Tech Acceleration vs Deceleration: e/acc vs. d/acc debate | Erik Torenberg & Haseeb Qureshi

Erik Torenburg and Haseeb Quereshi join us for today's debate. Should we accelerate or decelerate our tech progress? How about when it comes to something as powerful as AI? This is not just a debate in tech circles - this is a political debate that poised to define the next decade. We’ve had leaders from both sides of the debate on the podcast - episodes with Elizer Yudkowski and Beff Jezos. You’ve heard what they think. Today’s episode is a discussion and at times a debate on these opinions to help you think through where you stand on this issue - Haseeb Quereshi tends toward the EA side which favors more caution and regulatory intervention around AI while Erik Torenburg tends toward the e/acc side of the issue which favors faster progress and lighter touch. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ 🔐 SAFE | USE SAFE, GET REWARDED. CHECK OUT SAFE PASS https://bankless.cc/SafePass_NL ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🔐 SAFE | USE SAFE, GET REWARDED https://bankless.cc/SafePass_NL ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku 🏙️ CONSENSUS | SAVE 20% WITH CODE BANKLESS https://bankless.cc/4aykesD ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Start 00:03:51 Intro To Haseeb and Erik 00:05:58 Definind EA 00:11:30 Reflecting on EA 00:19:23 Erik's Case For E/Acc 00:23:05 Defining E/Acc 00:27:18 The Problem with E/Acc & Humanism 00:34:20 How Big is This Debate Really? 00:46:31 AI Safety & Regulatory Capture 00:56:39 EA's Political Affiliation 00:59:43 Extinction Risk 01:11:04 Politicizing the Debate 01:19:56 The Pro Tech Case 01:24:08 Productive Tension 01:28:33 AI Ethics vs Safety 01:32:53 Pick a Side ------ RESOURCES Haseeb Qureshi https://twitter.com/hosseeb Erik Torenberg https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you look at the companies that are actually accelerating, Yeah. They're mostly EAs, right? Which like kind of fucks up the narrative, which is like, oh, the EAs are ruining everything. They're slowing everyone down and like it's the accelerationists who want to go fast. The accelerationists are mostly VCs. They're mostly not building anything. They're just like on the sidelines cheerleading for this imaginary team that they think is in the driver's seat, when in reality, it's fucking EA people who are even thinking that this was possible in the first place, right? It was the, it was, it was all the VCs who were not investing in any of this stuff because they thought it was so impractical and it was worth it. It's the EAs who believed that AI risk was a real thing because AI was going to become really powerful really quickly who created all this shit.

• 0:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where today we're exploring the frontier of the tech acceleration versus deceleration debate. This is Ryan John Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless. The question on today's episode, I think a question that is everywhere right now. Should we accelerate or decelerate our tech progress? And how about when it comes to something as powerful as AI? This isn't just a debate in tech circles, at least not any longer. This is now a political debate. I think it's poised to define the next decade. We've had leaders from both sides of the debate on the podcast. You might remember our episode with Eliezer Yudkowsky, who argues very much from an AI safety perspective and Beth Jezos, which is almost the complete opposite of that. So

• 1:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  you've already heard what they think. Today's episode is more of a synthesis type episode. This is a debate on these two opposing opinions to help you think through where you might stand on the issue. We have Haseeb Qureshi, who tends towards the EA side of the conversation, which favors more caution, more regulatory intervention around AI. And we have Eric Torenberg. He tends more towards the EA side of the issue, which is a bit more tech forward, faster progress and a lighter touch from our regulators. We talk about the history of the debate, the cultures in Silicon Valley. We talk about Sam Altman. We talk about the regulators, the big bad US government, SBF, and what they think is the most sensible position on the acceleration versus deceleration debate.

• 2:07David Hoffman?

  Before we get into some of the takeaways, our friends and sponsors over At Safe wants to let you know that Safe, this is the multi-sig, Bankless uses this. I've used this personally. I have my own personal multi-sig. A lot of people use the Safe multi-sig. And now Safe is launching an activity rewards program. So as you use your multi-sig, you can get rewarded with points. So weekly users, or just for pushing volume through the Safe, or having a high number of transactions, or you store a lot of assets with Safe, everything that's an activity around Safe gets you now Safe points. And they also want you to stay on the lookout for further activities that will offer additional points as they unlock. If you want to learn more about Safe points and what you can do with them, click the link in the show notes to getting started with Safe points today. One of the reasons, Ryan, why I was really motivated to get this episode out here

• 2:52David Hoffman?

  is because I think right now this conversation is relevant to both crypto and AI, is about accelerationism and are we pushing the gas? Do we want to push the gas further? It's now just relevant to these two industries. I think there's more industries that is going to be relevant for beyond just what the scope of what this conversation is. I think this is like a sign of things to come. There are other industries that are also going to present some very hard conversations to humanity. It's like, and therefore government. And our tech sector is going to be coming out of the tech sector. When we talk about accelerationism, the world is going to look so much more different in 20 years than at any other 20-year increment that we've ever had before.

• 3:37David Hoffman?

  And that's only going to increase. So we have biotech and gene editing on the horizon. We have longevity, people like Brian Johnson, literally trying to become immortal. And I think AI and crypto are like banded together as kind of these accelerationist movements. But the thing is, I think these are the first of many industries to show up on the accelerationist side. And this conversation about this like caution versus gas, do we press on the gas pedal or do we hit the brakes? That is going to be a more, it's going to define society more and more and more, I think, as we move forward into the future. So that's the kind of the frame of thought that I hope listeners go into in this conversation.

• 4:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  I completely agree. This is the political debate of the decade, but it's also probably the political Debate of the entire next century. So a lot of, a lot of podcast episode fodder for us in, in the future. All right, guys, we're getting right to the conversation, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our number one recommended exchange, the place you can accelerate your crypto buys. That is Kraken. Go create an account.

• 4:40David Hoffman?

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• 5:25David Hoffman?

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• 6:05David Hoffman?

  It's a fantastic way to engage and earn rewards, launching just after Safe DAO voted in favor of Safe Token Transferability. So what are you waiting for? Head over to safe global, sign up for the Safe Pass Activity Rewards Program, and don't forget to check out Safe Con during Berlin Blockchain Week, where the future of smart accounts is unfolding in real life. Click the link in the show notes to secure your spot today and be a part of the transition that's setting a new standard in the world of custody. Taking self custody Your crypto is one of the most important things you can do on your bankless journey. It's also one of the hardest things to get right with huge consequences if you don't. If you want help going bankless, talk to Casa. Casa helps you take custody of your crypto assets. So you don't have to wonder whether you're doing it right. Casa is a one stop shop for doing self custody the right way.

• 6:47David Hoffman?

  With Casa Vaults, you can hold Ether, Bitcoins, stable coins, all with one simple app and multiple keys for the ultimate peace of mind with a support team to help you every step of the way. But it doesn't stop at self custody because even though crypto is forever, you are not. We all plan on making life changing wealth in crypto, but with Casa's inheritance products, life changing wealth can elevate to generational wealth for your kids and your loved ones who don't know anything about crypto. With Casa, you won't lose your private keys and you won't accidentally take them to the grave either. Click the link in the description to get started securing your generational wealth. Bankless Nation, I'm excited to introduce you to Erik Torenberg, an investor, technologist and fellow podcaster. He's got a podcast network called Turpentine Media, lots of excellent podcasts in that network

• 7:30David Hoffman?

  at the intersection of technology, culture, philosophy, social commentary. Eric, welcome to the podcast, my man.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me, longtime Bankless fan, stoked to be on.

• 7:40David Hoffman?

  You know, actually, before we introduce your fellow guests here, I actually remember a very early podcast episode that you had Ryan on as a guest, actually. Ryan and Cyrus Unesi, I believe, which is when some of the formative years around like Ether's money as a topic.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  Amazing. Yeah.

• 7:55David Hoffman?

  Joining Eric here on the podcast today, Bankless listeners probably know, Haseeb Qureshi, another investor, technologist, podcaster, who we've had on the Bankless many, many times before. GP over at Dragonfly and is also in the effective altruist camp well before anyone in crypto even knew what that meant. Haseeb, welcome back to Bankless.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, guys. Always fun to be here.

• 8:17David Hoffman?

  So just to lay some foundation for this episode, I think what this episode is going to be is kind of, it's going to evolve on its own, but really we are watching two camps out evolve in the tech space. And it's also migrated into government as well, but there's also some nuances. This is the accelerationism versus decelerationism camp. There are some other tribes inside of these tribes. Some adjacent tribes, but overall there's identities forming in the world of tech and governance and where we are going as a society in the future and it's causing arguments, it's causing debates. The accelerationists want to just hit on the gas pedal and innovate, innovate, innovate as fast as possible. And the decelerationists are like, ooh, scary. Let's regulate, let's regulate these things.

• 9:02David Hoffman?

  Now, I don't think we've totally seen perfect identification or identities form around these tribes. I think this is all new for Silicon Valley as a whole, which is why we want to bring you guys here on the podcast today to kind of like suss out and like figure out this landscape of these growing alignments across tech, across Silicon Valley, across politics. Think we can do that here on the show today?

• 9:25Speaker 00

  Let's do it. Perfect.

• 9:26David Hoffman?

  So I kind of just like laid down a whole bunch of stuff, different identities, different values. Maybe see if you can kind of get us started here because you are, you are, are an effective altruist well before anyone in crypto knew or cared what that meant. And that was one of the like earliest, call it tribes, both in Silicon Valley, in the venture space and also just broadly. Maybe you can kind of identify about like the formations of that whole camp and how it's innovated or just been a part of the whole like Silicon Valley tech sector.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Sure. So I think effective altruism, for most people, it came into the popular imagination with SBF, which now it's kind of a irrevocable taint on the movement and on the kind of the ideas behind EA. But EA came originally in around like 2011, 2012, mostly around Oxford and Cambridge from a small number of philosophers who were very interested in this idea of trying to apply a more rigorous form of ethics and morality to philanthropy. It originally started with philanthropy and it got broadened into a number of other ideas. So it starts with folks like Peter Singer and you know, a small, a small number of,

• 10:36Speaker 00

  who's the guy who was affiliated with SBF?

• 10:40David Hoffman?

