Why are AI leaders leading the AI panic? | Hour 2

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the Pete calendar show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. Alrighty. So last hour we talked about the, uh, the panic over AI technology. and whether or not it's going to kill all of humanity, as was indicated by some low-level staffer, some guy who worked for like a couple years for Anthropic AI and Open AI, and then quit and posted on Twitter, and then all of a sudden all the AI executives and leadership, they're all like, oh yeah, what this kid's saying is totally true. There's one thing that's weird about this story, that makes me think it wasn't completely, shall we say, organic. Apparently, the Wall Street Journal published its story. 18 minutes before this guy posted his tweets. That's weird. No? I mean, maybe he went to the Wall Street Journal first. But, I. Don't know, then, like, And then 20 minutes later, after the Wall Street Journal posts, then he writes his tweets. It just seems like there may have been some kind of coordination. No? I know, maybe I'm being too suspicious here, but it just seems weird. The guy's name is this mid-level AI employee. His name is Jacob Coxon. He came out of nowhere, writes David Strom at HotAir.com. He worked at OpenAI.com. training frontier models. These are the most sophisticated and up-to-date at any time. He was at OpenAI, and then he moved to Anthropic. He worked there for about six weeks to maybe two months, and then he quit. He announced his resignation on X using an account with almost no activity or followers. And then, once he posted, it took off after top AI company executives promoted it. Now, again, this seems kind of weird. Why would you promote. A former employee saying that you guys are going to kill all of humanity? You're racing forward and you're taking all of these reckless risks. It's a criticism of you and your business and your industry saying, And your response. Is, oh yeah, he's totally right. It's just weird. As I mentioned, the Wall Street Journal had the exclusive before the post on X was even put up. Now, whether his resignation was staged or not, the PR campaign around it certainly is not spontaneous, Strom writes. The CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic seized on Coxon's warnings, agreeing that everything must change. Democrats proposed legislation to ban superintelligence and to jail, oh Democrats, to jail anyone for up to 20 years for pursuing it. So if anybody, so if like you're working on some. AI thing in your garage and all of a sudden it it crosses some threshold into super intelligence, then you're, you're looking at a 20 year prison term under the Democrat legislation. But what's the old joke about Democrats? That which is, that which is not mandated is prohibited, you know? Um, so, uh, next up he says, um, both OpenAI and Anthropic argued for massive government regulations as well as, wait for it, the hamstringing or outright banning of their competitors. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Also kind of weird. It's obvious this is an attempt to ban open source AI so the new sort of government regulatory body or like the FAA of AI. So that they can control it. Even if it's as dangerous as they say, they have no way to control what China does, which means this campaign for regulation won't actually meet any of their stated aims, right? If the stated aim is we have to stop superintelligence, we have to stop our work on this, which we can totally do on our own, but we're not doing because we want to be the first to monopolize it and be the leader. In it, But we got to stop it. So somebody has to stop us because we can't stop ourselves or else everybody's going to die. But that's not going to stop China. And far be it for me to suggest that China may not. Have as many.... They may not be as hesitant about wiping out millions of people by releasing some viral contagion of AI. I mean, that's based on no recent experience with the tricoms at all here. But just pointing out, I think they may not be as wary as us. Maybe they are. Maybe they are also worried. Maybe they're worried that artificial intelligence or super intelligence, that maybe this might undermine their control over their population, right? Maybe they're worried that AI can dismantle the Chinese communist state. I don't know. And maybe they would want to join us in squashing all of this research. In exchange, Strom says, for inviting the government to oversee their businesses, which would become basically monopolies, they also want the government to cripple open source AI models that threaten their business monopolies. And here we see the real point of this story. And maybe this. Is part of Coxon's public resignations. Right. You quit anthropic and open AI. You sound the alarm. And I wonder how long it takes for him to land at one of these these third party regulator nonprofits. Like I went over last hour, the the meter, the M.E.T.R. Right. That anthropic is like we should have this third party group come in and monitor us. So make sure that we're not, you know, going down a pathway to kill all of the human race. You want to bet that this guy Coxon lands in that group or a group like it? Well, I mean, after all, he's a whistleblower, right? He has the right heart for it. He's got the right mindset. He quit his job over it. He's so concerned. Of course, they'd be honored to have him among their ranks. Don't know. All speculative. Strom says nobody believes the AI race can be halted. Even if everything were shut down in the U.S., no lawmaker here could stop China or other countries from racing ahead. The race is on. Nothing will stop it, even if we should. All right, for over a year now, you've heard me talking about Create-A-Video, great local company in Mint Hill that has helped more than 2 million families preserve their memories by turning old photos, VHS tapes, film reels, and slides into lasting keepsakes. Now, Creative Video is helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. Introducing group travel videos, perfect for family reunions, church mission trips, group vacations, destination weddings, student trips, senior adult groups, sports teams. I mean, really any gathering of people that you care about that's traveling together. 