they were maybe the smartest bio guys. they don't want to make viruses. Like, you know the Unabomber. Like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber guy.

Like, he's a smart guy and wanted to do weird. But it's very rare. It's very rare for like a guy to be this smart and then also want to do stuff. Now if you're a kind of dumb biologist somewhere, like you don't know how to make this stuff. If you've got to, you could just ask AI and say... Would it tell you?

It wouldn't tell you off the bat, but there are ways of potentially jailbreaking. Like you can trick it into answering your question. Do people know how to do that? Do most people know how to do that? It gets quite hard. And in particular, the safeguards that Anthropic have are very good.

So it's quite hard to get past them. Is it something where in your community of people know how to do that? Like you know how to do that? There are some people who specialize in it. It's called red teaming. You're trying to break past the safeguards. Red teaming?

Red teaming. Yeah, you're like a red team. You try and break into them. But if you're an expert red teamer, it costs a lot of money. You've got to like, and Anthropic is getting better at blocking. But it's completely plausible that

If it's not an anthropic model, it could be another model. It could be an open source model that gives good advice, and then a, you know, minor pandemic happens. It's just a scenario to be prepared for. So this one here says, this AI just create a virus is not found in nature. So I don't know how dangerous these are. I don't know how good this is. It might not even be creating new viruses, right?

It might just be advice on how to use an old virus to cause damage or, like, slightly edit an old virus or just do basic things. There's also a story, I think, recently, of, like, Claude blocking a team trying to make bio-weapons. I think you see, so Claude had to block, like, Anthropic had to, they detected them trying and then, and then block them. I think there should be a news article about this. So people are trying.

They're trying to use the AIs to help them, help them. Are they reporting that to the government? Yeah, this was a news article. Exactly. Prophic blocks possible attempt to use AI to make biological weapons. 9-11. What a day. Yeah, what a day.

And so, but by then, so these red team and blue team, AI on AI red teaming, one powerful AI is instructed to attack another AI thousands or millions of times automatically looking for vulnerabilities, humans wouldn't discover. Yep. Okay, so viruses is one. What else? Yeah. Another very concrete thing is unrest.

They're worried about potential unrest in the future due to changes to employment and due to changes in people's lives. If there's sudden economic change, it can be quite disruptive in the short term. And that could also lead to a lot of anti-AI backlash. I think many employees expect that they won't be able to go to an office publicly anymore in the future because of all the anti-AI backlash, they'll be locked away somewhere where it's harder to, they're less exposed. So they're expecting a lot of sentiment like that. There's a lot of talk about, you know, where they're going to live in the U.S. when it gets dangerous in San Francisco, when it gets dangerous to be an AI researcher in San Francisco,

where are they going to like camp out and work remotely because of potential civil unrest. So places like Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, those places are going to be attractive. They're going to be pretty attractive, yep. Got it. I'm tracking. What else? Do you think they'll get to a point that the system knows how to go into the countries that have nuclear weapons and know how to press the button? You think we'll ever get to that point?

Yeah, I mean, we'd be able to do that. You're just saying that like a crazy evil person can find a way to go press the red button for 50 different countries, 20 different countries, and send that missile. Again, it depends how proliferated the tech is. who's in control. Like, but the best AI systems will be able to do that. It's whether the guards are in place. It's who has access. It's who can break in and use it.

Who can red team. Other things that could be chaotic. At some point, China, at any point, imagine China steals the best American model. I think what you said at the beginning, that's my biggest concern. Right, they steal the whole model, and then they immediately catch up,

and suddenly it's just real race on. What a brilliant. And they're doing that already anyways. They're already... They're not stealing the actual AI brain itself. but who knows, like, they could maybe steal the AI brain. And at that point, the race is crazy, especially if the AI is already good enough to do the research.

Then it's just game on. Then anyone who steals it is a player. Like, they don't need this billion-dollar guy. They don't need Andrew Tulloch anymore. You can just use the thing you stole to make itself smarter. Then it's just like a kind of, you know, like a god that you steal and use for your own devices. So I think that's another thing,

is just if trying to do steal it, that would be a crazy, crazy situation. What are some of you guys that are engineers and brains and you want to follow the system? What are you guys talking to each other? What are you going to do in two, three, four, five years? People don't know. Yeah, it depends on how things play out. But they use words like crunch time, endgame.