  There's Will McCaskill.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Will McCaskill, Will McCaskill. That's right. Will McCaskill, Toby Ord, a few guys who all basically came up around that time. They started writing about a lot of these ideas in public. And the origination of the EA movement is very close to the rationalist movement, which was also founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who also has a lot of ties to AI dumerism. And so EA, though, is a little bit different from rationalism. Rationalism is the cohort that really came out of Silicon Valley. Whereas actually EA mostly came outside of the tech sector, mostly came from universities. So now EA, the core ideas behind effective altruism very simply are that most people, when they think about doing charity or doing good for the world, they kind of turn their brains off. They're basically guided by their emotions, they kind of donate based on mood affiliations

• 11:26Speaker 00

  or what makes people look good or what sounds good. And they don't think as rigorously as they do when they are, for example, doing science or technology or politics, or I don't know, maybe not politics. But when they're building businesses, for example, right? So when you're building a business, you A B test. You look for statistical significance. You're like very careful in making sure, does this thing actually improve my product? Does this thing actually get the thing that I want? And if not, you are very, very careful to measure the difference and allocate resources accordingly. But when most people do charity, they're just kind of like, well, you know, Here for the vibes.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Teaching violin in the inner cities, that sounds good. Sure, let's like go, you know, start a museum. That'll be good for kids learning how to read or whatever. These kinds of things that like, they sound really good, but are they actually good? And how good are they? And so EA kind of came up as this very scientific, engineering-heavy approach to thinking about how to do ethical, ethical actions in the most rigorous way. And there's a whole framework around it. I don't think we need to go into the details, but one of the things that came out of EA, which is now very, very relevant in the world of Silicon Valley, is for a long time EA's have argued about what is the most important cause area that can move the most impact in the world over a short amount of time with a small amount of resources.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  And, you know, many people talk about global poverty, animal welfare. But one of the most popular cause areas for a very long time, like almost 10 years now, has been AI risk. The idea being that as people develop more and more powerful AIs, AIs might be so powerful that they could end up disrupting society or even causing, you know, mass human extinction. And this was before ChatGPT. This is before any of the modern acceleration in AI advancement that we've seen over the last 10 years. And so people have been working on this, a lot of small groups like Miri and Chai and these very weird people in the back room doing stuff that was very disconnected from Silicon Valley. Only now, with the rise of large language models and the sense that everybody has of like, oh shit,

• 13:22Speaker 00

  this is actually happening and this is real, has the discourse around AI risk started to really intersect with society, with tech, with economics, with politics. All these things suddenly matter now. That's kind of been happening in a back room for about 10 years. That part of EA, so I was aligned with these ideas basically like 10 years ago, before any of this stuff was really on a global stage, of thinking, hey, you read these arguments. There's a very famous book by Nick Bostrom called Superintelligence, where he sketches out a lot of the in-principle arguments of how rapid AI advancement might cause some degree of existential risk. And you read the arguments, you're like, yeah, this kind of makes sense. It's not a slam dunk, it's like obviously correct, it's not that clearly this will happen, but there's at least a risk that it will happen and nobody seems to be thinking about that risk

• 14:07Speaker 00

  besides these small cohort of weirdos in the East Bay or in Oxford. And so people thought at that time, oh yeah, you should donate some money to these people because this seems like a very underexplored risk that right now society is ignoring. Now today, it's quite different. Society is not ignoring that risk. Now it's like a it's something that the White House is thinking about, which is kind of crazy, right? Very recently, Paul Christiano, who was the head of, he was a very, very early EA. He was the head of safety at OpenAI. He left OpenAI. Now he is at NIST. NIST recently hired him as like the head of AI safety at NIST. So now at this point, it's very firmly entrenched in at least the US government is this concern that, hey, AI safety is a real thing and that's not just

• 14:49Speaker 00

  it's not just sort of AI bias or AI replacing jobs, it's also catastrophic risks that might arise from the rapid advancement in AI.

• 14:58David Hoffman?

  I think probably listeners are generally familiar with GiveWell, which is this charitable organization that does a lot of research for understanding if you give this one charity $1, how effective will that $1 actually go into like improving people's lives? And then like this is where famously like they came down to like malaria nets. If you actually want to like put your $1 and save the most number of human lives, you would just buy malaria nets for like kids in Africa to prevent them from getting malaria. But this would also like, this is a very effective and rigorous process of understanding how to out capital allocate in the world of charitable giving. But I think as we are working on defining the landscape of all these different like tribes and identities about like the future arises here, I think Haseeb, what you're also alluding to is that, well, there's

• 15:42David Hoffman?

  like this like risk off, low risk, research and pragmatic capital allocation strategy in the world of charity. But then there's also like, okay, well, what about some like venture bet future, high impact things as well? So not just about like, hey, current kids could be impacted by this, but like, we could also have future generations and like, not just like next future generation, but literally every single future generation. So that's, this is how like the world of effective altruism got interested in like AI risk, because like, that's literally the whole thing. It's like all of human, human society. And so effective altruism is kind of taking the like, not just like a pragmatic approach to charitable giving today, but like also taking like venture bets in charity or venture bets in like effective altruism. How do you, how do you, how would you feel

• 16:25David Hoffman?

  about just that out on right there? Reflect on that for a second.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  No, I think that's exactly right. Most people, when they think about EA, or they hear these recommendations among EA, they're immediately turned off. There's a few reasons why people immediately get turned off. One is that like, well, you know, who are you to say what's the most effective and what's not, you know? Seems like you guys are kind of these big central planning type people and you know, naturally people have an aversion to that. And you know, so one thing to understand about EA is that EA is making recommendations at the margin, right? EA is sort of not assuming that most people will follow EA because they don't. And that would be stupid to assume that everyone will do what you tell them to do. So you always want to be thinking, what should more people be doing at the margin? And you'll probably influence 1%, maybe 2% of people at the most. If you're influencing everybody, like, let's say you are the government, then okay, the way you allocate capital and

• 17:11Speaker 00

  the way you make recommendations should be very different. But if you are saying, okay, I can basically influence about 1% to 2% of people, what should 1% to 2% of more people do, given where dollars are already being allocated? And the answer usually is, well, okay, you know, there's some obvious things like we should have schools, we should have sanitation, we should have... And so somebody might say, well, are you arguing that we should not have schools or not have sanitation, instead we should all donate to malaria bed nets? The answer is no, obviously not. Given where the majority of dollars are being deployed today, where should the next dollar go? That's the real question that EA is tasked with trying to answer. So, given that backdrop, now you might ask the question of like, well, you know, if you donate to an anti-malaria bed net, okay, I guess that makes sense. You save somebody's life from dying of malaria,

• 17:53Speaker 00

  that's a very cheap way to save somebody's life. But, you know, donating to AI risk, maybe AI is not a risk, right? Maybe there's only a 10% chance that AI is a risk, in which case, you'd be wasting that money. And, again, you know, the way that EA frames this is that, you know, you're thinking more about a portfolio of good, as opposed to thinking, well, definitely, this good will do this much, and this good will do that much. Most people, when they're thinking about, okay, I want to do one thing, you know, I want to eat lunch. And if you're gonna eat lunch, are you gonna take a risk on like, you know, maybe this random restaurant is like an amazing restaurant, and I should try it out? Or you're just like, look, I know that if I go to, you know, I don't know, Denny's, at least have a decent meal, right? I don't know, depending on how you feel about Denny's. And most people are naturally very risk averse, when it comes to their own lives, or the

• 18:36Speaker 00

  things that they do with their time. But, the idea is that when you have a large portfolio of giving, of all the giving in the world, you actually want there to be some people who are doing high-risk giving. Because, you know, sort of high-risk, high-reward, if nobody's doing high-risk giving, and nobody's doing stuff that looks kind of weird, or that may not pay off, or that may not even matter, but in the times when it does matter, it really, really matters a lot. So, the analogy that a lot of EA people give is that, you know, imagine that, you know, this is something like, like, like, like nuclear research. If you were in the 1930s or the 1920s, and you were thinking about nuclear research, you know, at the time, it was kind of this relatively boring, kind of scientific thing, that nobody really, nobody really understood why this mattered, until they saw the atom bomb, and they saw the destructive power of nuclear energy.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  And, there was a time that this was considered to be very speculative, that this was even possible at this kind of scale, to have this much destructive damage from this technology. And, you know, on the off-chance that it turned out to be right, that the order of magnitude estimates of this stuff was correct... Then you would really want there to be a lot of research into the safety of, you know, how to prevent nuclear proliferation, how to prevent mass nuclear scale wars. But, you know, people may be under invested in that. And as a result, you know, people in the, you know, 50, 60, 70s kind of lived under this specter that maybe there would be maybe one or two more decades of human existence and then the world would just wipe itself out. And, you know, for all we know, maybe we weren't that far from that happening.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Maybe it was we were, we were kind of various times on the brink of massive amounts of human damage and catastrophic risk from this proliferation of, of nukes. And so the question is, is AI like this? Is AI a similar technology? And the, and the answer might be, well, probably not. Maybe AI only has like a 20% chance of that, 10% chance of that. But even if it's 20 or 10% chance, what an EA would likely say is that, well, that is high enough that you probably want some people, maybe one to 2% of people, spending their time on this. Because, you know, 1 to 2% of people spending their time on something that might be 10% as bad as nukes, that, that's a pretty good trade. That's a pretty good investment. If you're thinking about the overall portfolio of how people are spending their time and

• 20:44Speaker 00

  spending their resources. So if you think about EA as here is what I decree as an EA, as this East Bay rationalist guy, that everybody in the world should be doing, then I think you'll, you'll come away with the sense that EA are, EA's are a bunch of, you know, selfish pricks and they think they should run the world. But if you come away with the sense that, okay, EA's are advocating about at the margin, how to alter the, the portfolio of all the different things that human beings are working on to ameliorate risk and increase the likelihood of human flourishing, then you might say, okay, that sounds like a reasonable investment strategy. You know, maybe I don't agree with it completely, but it's, it's a lot more reasonable if you think about it that way.

• 21:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Haseeb, I want to bring Eric into, into the, this conversation, just kind of reflect on what you said and add. But I have just one question that kind of plagues me. So we started this conversation talking about accelerationism versus tolerationism. The way we started this conversation was talking about EA and the rationale behind how EA came to support and fund a lot of the AI safety initiatives. And it's really, when I think of AI, it's really like utilitarianism or consequentialism. Mentalism as a as a philosophy kind of applied to giving that part to me sort of makes sense. But it doesn't necessarily follow that AI must lead to investments in funding of AI safety. Because if you are in the EA community and you believe in this sort of giving, you could just as well make the case that in order to benefit the most amount of

• 22:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  like the greatest number of future humans, say trillions of humans, we want to actually invest in AI technology because we believe AI technology will build a utopia and cure diseases and cure illnesses, solve the problem of of death and like old age and all of these things. And so you could easily make the case in the EA community under that philosophy that, no, we shouldn't be funding necessarily anything that would slow down AI. We should actually be funding startups. We should be funding OpenAI. We should be funding like all the tech that goes into into AI. But it seems like the community just forked mainly in one direction such that EA has become somewhat associated with AI safety. I think, by the way, recently, maybe some of the founders of EA,

• 22:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Will McCaskill and others have kind of walked back from that and be like, hey, you know, that's not EA is not necessarily AI safety. They're not one in the same. There's kind of some differences. Anyway, I just throw that idea out there. And Eric, what are your reflections on this conversation so far?