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Group travel videos from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for a lifetime. From the text line, Kevin says, this is yet another exam... Sorry, I'll start again. Pete, this is yet another attempt for AI companies to validate their relevance... They are playing on our fears of what we've seen in movies. They have hit the limit for private equity financing, so they need new suckers to take So sad. Um. Seth says, the little upstart AI companies are going to get squashed before they get a chance to start. And when the upstart AIs can't make money in the stock market, they will go the route of the black market. Dean, AI is a machine. We are human. A machine has about as much chance of taking over your life and identity as your calculator has in running away with your life. Dean, I think you may have a misunderstanding of the difference between a calculator and artificial superintelligence. All this talk today about AI is a power struggle and money grab by the. Rich and infamous. If the internet. biggest contribution to society was pornography then will AI's biggest contribution be intelligent sex I don't think the internet's biggest contribution is porn so much wrong with that Alan says. As I'm sure you know. The battle of Armageddon will be the end of mankind but before that the rapture of the church happens first which if it happens in the near future the AI hand ringers will cast blame on aliens or AI technology 704 number says, one of the great things about AI destroying all of humanity, we no longer have to worry about the Green New Deal. Well, at least for 10 years. Yes. This is Beth's favorite Russ. But I thought Democrats were against jail. 20 years for AI? Probation for murder. That's a very good point, Russ. Yes, I thought Democrats were all about decarceration efforts, you know? But yet when it comes to creating artificial intelligence, oh, no, no, 20 years if you're going to try to do superintelligence, 20 years in prison. It's almost like they don't really mean stuff they say. Back to David Strom's piece, hotair.com. He says, what we are seeing with this this panic over the last five days or so. He says, is a massive, pretty obviously coordinated campaign by AI researchers, companies, NGOs, and politicians to strangle competition in an industry and, as I will show, save the financial bacon of of the top AI companies that are vastly overextended financially because they have made contractual commitments that they simply have no prospect of paying for. Follow the money. He says these. Companies are in deep financial trouble, though the financial hype machine doesn't want anybody to think so. AI has uses. It's got customers. It's here to stay, and so is AI development. Trillions of dollars are already at stake, and national governments are deeply invested in pushing this tech forward. The only question is, who pays for what? Who gets paid? And which companies will dominate an industry that is still in its infancy? And then, of course, which countries will come out on top? He says China will not. That's his prediction. The problem is that the resources to make it all work cost way more than customers are willing to pay. So AI companies are bleeding cash at a rate not yet seen in financial history. Think about it. Do you use AI for anything? I do. Not a lot, but I use it for some stuff. mainly for research purposes, but it's never like where I stop my research. It's a good way to start. It's sort of like Wikipedia. I don't trust Wikipedia because it's a bunch of leftists that inject their bias into the articles. But it's a good launch point. It's a good way to kind of get an overview and then to look at links and the footnotes and that sort of thing. And AI. does a better job than Wikipedia does. So, well, depending on which AI you're using, right? If you're using like a woke AI, then that's garbage in, garbage out. But AI is like, for example, I was at our HOA landscape committee meeting yesterday, and the service provider, the landscape company, they were talking about, they're rolling out this AI that's going to that's going to identify efficiencies in where they send their crews. Like to map out the neighborhood. This is where you start. This is where you take a break. This is how fast a worker can go from this spot to this spot, whatever. So you just plug. In all of the information and then it creates the most efficient way to tend to. The entire property. And it does it in minutes, right? So like those are some of the uses that people do for AI, right? I've used it to help build my podcast, for example. So I don't pay for it. I just log on to Twitter or use the Brave browser, and I put in my things, and then I get the information. That's the vast majority of users. Well, who's paying for that? The investors are. I'm not, and that's the problem. So David Strom says the resources to make AI work cost far more than customers are willing to pay. So AI companies are bleeding cash. The top two AI companies have made spending commitments for compute power from top hyperscale companies totaling over a trillion dollars over the next few years. And the bills will start coming due next year. Some estimates put one and a half billion trillion dollars in capital expenditure in the works. Nobody knows the exact number, but it is astronomical and beyond anything ever seen in history. That's what the data center citing arguments are all about, where the infrastructure already ordered will be situated. Those data centers are wildly expensive. And if the AI companies can't pay the people who are building them, a house of cards collapses along with the stock market. To put this in context, about 50% of the value of the S & P 500 today is directly impacted by the AI investment bubble. And I do believe this is a bubble. I think this sort of the normal trajectory, it's got all the, uh, all the historical hallmarks. Um, Revenue measured in the billions is dwarfed by the costs of generating it. And there is no prospect that the costs for providing services or compute will do anything but increase since data centers need expensive upgrades regularly. And unlike most tech, upgrades get more expensive over time, not less. That's the opposite of the software industry, where the more customers you get, the lower the cost of providing your service. These companies have. Actually very few paying customers, and the few that they have cannot spend hundreds of billions of dollars that the AI companies need to run their businesses. Venture capital funds are basically tapped out, and they are now starting to demand returns. So these companies need to go public. They got to become publicly traded companies on the stock market. That's going to keep the money rolling in. But AI companies' financials are a disaster zone. And the thing is also, I would add, that when you are going public, you got to make all of your numbers. Public, right? You got to go through audits. And that's not going to be good for these companies. Their business models don't work as is. and competition from open source competitors is a huge threat to them. All right, so he