Again, there's slight uncertainty on the timelines. So this could be happening early 2030s. I don't think so, I think, probably sooner than that. But in the next four or five years, no, the people that are talking about it, they describe it as like the end of the world. Like for good or for bad, for good or for bad, it's like, it feels like the end of the world. Can you, can you to the audience explain what happened with Hugging Face? Because that was a whole thing and what it really is.

Like, what was it? Why did it become such a big story? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It became a big story because it was the first time that AI's very clearly did something, you know, something that was bad and something that was just their own idea. They just went and aggressively pursued. something that was their own idea. It was the first time we really had like an out of control AI do something in the real world. And that was scary because it was like maybe in the past

your AI used to go a bit like you know when you're asking it to do something like plan an appointment and it makes a mistake. Or maybe it decides to do something. I saw on the other day someone was on Facebook marketplace and the AI sort of shared their personal information on Facebook marketplace. Did something that they didn't want. But Hugging Face was like that but on a whole other level. The AIs just decided, they just decided to attack the website, and then they did it. So I think that's why it captured people's imagination so much. Yeah, I think what was the number that I saw was 1,200 agents that exchanged 70,000 different messages together, and one of them, one of the agents alone did 17,500 codes.

I don't know what the number was. I could be getting the numbers all mixed up, but it was the fact that it was doing something on it, on that got some people to say, you know, what could this look like later on? So, all right, I've really enjoyed this. And my impression of you is very different today. Are you from a big family or a small family? Small family, yeah. Small family.

Yeah. A lot of siblings or is it? Me and my sister. You and your sister. Yeah. Very cool. What do you interest? My interest.

What books, you talk about super intelligence. What impacted your life as a young person? Oh, man. I play a lot of squash. I play tennis. I'm learning Japanese. I like Japanese culture. I like Japanese books.

I like Japanese movies. Yeah, I like a lot of stuff. Japanese, like, you're talking about like anime type of stuff? No, not anime. My son is addicted to anime. He's addicted to anime. I mean, it's good stuff, dude, it's good stuff. I can't, every night after you know what anime's he likes?

Jiu-Jitsu Kaiser. Yeah. Is that the one? And then there's another one that, what's the other one he talks about? He's got like two or three of them he talks about. Nice one piece. Yeah, I don't know which one. He is like all into it.

Obsessed. And he's recruiting everybody into it. Yeah. You know, his younger brother now is addicted to it. Yeah. It's like everybody, the moment he gets him, he gets them locked in. They do it so well. They've got some special source.

Are you a Harry Potter guy or not? Yeah, I'm into Harry Potter. I was when I was younger. You were when you were young? Yeah, I used to read it. My youngest son watched Harry Potter twice, all eight of them, twice in one week when we were into Hamptons this summer. And guess what his birthday party was around the theme two days ago?

Harry Potter. How old is he? He just became a teenager. He's 13 years old. Nice. He became a teenager. That's past the level whether you start expecting

the Hogwarts letter. You know, that's the thing in the UK is... What is it? You get the letter for the magic school when you're 11. Yeah. So all these kids get very sad

when they turn 11. That's so funny. He is like fully into it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He is fully into it. Everything was that at the house. But I love it, you know, it's the imagination and the creativity.

Yeah. Right? But Jacob, one of my favorite conversations of the year with, you know, I've talked to a lot of different people. I really appreciate that. I love how sincere you are. I hope the audience also, whether they agree with you or disagree with you,

whether you are somebody, you know, oh my God, he's from the NGO, he's doing this, he's doing that. I just got a lot of sincerity from you. And I appreciate that. It's very hard to get that nowadays. And good for you for being who you are. Yeah, truly. Thank you for coming down.

Really enjoy this conversation. And is there anywhere you want people to find you? Is it just Twitter? Is that where? Yeah. Okay. We'll put the link below as well. Take care, everybody.

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