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Well, first, I just want to add that not all long termism is is in the venture bet category. Right? It's also things like pandemic prevention or reducing nuclear proliferation, things that already exist, already happened. And they were talking about pandemic prevention before COVID, right? So they're really on to some things. The the leap that the long termism can be broadly explained by this idea that EA is about a kind of arbitrage, right? David, you described how if $1 can make a better difference, a bigger difference to people in Africa than it can to people in San Francisco. Well, maybe we should put our dollar to to people in Africa. And and EA says, OK.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Because a person in Africa's life is worth as much as a person in San Francisco's life, what about a person that doesn't exist yet? What about a future person? That that person's life is also worth as much as a current person's life. And guess what? There's going to be trillions of future people, way more than than exist today, and thus, we should really care about the future. And and there's a lot of people who got on board with that. There's a lot of people who who didn't get on board with that. And this was a schism in the EA community. Some people are like, hey, I'm all about effective charity. But this long termism stuff, that's a bit too bit too out there with me for me. And there's some people who who go all the way. And that now, when we go even among the people who go all the way, there's another schism that Ryan just outlined. Some people say, hey, it it really depends on what you think about the future of AI.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Some people say that the idea that you just said, Ryan, which is, if you're concerned about helping most future people, you want to accelerate AI. And these are people who are effective accelerationists. This this is why there is an additional schism. It's people who are not on board with with the AI safety agenda. And one thing that's worth noting, you know, EA and EAC are having the strongest conflict. But what did Henry Kissinger say, something like the tyranny of small differences? Like AI safety people and EAC people agree on 99% of of things in in many cases. They they both believe that the people who are worried about misinformation

• 25:04Speaker 03

  or DEI or AI saying racist things, they're they're not focused. They're not at the adult table of of of the important conversation. Those people are misguided. They're not disagreeing with that. And in in many ways, AI safety people and EA people are tech accelerationists. They they agree that nuclear regulation has been really bad. They they are one accelerate things like self driving cars or longevity or or other things that EAC people get on board with. The the one place in which they disagree is this this field of AI. They they say AI is this time it's different. We're not just introducing a new technology. We're almost introducing like a new form of evolution or a new species that it one day is going to be

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Way smarter than us and thus is a threat, not just to fake news. It's not like social media, not just to jobs.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  But to actual humanity, to actually the chance of us being extinct. And thus we should treat it differently. And that is the core of the argument between effective accelerationists and effective altruists as it relates to AI safety.

• 26:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, okay, so we're dealing with like, this is like an argument between like Catholics and Protestants, basically. It's like all in the same religion, but like you guys are arguing over these specifics here.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  I'm gonna dispute that, I'm gonna dispute that a little bit. I think, I think, I'd say a lot of EACs. So first of all, I think it's probably worth actually defining what EAC is, what it means as a movement. Because I think it's also been, in a sense, co-opted by what people want it to mean, which is like accelerationism, right? This idea that, oh, all technology is good and all technology should be faster, we should be super libertarian. We should, you know, kind of let all the guardrails off and just let it vroom, vroom, vroom, right? That's not actually what EAC says, right? If you read the EAC manifesto from Beth Jezos, who's the guy who invented it, who's like this Google engineer, worst quantific. It's actually pretty fucking crazy, like what he actually literally says. Like, I don't know, Eric, I'm not, it's been a while since I've actually looked at that manifesto.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  But there's stuff in there about how, like, yes, if AI ends up, you know, totally conquering humanity, like, that's good. We actually want to feed entropy, we actually worship entropy. Entropy is the thing, you know, the core value from which all good flows. It's like actually very weirdly cult-like and kind of anti-humanist. I think most people don't, haven't actually read it, or they just kind of take it as a vibe. And they're like, well, the vibe that I want it to be is like, you know, basically Marc Andreessen. I think that is what I imagine EAC is. But if you actually read the EAC manifesto, it's like, it's a bunch of other weird shit. That's adjacent to like the Marc Andreessen philosophy, but it's not quite the same thing. So I think it's sort of been typecast into, this is like Silicon Valley, you know, protex libertarian energy. But that's not, that's not literally what EAC says.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  I don't know, Eric, if you would agree or disagree with that.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  I do agree with it, and I should say that that is my, my tribe in some sense is people like Mike Solana, people like Balaji, people like Mark Andreessen. And so that is where, that is where I come from. And so I've been very sympathetic to this EAC movement, right? Which to some degree says, hey, over the last decade, there have been a lot of anti-tech movements and sentiments and people trying to use arguments to thus regulate tech in ways that have been very bad from whether it's energy or social media or a wide variety of things.

• 28:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about crypto? Does that add to the list?

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. And we're not going to let that happen here. And we're finally going to stand up for ourselves because you saw Zuckerberg and others apologize, and that didn't really get them anywhere. It only conceded their, their sort of lack of moral sort of credibility and that they were wrong and blah, blah, blah. And that's all these bad things. And so this EAC is coinciding with a desire for tech to stand up for itself, to say, hey, we are actually good. We are actually going to push back and we are going to defend ourselves. Now, I think you see brings up a really interesting point because yeah, Mike Solana, Balaji and Mark Andreessen are not saying that, you know,

• 29:22Speaker 03

  we're going to be pro-human or sorry, post-human in some sense. They're saying that technology is going to make human life way better for decades to come. And I think what, what Beth was doing, and you know, in some ways, EAC is critiqued as being about vibes. And the benefit of being about vibes is you can't really be pinned down. You can't really be critiqued on your philosophy. And I, I think that's partially because of what you see just, just identified, which is if you take it to its logical conclusion. It's not something that a lot of people want to get on board with. If you if you take sort of advancing technology to its logical conclusion, like, what is the role for humans once we have super intelligence?

• 30:04Speaker 03

  What is like when we're like cyborg stuff and then different speciation as as was I like? So it is very weird, but also I think in some ways it's intellectually honest of like, that's where things are going. And I couldn't pin down Solana or Balaji or Mark on like, what do they think about that? But but I think there is some truth to that. But I also think there's some like, I do think it's hard to be a pro tech on a long enough time scale and not think that we're going to like be like that think that humans are the last sort of, you know, form of intelligence that is going to going to rule the world. So I think it's intellectually honest. I also think it is very weird.

• 30:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what's what's the problem with like Yak plus some humanism, right? It's like a more, you know, like moderated.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  To be clear, there's, yeah, there's, there's nothing, there's nothing wrong with Yak plus some humanism. I think it's much preferable to like raw Yak as it was actually articulated in its genesis.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  I think it's evolved that way.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  The thing that's weird, yeah, well, I don't know that it's evolved so much, it's been co-opted. I think it's more like it's been co-opted, right? It's been co-opted. Like, the reality is that any anytime you get a culture war, you basically get the superimposition of what was once like a pretty, you know, esoteric argument about like, will it will AIs take over the world? Is it risky? Is it not risky? Is it good to have more? Is it good to slow down? This is like a pretty, you know, conceptual theoretical argument that's been going on in very obscure circles for a very long time. And then basically in the span of about a year and a half, it has now become a culture war. And once it becomes a culture war, then all of a sudden people get typecast, right? So like, okay, if you're an EA, you're like the decelerationist. That means that you you hate technology.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  And if you're an Yak, you love technology and you love Silicon Valley and you love Marc Andreessen and you love Peter Thiel. And it's like, well, you know, not necessarily like in reality, there's, there's, there's a, there's a panoply of views. There's, there's people who arrive at different parts of the spectrum from many different places. And there's people who say like, well, look, I think that the probability of AIs going badly is 5%, but the likelihood that actually it's better. If it's open source is like 25% or some people say like, well, look, I think it's like 10%. But I actually think that, you know, decelerationism is a bad idea and it ends up like just politically backfiring. So we kind of have to live with the acceleration. Like in reality, there are EAs and there are EAX, quote unquote, who have views anywhere along the spectrum. But once you become a culture war, all that shit goes away. And it's just like, oh, your EA, oh, your D cell or your EA or whatever the fuck.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  And people ultimately want a one dimensional or sort of one bit answer to how you feel about what is probably one of the most important questions right now facing technologists or, you know, technology regulation in America. So, you know, if you ask EAs, what do you think we should do, you know, regulatorily about, about AIs? You'll get a lot of different answers. You won't get, well, we should shut it all down and, you know, fucking control all the GPUs. Right? Eliezer says that, but Eliezer is like the all the way on the spectrum. He's like, you know, the, the, the platonic ideal of a decelerationist, right? In that sense, but most people on EA are very, you know, there's like a multi dimensional spectrum that people sit on different places in that spectrum.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  So for, you know, for myself, I was donating to AI risk like in 2014, 2015, way before, you know, large language model, I mean, not way before large language, but before any of this stuff was in the popular imagination. And it was not very obvious at that time, what were the specific policy prescriptions that were going to be made? Or how was this going to interact with Silicon Valley? At that time, the people who are working on AI risk were also Silicon Valley nerds. It was the same team, right? It was, it was the same people talking about this stuff. It's only very recently that now there's this sense that, well, you know, build, baby, build, which is like the Silicon Valley mantra is now hitting this wall. And like, I, I think in, it's, it's a little bit of a boogeyman as well, because the reality is that the EA types, you know, they don't really have that much power.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  Like they're not actually stopping anyone from doing anything at the moment. Like the real people who are stopping AIs are like the EU or like China, right? Who are not EAs, right? That's not what's motivating them. It's like data privacy laws or just, you know, deference to the CCP, right? Even the executive order that, that Biden passed said that, okay, if you're above a certain training run size, you have to report that to the government. That's it. It doesn't say you have to stop, doesn't say you can't do it, doesn't say you have to like, you know, follow these rules or whatever. It just says you have to let us know that it's happening. Which, to me, like, okay, that's a pretty far cry from, you know, oh, deceleration, blah, blah, blah. It's really just like an information gathering exercise, which, I don't know, like, probably they wouldn't have that much trouble gathering that information anyway, given the amount of GPUs would have to be cornered by anybody running a

• 34:36Speaker 00

  training run of that size. So I think there is a lot of reactivity right now, and that's what's causing people to believe, oh, you're way on this side, and I'm way on this side, and you kind of can't take any nuanced view in the middle. That's what happens in a culture war.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  First, let me just say that Eliza has also tweeted things like abortion, we should be able to abort babies that are up to 18 months, or you should be able to leave your partner if you find some, your wife or husband, if you find someone 25% better. Like, he is, you mentioned the platonic ideal, he takes utilitarianism to the extreme. And so, like, in the same way that Best Manifesto takes that idea to the extreme, there are people in EA, SBF, of course, one of them, who take, you know, some of the ideas within EA to the extremes, so far that they're no longer, you know, sort of palatable. I would take the other side a little bit. I do think EA has a lot of power, because I think that

• 35:34Speaker 03

  a lot of the people who make up OpenAI, who make up Anthropic, who make up some of these biggest labs, were influenced by EA, or themselves are