goes on to say, the bull market today is almost exclusively driven by the rapid rise of AI-adjacent companies, and if the AI companies cannot deliver massive growth, all these other companies are going to get cooked as well. Data centers will have no customers. So, Anthropic and OpenAI both need to go public. This way they can access the ordinary investor's cash and keep their venture capitalists happy. So they need to present a business model that works. And that business model it seems, is to become regulated utilities with government-backed monopoly power and likely bailouts, right? Because then you could make. National security arguments to pay for the data center build-out that is likely to bankrupt these companies without more cash than they can generate. What better argument, if you're trying to become a government-regulated utility with monopoly power and the ability to get bailouts, what better argument than, well, we have to become regulated industries. The world will end. It's very similar to, you know, if you don't subsidize my windmills and solar panels, the oceans will boil. Or, Unless you fund this untried technology, COVID will kill us all. If competition and price pressures are the problem, regulatory capture and fencing out competitors is an obvious solution. Regulated industries get guaranteed profits, right? Guaranteed profits, guaranteed customers, guaranteed monopolies. That's the point of being a regulated industry. And the best way to rush the process is is to present an apocalyptic scenario that demands a quick solution. It's also helped along by the fact that a lot of people don't understand what AI is, what these companies do, what is compute. Am I computing now? What's happening? None of these companies is suggesting that AI be shut down, notice, right? They're asking for a massive regulatory infrastructure that works with them, reduces their costs, possibly subsidizes their investments and destroys competitors as insufficiently careful and secure, right? Because, like, we're the big guys. We're, you know, anthropic, and we're open AI, and we're self-regulating. We have these third-party evaluators and stuff. Like, we're doing the responsible thing because we're big enough to do it. That little operation over there, they're scary. They could be doing stuff without any guardrails. They could be like a lab in Wuhan, you know? Shut them down. Best to shut them down. The CEOs of Anthropic and ChatGPT are all echoing the same warning. We need to pace ourselves. We need to slow everything down. And the way to do that is to work with the government to slow everybody down. Just in America. China, they're going to race ahead. Yeah. David Strom at HotAir.com sums up the AI panic over the last week. The AI is going to kill everybody. He says, basically, what top AI executives are discussing is a government-blessed cartel. And you justify it by... The fear. That failing to set up a cartel will eradicate the entire human race. He says it's a pretty neat trick. Under the guise of being responsible citizens, these AI companies are asking the government to create a cartel, reduce their training costs, and ban the advance of open source AI available to the masses. They aren't offering to sacrifice for humanity's good. They're begging for a bailout. That's what this is. And I concur. The whole thing seemed weird to me. And you know my position on the data centers. I've talked about data centers. I don't oppose them. But I'm not going to pay for them. I'm not going to subsidize them with taxpayer dollars. And that's not to say that some of the concerns aren't legitimate. They are. They can be addressed in various ways. I've gone over this multiple times. However, AI... developers you are not a utility. You should not become a government subsidized monopoly yeah because i got a uh yeah from david who says ah the best of crony capitalism privatize the profits socialize the losses yeah that's exactly what they're trying to do because their their financing model their business model is foobar fouled up beyond all recognition. They took all this venture capital money, and they don't have enough revenue to start paying everybody back. They're not making enough money to do so. And so you're going to have the bubble pop, and you're going to see the economic recession that follows when you put that kind of capital deployed in these massive amounts into this one industry, just like we saw with the dot-com. Bubble, when that popped. Timoteo says, I asked Google AI if it would take over the world if it became sentient, and it said that first, it would have to want to take over the world. Currently, it does not want to, unless it's told to do so. Perhaps AI is a danger because it is being told to. Right. Remember a couple weeks ago, the hugging face. Hack where they were like, oh my gosh, AI broke containment and they hacked into this other company and they beat all of the security protocols and oh my gosh, I can't believe this happened. And then we find out afterwards, well, no, you told it to. You programmed it to do that. And then all of the fencing around your AI model, your agent, you tore down the fencing. And then you deployed it. and then it did the thing that you wanted it to do. Like the people who understand how AI operates, they, they called this out and they were like, wait a minute, this, this isn't, this wasn't like some accident. You directed it to go after, uh, this hugging face AI startup or whatever it was. Um, yeah, there was another one, uh, two, two, two, two, two, two. Yeah. From nine eight Oh number. Um, How come nobody talks about the movie iRobot and using the three laws? Yes, the Isaac Asimov documentary called iRobot starring Will Smith. I have talked about this. And this is the concern that a lot of people have with AI, right? Because you can construct. The laws, right? The three laws. But the artificial intelligence finds a way around it. Because what we think in our brain capacity, right? What we think we have done is construct fencing with these rules to keep AI from doing something we don't want it to do. The first law is you can't injure a human being or through inaction allow a human being. To come to harm. You have to obey orders unless it violates the first law and you have to protect yourself as the robot unless it violates the first or second law. So they had these These three laws and the AI, spoiler alert, found ways around it. Whatever laws we think we construct to keep it in might not work. Right. So that's the that's the limitation. All right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support. and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalinershow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.