• 35:42Speaker 00

  They were, yes.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. And so, the ideas, they sort of came up in the EA soup, and right now, there's not a brace of regulations, as you mentioned, you know, people are still a lot, but we're at a time where these regulations are about to be defined, the regulatory era of AI over the next year, et cetera, and the people who have, you know, like, they're inviting people into the conversation who have EA influence, EA ideas, and so I do think the AI safety community will have an impact into the regulatory.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  But, okay, but you raised a good point, which is kind of ironic, right, which is that if you look at OpenAI, if you look at Anthropic, if you look at the companies that are actually accelerating. They're mostly EAs, right? Which like kind of fucks up the narrative, which is like, oh, the EAs are ruining everything. They're slowing everyone down and like it's the accelerationists who want to go fast. The accelerationists are mostly VCs. They're mostly not building anything. They're just like on the sidelines cheerleading for this imaginary team that they think is in the driver's seat when it's reality, it's fucking EA people who are even thinking that this was possible in the first place, right? It was the, it was, it was all the VCs who were not investing in any of this stuff because they thought it was so impractical and it was worth it. It's the EAs who believed that AI risk was a real thing because AI was going to become really powerful, really quickly, who created all this shit. So that's why I

• 37:00Speaker 00

  think like, again, this culture war typecasting that has happened is, is just ahistorical. It just doesn't make sense, given who's actually the players involved. Most of the people who are regulating AI, like, yes, we just talked about Paul Cristiano, who is now, you know, somewhat influential, presumably at NIST, which is, again, a relatively minor kind of scientific organization. He's not a congressperson, right? That's who actually writes the laws, is congresspeople. If you listen to congresspeople, what do they care about? They care about jobs. They care about, you know, bias. They care about, oh, you're, you're, you're, um, uh, squelching conservative voices. That's what is very likely to end up on the regulatory regime or the legislative regime. You know, I, I'd love if Paul Cristiano got, you know, uh, uh, something in edgewise into that conversation and maybe he will, but so far,

• 37:43Speaker 00

  it doesn't seem like that's predominantly what we're hearing from the people who actually make the laws.

• 37:48David Hoffman?

  There's one thing that we're familiar with in the crypto space. It's tribes and certain like cultural leaders in respective tribes becoming the hardliners for that tribe, right? They really, they teach the tribe who, you know, vibe associate with the cultural leader, how to be a hardliner. And then like the people that listen to like the high priests of this particular alignment camp, uh, absorb some, not all of the message, right? Like, oh yeah, most of this stuff feels good to me, right? We see this in literally every single crypto tribe that has ever been birthed and, and, and we all have like one, at least one respective hardliner. And that's what like kind of more or less creates the tribe. And then also you smash the particle of social media into that and like everything gets,

• 38:29David Hoffman?

  just gets juiced. Uh, especially this last cycle as like Bitcoin ETFs have gotten And like BlackRock is starting to tokenize securities on Ethereum. I've very quickly realized that like the realm of crypto Twitter is actually a significant minority of like what actually matters in the space. And like if you're in crypto Twitter, you think crypto Twitter is massive. You think it's a really big deal because you are in it and maybe it actually is. But like I remember hearing this like line from Sam Harris when he was critiquing Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter is like. Sam Harris was saying like Elon Musk is like disconnected from reality because he's on Twitter all of the time. He thinks the universe is Twitter. And this is, this is where these tribes fight, right?

• 39:13David Hoffman?

  This is where the hardliners, you know, chant their chant and they'll post out their tweets, like get their tribe on board. And then everyone else thinks that this is the universe. And so I guess like zooming out, Eric, like you, you talked to all the technologists of Silicon Valley. Like, can you like, help us understand the scope of this? Like, is this like a broad encompassing blanket that is over all of Silicon Valley and like government? And like everyone is focused on this conversation? Or is this like, kind of like a side quest from like the VCs and the builders? And like, it's actually not really defining the game, the landscape that much. Like, how, how far are we on these like continuums?

• 39:51Speaker 03

  I think the answer is, is both. Similarly, you know, people say Twitter is not the real world. Most people in the world are not on Twitter. That said, the people who are influential in the world, who influence other people's views, whether it's journalists or politicians or people on TV or anyone who's got a mouthpiece to, to the rest of the world are on Twitter. Not only are they on Twitter, they get their ideas from Twitter. They, they battle it out in the, in the marketplace of ideas or the culture war. And so I disagree with Sam Harris. I do think Twitter is the source where a lot of ideas come from and a lot of the sort of ideas get litigated on Twitter.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  And similarly, most of Silicon Valley is just doing their jobs, not, not, not on Twitter, not, not focused on this. But where do things get litigated often on Twitter, right? Like. You know, as he was just saying how EA has not had a big impact yet, we alluded to this off camera, but you know, there's a, there's a world where Sam Altman did get fired and there was an EA coup and maybe there's overblown, but there, there, there seemed to be some EA concerns from the board and maybe OpenAI would have taken a much more sort of decelerationist stance, right? There was this movement to pause AI, you know, about a year ago that it didn't seem like people followed, but maybe they, maybe they, they would have.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I want to, I want to push back against this because like this again was the framing of the OpenAI coup, basically in like the, the couple of days when it was all fog of war and nobody knew what was actually going on. There's now been a ton of reporting on what actually happened in the OpenAI coup and it looks like just a regular old, you know, like Sam Altman was like kind of telling people different things and he was like raising money for stuff on the side and not telling the board and blah, blah, blah. There's just like, actually there was not, oh, there's Q star and it's a secret algorithm that's gonna AI risk and you know, people saw that like, oh my God, you know, Sam Altman wants to unleash it on the world and he's not being safe enough. That was not what happened. Like, we know now that's not what happened, right? What happened was just ordinary board loses trust with CEO, CEO and board fight, board is like very amateurish, oust the CEO,

• 42:03Speaker 00

  hire somebody, you know, it was all just like terrible board management.

• 42:06David Hoffman?

  Wow, really? Because like to this day, I have always thought that it was an AI safety like issue.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  No, there was no, no, there's been so much reporting on it now. Like, no, no, go read, the New York Times has done a ton of exposes about this now. Like, there was almost nothing to do with AI safety in the reason why OpenAI, like, because if, like, at the end of the day, like, the, the whole nonprofit structure of OpenAI was not the reason why they fired Sam, right? The reason why they fired Sam was that the board members lost trust with Sam. Sam reportedly was like telling different people on the board, different things. The board was like getting back together and they were very uncomfortable with the way that Sam was managing things and he was kind of controlling people and he had, people talked a lot about the fact that Sam is a very manipulative guy and he's very, very effective at what he does. Part of what makes him a very good leader is that he's very, he has this reality distortion field and he makes people feel how he wants them to feel.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  He's around them. That's the real story. If you try to tell the story about, well, OpenAI was an EA coup, then you have a lot more explaining to do about like, okay, what was the EA thing that happened that precipitated all this?

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Perception is reality, right? And it was framed-

• 43:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. No, it's true. It's true. It was framed in that way by like the chorus, you know, just the people on Twitter, the talking heads-

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, the fluke.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Who wanted this to be the story. It's the same thing with like EA versus EA, right? People want this to be the story, but the story is almost always more complicated. And the reality of OpenAI was that it was more complicated than that.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Yes. But if it had been completed, this coup that never was-

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  It would be framed as an EA coup, right? And so-

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Which, which, um, so let me refer in a different way. You're saying, hey, the people who actually write the laws, they don't care about AI safety. They're not AI safety people. They care about jobs and they care about misinformation. And, and I agree with that. And this, this gets to the sort of Baptist bootleggers, um, sort of dichotomy that Mark Andreessen often brings up, which is this idea that there are people who are purists. They actually believe in, in things like AI safety and they, uh, they, they really care about the issues. And there are bootleggers who are sort of either grifters or opportunists who notice something that is in their self-interest

• 44:17Speaker 03

  to take the same position as the, as the Baptists. And they use the language of the Baptists to justify their own advancement of their own self-interest. And similarly in, in, in tech, um, when, right now, there's a schism within, within tech. Like there, there was a survey that went up to 10,000 researchers or, or thousands of researchers. And I think 10,000 MLAR researchers who work at these big labs expressed some concern over or sympathy with AI safety. And so, um, if we as an industry don't present a united front in our belief of these technologies, it gives ammo to people who want to regulate them, right? And in the same way that within crypto, if you have, you know, half the, the community

• 45:01Speaker 03

  talking about, um, you know, sort of the why crypto is bad and regulators see that, they might say, oh, even, even crypto people think it's, it's, it's, it's bad or what people think, think it's bad. Thus we need to regulate it. So, so there's a concern in the same way that with social media, social media people apologize all the time and express their concerns and it gave more ammo for regulation. They, they have the concern that the same thing will happen here. The, the counter to that, which I think is a good counter is no, it's not about giving them ammo. It's about self-regulating. If, if we as an industry can self-regulate ourselves, maybe that will prevent other people from coming in because we can prevent some of the damages. And, and you know, crypto talk, talk about this a lot too of like, you know, um, getting rid of scams early so that doesn't give the whole industry a, a, a bad name.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  Well, in reality, that is what's happening, right? It's, it's who's doing the AI safety research? Who's actually trying to be responsible with this stuff? The answer is OpenAI and Anthropic. And like the guys who are actually leading the front are self-regulating because the regulators have no clue what the fuck is going on. They have no idea how to even be productively, how to productively give input into how to guide this technology forward. So the reality is that, you know, the, the concern about regulation, I mean, it's one that I don't know anybody who doesn't share the concern over bad regulation. Bad regulation is bad, right? Clearly. Um, but it's also obviously true, even among the effective accelerationists, that AI is really powerful and AI is going to massively change the playing field around who controls what. And right now, you know, they're kind of toys like, okay, yeah, you

• 46:29Speaker 00

  can spam people or you can, you know, spearfish much more efficiently using these tools or they can tell you how to build a bomb, which like, okay, if you can't figure out how to Google, how to build a bomb, like, you know, good luck, uh, using a large language model to get there. Um, but like there, there's, there's a lot more that's coming and it's pretty obvious to everybody. There's a lot more that's coming. And so I think, you know, uh, whether you agree about, whether you think the right way to do this is self-regulation or government regulation depends on your confidence in the right laws or right frameworks to arise. And Silicon Valley obviously has, you know, a lot of scar tissue in believing that, you know, governments fucking up, governments are terrible, you know? Everybody hates us and so they're going to create these draconian laws that are going to be about this, you know, power struggle with government and with special interests

• 47:12Speaker 00

  or whatever, and that's going to be the regulatory regime that we enter into. But nobody goes around saying like, you know, you know, all the stuff that OpenAI is doing around safety or this research that Anthropic is doing, it's stupid, it's worthless, it's slowing us down, let's throw it away, right? If effective acceleration has said that, then I would say, okay, it sounds like you guys are very consistent in believing that AI is an unalloyed good. But they don't say that. They don't say like, well, why are these people slowing themselves down? Instead, they say, well, you know, government bad, these people good, which like, okay, I understand where that's coming from. And I don't think EAs are pro-government, right? Which I think is again, another way that this dichotomy kind of breaks down. EAs in general think that governments are terrible allocators of goods, right? I mean, you can just see it historically, governments are incredibly inefficient. And so I don't think EAs look at that and say, well, great, government is the natural

• 47:55Speaker 00

  person to provide this regulatory regime because they're all brilliant and we love what everything the governments do. Most EAs are pretty libertarian on almost every single front. They generally believe that governments are incredibly wasteful. But when it comes to AI, the concern is that, well, is self-regulation enough when you have a tool that is incredibly powerful, right? So if you have self-regulation around, you know, nuclear weapons, how well is that going to do in an environment where nuclear weapons are extremely powerful, extremely damaging? Well, in practice, we've kind of learned through experience, the only way to really control nuclear weapons is with the monopoly on violence. Is it basically saying, yo, Iran, if you develop nuclear weapons, we're going to come at you, you know, North Korea, if you develop nuclear weapons, we're going to come at you because we don't want these proliferate, we don't want this to just be a tool in everybody's hands.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  We actually think that's a worse equilibrium to have everybody be really powerful. But this is kind of what EAC implies, is that the best equilibrium for AI is that everyone has one and AIs keep other AIs in check and it's sort of like we all have nukes. Maybe that's true, but there's at least a real possibility that that's not true, that it's more like nukes and it's not like, you know, I don't know, you know, the books, right? Which is a thing, okay, more education is good for everyone. So anyway, sorry, Eric, I know you want to jump in.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  You are correct in saying that we are accelerating and EAC people are happy with the status quo. They're just worried that things will change because, as you mentioned, the irony, people who are sympathetic with AI safety are the ones driving the acceleration. People work at these labs, but there are people who are even further on the side of AI safety who are noticing that contradiction, saying, hey, you claim to be about AI safety, but you're actually accelerating. People like Eliza, people like Laron, very smart, brilliant people who are saying, hey, we actually need to slow down. Like, you need to be more, we need to pause AI, we need to put an off switch, we need to have some sort of more extreme intervention. And I think the EAC

• 49:48Speaker 03

  people are responding to that concern. Not that the status quo is a problem, but that a very significant change could be a problem. So that's what they're worried.

• 49:58David Hoffman?

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• 53:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think that draws something that we see on both the extremes and something that Eliezer Yudkowsky and like Beff Jayzos might also agree is like there's another more cynical interpretation of the stuff that the EA people like the Sam Altman's are doing and the reason they're spending time in DC and that interpretation is regulatory capture. So they actually want to hit the accelerator on AI in general, but they're also reasonable people and they're happy to work with the government in order to come up with sensible regulation and partner with them because we're the educated ones, we're building the models. And so yeah, let's team up with the regulators and the governments

• 54:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  around the world in order to kind of create the right rules for this new and emerging industry. And oh, by the way, this would be, I think, the Marc Andreessen critique. By the way, we are the recipients of like of value. We have cemented ourselves, we've created a moat for ourselves and our own businesses. And so there's a criticism that comes from Eliezer in doing this. He's saying, well, this is hypocritical. If you're really worried about AI safety, you would like cease immediately. You would stop like doing this until you do a Manhattan project and go figure it out. And then there's a criticism from the Beff Jezos side of things with Sam Altman. And Beff would probably be someone who says like, this is clearly regulatory capture. They're doing it in broad daylight,

• 54:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  right? The only solution for this is decentralized AI and everyone needs like a model and an AI genie in their own home, running on their own like hardware, right? So this is a critique that's coming from both sides. And I'm wondering, Haseeb, like, what about that more cynical interpretation of what's going on? Like, in fact, wouldn't that be like, actually, the game theory of what companies want to do? They want to go build monopolies. And so, I mean, that's a sensible business strategy. Sam Altman's a smart individual. He's great at this, right?

• 55:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. So first of all, I'd say I find this a little ironic because again, during the whole AI ousting or OpenAI ousting drama, Sam Altman was typecast as like the Promethean, you know, like the IAC guy who was trying to make AI go faster. And now all of a sudden, oh, no, no, actually, never mind. He's not the savior. He's actually the, he's the boogeyman. He's actually going out there and trying to, you know, he's the JP Morgan trying to corner the steel trade or whatever. I don't know. To me, this is not a critique. This is an innuendo, right? What is Sam Altman? Okay, let's, let's, let's step away from AI. Let's talk about crypto. Because I think, you know, people on this podcast understand crypto easier. Let's pretend that instead of Sam Altman, it's Brian, Brian Armstrong. Okay? He goes to DC and he says, hey, I'm going to engage with DC and try to come up with, you know, sensible legislation. Would you be like, oh, my God, he's trying to cap his regulatory capture?

• 56:08Speaker 00

  What is he doing? Why is he consorting with the enemy?

• 56:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  It depends. So not, not Brian Armstrong, but SBF. That's exactly what he was doing.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. Okay, so put SBF aside. Let's say Brian Armstrong. Brian Armstrong does go to DC. He does do all those things. Do you say the same thing is happening now? It's just Brian Armstrong instead of SBF?

• 56:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, but I would be cautious.

• 56:29David Hoffman?

  Generally, I'm supportive.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  Why not? Why not?

• 56:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just, just because, I mean, for me, is this a?

• 56:34Speaker 00

  Be cautious? What, what do you mean by be cautious? What do you mean be cautious?

• 56:37David Hoffman?

  I think, I think it's both. It's he's both fighting for regulatory arbitrage in the, maybe implicitly, but he's also fighting for the industry as a whole. Uh, yes, regulatory capture. Yes. But I think he's motivated by all of the right reasons. And then that effect of that is regulatory capture.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  Sure. Okay. So, so it sounds like what you're saying is, hold up a sec. Let's see what he actually does.

• 57:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  And then judge him based on the consequences of the legislation that's actually proposed.

• 57:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, yes.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  Okay, that sounds very reasonable, right? That sounds very reasonable. Okay. What is the legislation that Sam Altman has proposed?

• 57:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I actually haven't seen anything.

• 57:13Speaker 00

  We don't know. Nobody fucking knows. We don't know. The answer is we don't know. So it's all innuendo, right? This is people just making up a fucking story because it sounds good. The reality is, if you're Sam Altman and you're not going to DC and you're ignoring people in, in the White House, you're a fucking idiot. You're an idiot whether you're fighting for the industry or whether you're fighting for regulatory capture. Like either way, if you just ignore them, you're a fucking moron. So until we see what is the actual legislation that he's advocating, we don't know. And if you were Sam Altman and you literally just ignored DC, you would be definitely doing the worst thing possible, right? I would much rather Sam Altman be there than whoever else is gonna be there instead. You know, some guy from, I don't know, fucking Google or something. I would much rather Sam Altman be there.

• 57:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think this is a fair point, and I want to hear what Eric says on this, but it is a fair point. Actually, it was kind of like a critique that I had of like Brian Armstrong and Coinbase, of like not engaging in DC earlier and sort of letting a vacuum be present so that people like SBF could actually engage. The moment I actually, like Bankless in general, so David and I kind of like started, our spidey senses started tingling with SBF, was when the draft of some proposed legislation that he was responsible for actually came out, and it felt very much like a rug pull, ladder pull up on all DeFi front-end interfaces. And like brought him to task and said, hey, SBF, this is not like crypto values. Like, what are you doing?

• 58:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're essentially forcing or creating some legislation that would force kind of compliance on this space and promote your centralized exchange. And so a critique of like Brian during that time was like, I wish he had have been there. Because if you're saying Sam Altman could be good, we don't know. It's kind of like, you know, Schröder's Sam Altman. We'll see what the legislation that pops out on the other side. I guess the case for that would be if he doesn't do it, then some more nefarious version of a Sam Altman would be in DC, engaging those regulators and engaging regulatory capture. So I suppose we don't know until the legislation is out. What do you think about this, Eric?

• 59:16Speaker 03

  I would, I agree with Aziz's framing that Sam has to get involved. Yeah, let's wait and see what the regulation looks like. I would like to see AI safety people more strongly disown the AI ethics people, because they often get conflated, right? And because they have a sort of a coincidence of wants motivated by, you know, disparate desires.

• 59:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who are the AI ethics people? I don't think we've defined that well enough, Eric.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  AI ethics people are people who are worried about misinformation, who are worried about sort of inequality, about certain people or certain voices being represented by the AI.

• 59:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this like AI woke people?

• 59:56Speaker 03

  Yes, that's exactly it. And these are the concerns that along with jobs and other things that congresspeople or regulators are more sympathetic to because they don't quite understand the AI safety arguments just yet or it's abstract and by not disowning those sort of reasons, they sort of implicitly accept them or give them more power. And I would like to see that. And this is why we see things like Google Gemini being being super woke or even chat GPT earlier. And these things matter. And so that's something that I would like to see. One thing I want to return to a little bit earlier is as he was framing the culture

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  war. And we have a culture where things get kind of dumbed down. And people typically here think of associate cultural with bad, right? And when they think of a lack of culture war, they think of, oh, a great marketplace of ideas where people are being very sophisticated and presenting good arguments. And this to EA's credit is often what EA is. In many ways, it's very, you know, intelligent conversation, trying to get the truth in some ways. Now, I would also posit that the lack of a culture war is not just this great marketplace of ideas. It's also something like North Korea. It's something where there's a lack of moral or intellectual diversity. It's just like, you just have to have this, this is the defense that some people give a poll.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  Is this a pro culture war argument?

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, it's a

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  We should have more culture wars.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  It's a pro polarization argument. I think in and even in EA, I saw this blog post, we can link to it, where someone was saying that EA needs more polarization. And it actually affects their giving, like EA gave or, you know, Gible gave like $200 million to criminal reform or something. And this guy was arguing that actually made the problem worse. And why didn't people come in and and measure this? Because they they felt it was too controversial to go against it. And this is a critique that some people give a BA, which is as as much as they want to claim to be rational, first principles, you would think that that would lead to a diversity of perspectives. And in some cases, it does on, you know, issues like long termism and and specific implementation details. But it's worth noting

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  that EA is Democrat.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  That there are very few Trump supporting EA's. Now, why is that? Is it possible that everyone in EA from their first principles is just like Trump bad, Biden better? That seems very unlikely. It seems that EA is also prone to tribal thinking in ways that other communities are. And that's not a knock on EA, but it's the reason why Culture War in this case might be good. I'll also posit that EA is a way for Silicon Valley to implicitly be right wing, implicitly be conservative. And you notice that EA is not only talking about issues like advancing AI or technology, but also wading into other culture. It's much more masculine. It's much more alpha.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  It's much, you know, it's concerned with birth rates, right? And so I think it's good for there to be in Silicon Valley more polarization and more diversity as it relates to, as it relates to intellectual issues, it relates to politics, because for so long, we've had a lack of that. And that's prevented really important conversations on things like, you know, criminal justice, for example, or things where there are different, there are taboos. And EA and rationality is supposed to get rid of taboos. Or, and in some ways, it hasn't done that. So I'm curious how you would react to the characterization of EA as Democrat affiliated

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  or left wing and not having enough sort of intellectual or moral diversity.

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  I think you raised good points. And I should probably reiterate that, you know, I've been affiliated with the EA philosophy for, you know, almost 10 years now. I wrote a post fairly recently, kind of critiquing EA's. I think I titled the post, "The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Effective Altruists." And I think what I've found over time, you know, coming into the crypto space, I kind of thought that there would be, you know, I first got into EA. EA was like, you know, all these kids who were really, really smart and, you know, made a lot of money and they seemed to be extremely smart and fastidious and hardworking. And I thought, wow, these people are going to be super successful. I'm a nobody. I hope I can be successful too someday. And then, you know, I found my way into crypto and started building stuff. And I knew some EA's who'd gotten into crypto.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  One of those EA's was this kid named Sam, who I first met at EA Global, which is like this big EA conference in San Francisco in 2015. He was still working at Jane Street at that time and I met him in a hallway and we chatted for like five minutes just about blah, blah, blah, EA, whatever, and you know, whatever. I didn't think much of it. He was just, you know, got, you know, PC guy, curly hair, shorts. Little did I know, little did I know. I'd come across him again much later when we were both doing very different things in the crypto industry. Neither of us were in crypto at that time. And so I kind of assumed that there would be a lot of people who were really successful in crypto who were EA's. And what I would later discover, many years after being a VC, was that that was super not true. There was basically only one other person who was

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  a real EA, or like a kind of central EA, who was very successful in crypto, and that was Sam. And I didn't know Sam super well. We chatted maybe three, four times over the years that we'd interacted with each other. But obviously, you know, we all know the story of what happened with Sam and he, you know, single-handedly kind of redefined EA for most people as being this kind of really corrupted, kind of corrosive, you know, group thinky, kind of go along with the flow, very left-leaning tribe, right? Essentially, that's what most people think of EA's.

• 1:05:46David Hoffman?

  Well, now, just like to add a little bit more onto that, just like sociopathic comes to mind because it was like utilitarianism to its nth degree, like not considering about like any local humans' emotions or anything like that.

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  Right, right. And so in, you know, these famous stories about, you know, would you bet the entire universe on a 5149 coin flip? And he's like, yes, I do it infinitely many times. And so just almost like autistic chasing of, oh, go ahead, Eric.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  It's worth noting, he said that in a podcast, and it wasn't like there was this, you know, everyone coming down on him criticizing him. He was still a god. And so it's crazy the difference between how SPF was treated before we found out he was doing the fraud, even though he was saying some of these things, he wasn't saying fraud, but he was saying extreme utilitarian ideas in broad daylight. And so it's just worth noting.

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And so it is, it is, it's something that we actually talked about, we alluded to briefly earlier about extinction risk, right? And like, you know, what is the, what is the importance of avoiding extinction risk? And the reason why SBF's example is wrong. So a classical thing in EA is this idea of risk neutrality, which is this idea that, okay, you know, most people are risk averse. They don't want to take risks. And so it's like, okay, if I can definitely save a life by, you know, going to, I don't know, a food drive and donating some food, and I will definitely save a life by doing that, but it's very, very expensive. Or I can like maybe probabilistically save a life by, you know, investing into water filtration systems and maybe somewhere down the road that's going to result in saving a life. Most people are like, well, I want to know for sure

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  that I saved a life. And EA kind of advocates this risk neutrality, which is idea that, look, in expectation, because, you know, there's millions of people doing millions and millions of things trying to save lives, all you really care about is on average, how many lives do you save? And in the portfolio of all the things people are doing to save lives, you should just increase the expected value and not worry so much about whether your coin flip turns out heads or tails, right? And so, you know, SBF kind of took this idea to an extreme and said, okay, well, we should gamble the whole fucking world on, you know, plus EV, one life, great, okay, flip the coin as many times as you want, that's free money. Now, this is wrong. Okay, this is actually just wrong. This is wrong according to this mathematical rule called the Kelly criterion, which basically defines the optimal level of risk-taking you should make in order to maximize the growth rate

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  of your bankroll. I used to be a professional poker player before I ever got into tech or crypto or anything. And Kelly criterion is a concept that everybody in poker knows, is that if you want to make the most money, you follow the Kelly criteria. You don't bet your entire bankroll on, oh, okay, I've got like, you know, 60% to win this hand if we go all in. So great, I'm going to bet my entire bankroll on it because that's the maximal expected value. That's wrong. That is wrong to do that. It is wrong to do that because when you go to zero, right, if there's a real existential risk, even if the risk is low, like, you can never come back from zero. As long as you still have some bankroll, you can make it all back. But if you go to zero, you cannot make it all back anymore. Your growth rate is now zero forever. And so Kelly criterion tells you, you should maximize growth rate as opposed to maximize expected value.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  And you maximize growth rate by following the Kelly criterion, right? So Sam was wrong in his elocution of that. But people kind of get stuck on this idea that, oh, well, that's what EA's belief. EA's believe that you should bet the universe on every tiny little edge and, you know, every small piece of expected value. So again, it's like this, it seems like the EA worldview just completely diverges from what normal people think of as common sense morality. And I think that's, it's, SBF's worldview did. But most EA's worldviews, you know, if you, if you explain them clearly enough, it's like, actually, no, that, that actually does sound pretty reasonable. Yeah, okay, if you, if you're playing with a, with a technology that might make you go to zero, okay, well, you know, the, the one rule of gambling is that you never fuck with going to zero, right? You never fuck with going broke.

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  You always leave some money on the side that if you end up losing the hand, even if you're all in aces versus kings, you still, there's a chance you lose when you go all in aces against kings, right? So, okay, that 10% of the time that you wipe out, you want to make sure you've got some money to start grinding it back. And that, in, in some sense, that is the, the, the core idea behind, hey, if your P doom, that's the, the probability that you think that AI, AI is in some way an existential risk to humanity. If your P doom is like, you know, 5%, that means to most people, like, oh, okay, well then why worry? Like, obviously this won't happen. And so, you know, what's the chance that a 1 in 20 thing is going to happen? Why are you guys freaking out about this? But if, if somebody says, like, you know, I, I don't know what my P doom is, but it's probably something on the order of like 5, 10%, which means the modal outcome, nobody ever has to worry about any of this.

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  None of this is going to matter. Most of the time, you're going to walk through the world and AIs are just going to be, you know, sex robots and, you know, it's going to help you with your taxes and whatever. But, you know, none of them is going to, none of them are really going to try to kill humanity, right? That, most people who are talking about EA believe that. They believe that the modal outcome is that nothing bad will happen or nothing bad on a catastrophic scale will happen, I should, I should clarify. And, but, but they say, even if that's true, That 5% of the time, you don't risk that. You don't risk that. So even if you think, yes, there are going to be trillions of humans in the future, and the EA worldview is that, well, all those trillions of humans, I agree, there will be trillions of humans in the future, and we should care about their well-being just as much as we care about present humans. And so therefore, if we wait even a moment longer to let EA,

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  or sorry, to let AIs arrive into the world, we are doing a massive amount of harm to all those humans. The shape of the argument is kind of similar, right? But the Kelly criterion, if you take it seriously, what it implies is that, hey, waiting another couple of years to get to the same place we're eventually going to get to, but with much more, with basically minimizing the chance that your bankroll goes to zero, is worth it if you're just thinking about Kelly criterion.

• 1:11:24David Hoffman?

  And also with the role of human incentives, I think the gap between the Kelly criterion and what value, like maximizing EV, ended up being like SPF's Bahamian penthouse and all of his political donations and everything else.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  One thing I want to speculate with you guys is, why is EA this convenient punching bag? And it's a punching bag on contradictory statements, right? Like, the AI ethics people, for years have been calling EA like transhumanists, or saying, hey, you're way too tech-oriented. And of course, EA people called them doomers. Like, you know, EA is, has a branding problem. It's been having a branding problem. And it was a punching bag after SPF. It was a punching bag for OpenAI. It's basically something that everybody else can rally around of why they dislike it, right? And it continues to have this trouble. And I would posit, it's because EA has beta energy.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  EA has nerdy beta energy, and it doesn't stand up for itself. It doesn't say, you know, like, after the SPF thing, it apologizes, it goes into hiding. After the OpenAI thing, also, like, why did they say, no, this was totally fake, you're making this up? Actually, like... EA has done some amazing things, right? EA has had incredible accomplishments and yet they're not shouting them up at the rooftops in the way that Mike Solana is shouting off, you know, alpha aggressively saying why tech is good. And this is where I posit when I somewhat joke about culture war good, but I think EA and EAC need each other. Like I want an ecosystem where EAC and EA are duking it out because I think we need both.

• 1:13:03Speaker 03

  I think we need a movement that is explicitly, you know, unadulterated, pro-tech, alpha energy, willing to fight back against people who are trying to unfairly critique it or get our CEOs fired or put in dumb regulations. But I also want another movement that keeps that movement in check and says, hey, AI safety is actually this really important thing. We should really look into it. We should self-regulate and have that fight internally as opposed to externally. And we've seen when EA gets too powerful, it becomes this massive punching bag. At the same time, EAC, when it gets too powerful, it becomes really cringe, right?

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  Like EA is at its best when it's duking it out with EA, when it's trying to be this overarching thing. It can't really, EA is like an underdog movement. They're both like underdog movements that should be in productive tension with each other for us to figure out. And maybe the status quo is actually like pretty good. Like we have labs who are accelerating and yet they're also working on alignment research. They're also trying to keep each other in check. And if we could just keep this productive tension or what I'm calling productive tension, maybe we can get to a better solution here as opposed to the worst of these extremes. You know, you talked about the manifesto and how extreme that is. And we talked about some of the more extreme players in AI safety and how bad that is.

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  So that's something I would posit why EA gets beaten up so much and why it needs EA support to help defend the parts of it that they agree with, which is 98% in my belief. And then also why the tension is helpful.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  I agree with you that EA is a punching bag. It's weird to me in a way. So, you know, I was in EA before EA got really on the global stage, right? Most people didn't know what an EA was when I was first in EA. And then, really, kind of in large part due to SPF, EA suddenly became very high status, right? During SPF's reign, EA, like, it was almost crazy the amount of positive coverage that EA was getting, despite the fact that EA is, like, objectively really weird and very unapproachable for most people, right? So it kind of got lumped into this just, like, general asceticism and, like, sagely, saintly energy that SPF was trying to portray himself as being. And the, like, in a way, it was two things I'd say.

• 1:15:25Speaker 00

  One is that that made me very uncomfortable, this idea that, like, wow, EA is, like, so good and everything about you is good and everything that is EA is good. And now EA is actually really cringe, right? It's like, not cool. You go to Silicon Valley party and you tell someone you're in EA and they're like, oh, okay, well, interesting. And that, and like, it's definitely not something that people continue to self-affiliate with, which is part of the reason why I also like it more now. Because I feel like, okay, if you're EA now, then you actually, it requires some balls, right? You're basically taking a hit publicly to say that you're in EA. Right, exactly. It's an EA bear market. I think, like, that is kind of the valley of darkness that EA needs in order to really define its identity and not just be like this kind of milquetoast, like, oh, I'm smart and cool and good. And isn't that wonderful that I'm all those things at the same time?

• 1:16:10Speaker 00

  And so, so that's, that's one thing I'll say. I think that it has been good for EA in a certain sense to kind of get stress-tested by becoming very politically unpopular. The second thing I'll say is, okay, why is, why is EA such a punching bag? In a way that, for example, tech was not, you know, post-Theranos or post, or, you know, post, I don't know, crypto. And crypto, obviously, was a punching bag post-SPF blowing up, but EA as well. And I think a big part of the reason for that is that EA is just not designed to be politically capable. Right, it's almost premise on this idea that politics is bad and politics is the mindkiller. And if you believe this and everything that you preach is about nuance and careful thinking

• 1:16:51Speaker 00

  and avoiding sloganism and not being lazy and being suspicious of power structures. And then you're like, great, now let's go fight in the biggest power game of all, which is politics. You're just gonna lose because you're gonna suck at it. So I think that's largely the answer is that the one person who was good at politics in EA was SBF. And everybody else in EA just like fucking sucks at politics. And that's why they were the saintly, quiet nerdy people who are just in the background doing stuff and donating to bed nets and all this, doing the AI research, AI safety research at a time when nobody else cared. And now it's like, oh my god, you guys are actually in the way of progress and you guys are all terrible people. And they're like, no, no, we really not. Let's do a two hour debate to discuss why.

• 1:17:34Speaker 00

  And they just don't have the ability to get out there and fight with slogans, which is the EA people very politically capable, right? I mean, Marc Andreessen and Mike Solan and all those guys, they live and breathe politics, right? Whereas the EA people, they're a bunch of like philosophy professors, right? Like that was the leader of their movement. These are verbose, kind of extremely particular people and they suck at politics.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  They might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in them.

• 1:18:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's just the point, right? And maybe we could bring to that part of the conversation because like these nerd battles that we thought we were having insular to like kind of nerd culture in Silicon Valley are now like political battles. And there seemed to be some like party lines kind of drawing and like using these platforms, right? For maybe like a different use case than when they were originally created. And there seems to be this dichotomy forming behind like kind of a political party for de-accelerationism, like check on Silicon Valley power and technological progress without constraints. Maybe there's some anti-capitalism or anti-billionaire type stuff tied up in that.

• 1:18:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then there's this like pro-tech accelerationism, remove the constraints, like let's...

• 1:18:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let America be kind of like the grand master of AI. Let's like, like, let's win this battle. And it at a various curious time with respect to like, at least American politics, right? Because we're sort of in between orders, right? We had the New Deal order for a very long time, FDR until like the 1970s. And now we're, we're in this neoliberal order and have been for the last 40 years. And we've, I feel like we very much are on the exit ramp out of that neoliberal liberal order. And it's like, the US is trying to find out what's the next political order that we're going to establish ourselves with. And I think the neoliberal order that kind of rubber stamped the, the internet in the 1990s and, you know, helped Silicon Valley prosper, they were very tech forward.

• 1:19:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  They love technology, right? It's going to bring jobs, like the economy. It's not a certain thing that the next order, political order that dominates America will be as tech forward as the order has been at this point in time. You could start to see some battle lines being drawn. You know, I, I think people like Bology and Marc Andreessen might say there's like the blue tribe that is tending towards tech de-accelerationism. Like lots of restraint, lots of regulatory apparatus, like slow down on this whole tech thing in general. And then there's maybe Team Red. They haven't quite chosen an alliance yet, but maybe they are going on the tech forward side of things

• 1:20:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  and tech accelerationism side of things. And it seems like, I don't know, you have to pick a tribe at this point in time. From our conversation up to this point, Haseeb and Eric, I feel like both of you guys believe in a P doom for AI greater than zero, right? So you're not maximalist on either side, the EA side, you know, or the, or the EA side of this debate. You're probably somewhere in the middle, but it's, it's hard to really pick a side politically, right? When it seems like if you choose the de-accelerationism side, then you're, you're consigned to like shitty regulation and they're going to like shut things down and, and cement some of the leaders. Or if you go on kind of the other side, well, then maybe you don't have the constraints that you actually need for the space and you're not, you're.

• 1:21:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're not properly regulating kind of like the danger of this. Anyway, how do you think about the politics of this whole conversation that has exploded beyond like nerd culture? And is now like Biden has executive orders about this stuff. All right. And it's just starting like AI is the thing that the nation that the world is talking about at this point. So Haseeb, what's your take on this?

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

  So what I resist the most strongly is the politicization of this question. Right. Cause this is one of the most important questions of our time, which also means that it's really fucking important to get it right. And the one way you will guarantee that you don't get it right is by making it into politics. Right. Like, if you think about masks, like, you know, how we dealt with the pandemic was probably one of the most important questions this decade. And we fucking failed because we turned it into politics. Instead of turning it into a just raw scientific question of what is the answer of how this fucking disease is spreading and disrupting society? And like, you know, killing millions of people around the world. And so if you let that happen to AI, I think you've already lost the game.

• 1:22:14Speaker 00

  Right. If you concede this idea that, well, there's this tribe over here and this tribe over there. And you pick one side and then, you know, the end like, no, that's fucking retarded. Okay. That's just absolutely wrong. That's not the way you should be thinking about this. The way you should be thinking about this is that these are really hard questions and the answers require nuance. They require careful study. They require lots of time and energy. And the only way you will guarantee that you get it wrong is by saying that there are only two sides. Right. In reality, it's a multi dimensional question like, and the idea that, okay, well, you know, there's the D cells and there's the X cells. And like, you know, the blue tribe likes this, the red tribe likes that and blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, no, no, that's not true. Okay. One thing that we know about politics from people who actually go and study this stuff as opposed to reading media,

• 1:22:54Speaker 00

  which will give you a very distorted view of what people actually think is that most people are not diehard leftists or diehard rightists. Most people are somewhere in between. They have a mishmash of ideas. They don't fit neatly into either of these categories. And they, they, they don't like either of the leading candidates right now. Right? That, that is what we know. Know that by actually doing polling. If you go look at people, they don't fit neatly into these two categories and they don't on AI risk either. Right? So people say, well, you know, I think P D O M is this, but I actually think we should do that. Or I think, hey, you know, GPU constraints are not smart, but I think we should be putting more effort into, you know, using the government to fund safety research, right? Because it maybe it's undersupplied by the private market. There are a lot of median positions you can take that are not shut it all down or like build, baby, build. Right? There's, there's tons of room in the middle. And if you lose that room, then you're definitely going to fuck up.

• 1:23:39Speaker 03

  I think you will fuck up to some degree, but I would argue that it could actually be worse. And so I, I think it would be not the worst situation if one side was build, baby boom. And the other side was shut it all down because my worry is that both sides are going to say, shut it all down. Like we have Tucker Carlson going on Joe Rogan, literally saying, shut it all down. He sounds like, like a dumber version of Eliza. Not to put down Tucker, deservedly, but like he's, and Tucker is one of the most popular people, you know, on the right. Like if he ran for president, there wasn't Trump, maybe he'd be a candidate. So I could see shut it all down being a bipartisan thing. Like, um, you know, we're at a time of extreme populists, as, as Steve mentioned.

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  You know, people don't like Biden, people don't like Trump, you know, and, and, and we're also at a side of, in an era of horseshoe theory on anti-tech. Right? Like when, when you think about someone like Bernie Sanders, you think about someone like Trump. These are populists from both sides who actually have a lot in common or more than we might think. So, um, my, my hope is that the AI safety people, I don't want to call them decelerationists because they, they don't call themselves decelerationists. And we should, um, use the terms that people use for each other, uh, for themselves. My hope is that the AI safety people and the EAC people can publicly state, hey, we have, uh, you know, 95% agreement. We're both, we're all pro-tech. Tech as an industry is, is pro-tech. We disagree on this, you know, little issue.

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  Of course, it's of my go importance, uh, utmost importance of AI safety. Because that would signal to the rest of the world, there's, that there's, uh, that there's alignment. Whereas my concern is that both sides will be at both red and blue in a. Populist side will be anti-tech and will be sort of missing the forest from the trees when we need to actually defend tech.

• 1:25:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I share that concern and actually that might be kind of like the default state of the pendulum swing. Because I would say the neoliberal order of the last 40 years has been very much like pro-globalization, pro-many things, but definitely pro-tech, okay? And I'm seeing whatever the new political order that's replacing it to not be so favorable to tech as they previously were. And a microcosm for this is like, is crypto for me, right? It's basically like, it's not a sure thing that team red or team blue will be team crypto. It's just totally not a sure thing. Like, we have no idea where they're actually going to fall on this.

• 1:26:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it actually does, to Eric's point, does make me, as somebody who is an advocate for crypto technology, decentralization, private keys in the hands of individual, all of these things, start to skew a bit more extreme on the, like, more extreme than I otherwise would be in trying to make the case for like, why crypto is good, right? It's like, I have to do that in order to push the agenda and to contrast myself against these movements from both like, sides of politics. That would just like, shut it all down. They don't see the use case for proof-of-work mining in Bitcoin. So they'll just shut down all the mining facilities. They don't understand why people need to run a validator in their own home

• 1:26:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  or why DeFi interfaces, you know, don't require AML KYC and all of these things, right? So, let's see, what do you say to that? Like, Eric's making the case that maybe we should all band together, not necessarily on the far-extreme EAC type of case, but we should definitely make a pro-tech case. Like, or else we'll fall prey to the political parties that just don't want any of this technology, just don't care about it.

• 1:27:20Speaker 00

  So the EA tribe is often affiliated with being doomers about the technology. But I feel like the EA side is in a way a doomer on the politics, right? Where they basically believe that, you know, if we don't have this extremely rigorous defense of technology, that it's all just gonna get, you know, it's all gonna go kablooey and we're gonna get, you know, we're gonna turn into like this socialist state that we're all gonna be enslaved by Elizabeth Warren and nobody's gonna have any freedom. And like the reality, you just look right now, okay? You say, oh, the EA's are in control, or sorry, the EA's are in control, the safetyists are running the asylum. If you look right now around the world, where are the AI restrictions actually happening? Right? The answer is in the EU. That's where the most constraining stuff is happening. And then in China, right?

• 1:28:03Speaker 00

  People are saying on the EA side, they're like, oh, no, if we don't, you know, EA is so anti-tech, you know, if we let the Democrats, we have a Democratic president right now. The Democrats, if they control things, they're gonna shut down all the technology and they're gonna make it so I can't use the internet, I can't use social media, I can't use whatever. Go look at China, where they have, you know, people are worried, oh, China's gonna race ahead of us, they're gonna unlock the technology, they're the real accelerationists. Go read the AI regulations in China, right? In China, you cannot release an AI application without it being explicitly approved by the CCP. There are only 40 applications that have ever been approved by the CCP, right? You are liable in China if your large language model says something that's not true. You are liable in China, that's the law that they passed in China, okay? That's fucking insane.

• 1:28:48Speaker 00

  That's absolute, that is, okay, that is what you're up against in America. The reality is that, yes, there's a cacophony of voices. Many people saying many different things. The EA's are saying one thing, the EA's are saying one thing, the AI, you know, anti-bias people are saying some other things. And the reality, what did we actually have in the US? The answer is nothing. There is no laws, there is no regulation, there's nothing right now, right? There's an executive order that says, you have to let us know if you run a training run at least this size, that's it. That's the only regulation that we actually have. And regulation's a strong word for that, right? The reality is that there's no regulatory regime at the moment in the US. And the reason why that is, is because that cacophony of voices continues pulling things in different directions, right? I mean, we say, man, it really sucks that Gensler's doing this and, you know, the FinCEN is doing this and blah, blah, blah.

• 1:29:33Speaker 00

  Okay, what are the laws of crypto in the US? The answer is that there are none. There are no laws in the US. There's no regulatory regime. There's nothing. There's just a bunch of people fighting. And if you look at the founding fathers, the way that they described government is that they wanted that to be the case. They wanted there to be continual fighting between the different branches of government to prevent any centralized control in, for example, the president. They didn't want the president to be able to say, "Well, guess what? I'm president, so here are the laws now." Well, the laws can get shut down by judges. They can get replaced by legislators. And the reality is that that cacophony of voices keeps things in check. So anybody who's claiming, "Oh, my God, there are EAs in the government now, therefore, it's all going to go to hell and we're now all going to be

• 1:30:17Speaker 00

  talking on our Google-controlled smartphones and nobody's going to have open-source AI anymore because it's all going to get banned." They're fucking wrong. It's never happened. It's never been true because of our system of government. So that's why there's a political doomerism that I also object to, which I feel like is part of what motivates the energy in demonizing the EA type. So I think what they have to say is a very good point that deserves to be heard. But do I want EAs running the government? No. I want the government to be the way it is, which is a contest of different forces. There are people who are economically minded who have a good point. That's not being pro-culture war. It's being pro-democracy.

• 1:30:56Speaker 03

  Yes. I'm just teasing. But you're pro this productive tension, and it plays out.

• 1:31:00Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. I'm very pro-productive tension. A hundred percent.

• 1:31:05David Hoffman?

  I actually really like this productive tension framing. Kind of like as we get to the close of this conversation here, I kind of want to zoom out because I actually see the same acceleration. I know decelerationist isn't actually a tribe here, but it's like a kind of a talking point. There's accelerationist versus decelerationist debate. But it's also not just Silicon Valley. It's not just AI. It's not just crypto. Whereas these things are generally all on the accelerationist front. We're also seeing experiments going on in other technology verticals as well. Like Brian Armstrong, or, excuse me, not Brian Armstrong. Brian Johnson is trying to experiment himself into becoming a new class of humans. This is the guy who's taking any risk, or not any risk, but any sort of experiment to try and... Like add, you know, five more minutes to his life every single day, right?

• 1:31:49David Hoffman?

  Like people like Aubrey de Grey are literally trying to create like immortality. Even in the crypto space, there's like Vida Dao out there who's like trying to combine crypto and immortality to make it happen faster. And like this is, we haven't even like opened up the conversation about like gene editing, which is like not far away. Like there's other technologies out there that's really going to like, if you think AI and crypto is going to make the future weird. Well, like there's like three more technologies out there who's also going to make the future weird. And the thing is like, this has always been the case of like technology, technology just accelerates. It's always accelerated. As soon as we develop tools, we can use those tools to develop other tools. And all of a sudden, like we are an accelerationist in an accelerating state. And this is just, the only difference between like now and any other time in history is that it seems to be where we are now

• 1:32:34David Hoffman?

  versus where we are at the end of the lifetimes, might be like multiple orders of magnitude different. And that has never been true before in history. Like we've only ever had like 20%, 30% gains at most. And like usually over the span of human history, we have like 2% gains. And like for thousands of years, we actually literally had 0% gains. And we're now we're on this like parabola of innovation. And so if we're talking about this tension between governments, like stakeholders in the government, it does make sense that when you have crypto and AI and like biotech and all of these other different like sectors of technology, which are all like making monumental gains, that all of government is like, okay, everyone break. Because who else is saying that?

• 1:33:18David Hoffman?

  Who else is saying like, yo, calm down? Like that's maybe like, kind of like my commentary on, on like why I think the government will trend towards breaks, not gas. But like, maybe Eric, maybe you can like check my reasoning on this.

• 1:33:30Speaker 03

  No, I, I, I, I agree. That's part of the broader productive tension. And I, I want to bring in, you guys had this amazing episode of Vitalik where he, he identified and expanded upon his DAK philosophy. And I think that's worth noting too. And, and I think that piece had a great synthesis of the, of the, of the problem and sort of the common alignment between EA and EA and tried to develop. This sort of, you know, thesis and synthesis synthesis approach. But I, I think unfortunately, I think it's a bit too neat. I, I think it's tough to just focus on technology that are defensive. You know, things that tend to be defensive can be offensive and vice versa. You know, fire can be used for good, it can be used for, for evil.

• 1:34:13Speaker 03

  And if we're going to continue to, to develop these models, I, I don't see ways in which it can only be used for, for defensive ways. So, um, that's my commentary on, on that. And then to kind of to your, to your point, I think we are going to continue to need the AI safety people to develop, uh, you know, and, and further develop, uh, uh, our alignment capabilities. Um, and we're going to need people who are, who are pushing the brakes. It's, it's my goal in this conversation to, to rehab, uh, or, or improve EA's reputation, AI safety's reputation. But to also, um, keep it in its box. As the Seb said, we don't want them running the government. They're, they're, they're, they're not close to it yet, but you know, the regulatory regime, you know, is, is going to be up for grabs over the next few years.

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  And that's why these, these fights are, are really important, even if they only influence a small amount of people right now. They have potential to influence a large amount of people. And so I think we do need the, the right, um, combination of brakes versus gas. I would rather see it come from within the industry, from people who know what they're talking about than, uh, than outside of it, you know, prematurely. And so, um, yes, we are going to see governments come in with some brakes. Ideally, they can be informed by some of our people and some of the productive tension that we're, that we're having first.

• 1:35:29Speaker 00

  The one thing I would add to that is that, um, you know, we've talked a lot about, oh my God, what if the EAs are running things? And what if they have total control? Won't they shut it all down? The reality is a much more politically powerful cohort is not the AI safety people, but the AI bias people. Right? These people are much more influential.

• 1:35:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Eric was calling EI ethics earlier in the conversation.

• 1:35:51Speaker 00

  Yes, AI, AI, AI ethics, exactly. So these are people who are like, okay, you know, what if the models are biased? What if the models are more liberal? What if they're more Republican? What if they, you know, say things that they shouldn't be saying? Or, you know, they, they give people instructions on how to cause harm or whatever. Now, the interesting thing about AI ethics versus AI safety is that the core problems that you need to solve are actually kind of the same, which is how do you control these models? And the answer is, we don't really know. We don't have good techniques to control these models. Now, how do you control a model? Well, that's called AI alignment, which is the core problem behind AI safety, which is, okay, right now, the thing that the model is doing that you don't want is making biased representations of, you know, people in certain, you know, stereotypical careers or something.

• 1:36:34Speaker 00

  But, you know, eventually, it might be the thing you don't want is that, you know, gathering a bunch of resources or hacking people in order to, you know, make a bunch of money in order to fulfill some task that somebody who's running an AI agent wants it to do. These problems are one in the same, in a sense, right? I mean, they're, one of them is easier to solve than the other, but the core of the problem is that we don't know how to control these models. They are very difficult to control, they're very unintuitive, they're kind of like these space aliens that we've conjured up, right? People often say that large language models were discovered, not invented, in the sense that, you know, we just sort of threw more and more compute and then it's kind of like, you know, when something moves faster and faster, it turns from a liquid into a gas? In the same way, when you throw more and more compute at something, at a certain point, it becomes a large language model. And you're just like, whoa, what the fuck? What is it?

• 1:37:18Speaker 00

  This thing can now, like, talk to me and do my math homework? Like, that's really weird. And that phase transition is still very poorly understood, and I think there's gonna be a lot of political fights about it. But if both the EAX and the EAS don't get their shit together, the AI ethics people are going to win, because they have much, they're, one, they're much more persuasive, they're much more easy to understand for most people, right? Like, the whole Gemini drama had nothing to do with EAC or EA, it was all bias, right? It was all like, oh, you know, this thing fits neatly into the actual culture war, which is the east, or, sorry, the left-right culture war, which is, oh, these things are super woke and they're, you know, they won't depict any white people.

• 1:38:00Speaker 00

  And that is much more powerfully animating in, you know, among Congress, you know, we're talking about what are 70-year-olds, who are actually the people making the laws and voting on this stuff? What resonates with them? I'll tell you, it's the AI ethics stuff. None of this stuff even rates yet. So, everything that, you know, Marc Andreessen's doing and that Eliezer is doing is important, because by default, both tribes are losing.

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  And maybe this is a great place to end this idea. There's this, uh, there's a saying, you know, I'm against my brothers, but me and my brother are against my cousin. And, and right now EA is against EA, but EA and EA need to team up against AI ethics or AI bias because we can all agree that those people are, are wrong.

• 1:38:40Speaker 00

  Well, hold on, hold on. Last thing I want to say, I, I, I want to make some room for the AI bias people because like, obviously it's true that Gemini was like a horrible model. And obviously it's true that, you know, the AI models can do pedestrian bad things too. And you want to control that because way before AIs are going to become super intelligent or become so powerful, they take over the world, uh, they're going to do pedestrian harms. And you, you kind of want both, right? You want to also solve the pedestrian harms, and that's a real problem. Uh, you also want to solve the existential harms. Those, that's a, that's a potential real problem too. It's a much bigger problem. And you also want to solve, uh, AI overregulation. That's also a big problem, right? All three of these are problems that a good regulatory regime should find a way to solve. Um, and

• 1:39:23Speaker 00

  so, I mean, that, that is my very lame and narrow attempt at synthesis of these three positions, but I don't think you have to say, well, you know, these two are illegitimate and this one is legitimate. The, the answer is obviously all three of them have legitimate concerns and you want to find a way to address all three.

• 1:39:36Speaker 03

  That's too much nuance for me. I preferred my, uh,

• 1:39:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let's close this conversation out. I want to ask you just one final ending question, uh, which is just maybe summarize that the conversation, um, for, for each of you. So when faced with the question, which you surely will, Bankless Listener and then Haseeb and Eric, are you team Excel or team Dcel? Are you team EA or are you team EA? Pick a side. Uh, what's the most sensible posture to that kind of framing of, of the question to pick a side? Haseeb?

• 1:40:10Speaker 00

  So I mean, I won't surprise anyone to say that I'm on team EA. Um, but a frame that is saying I'm on team EA because I think, uh, at the margin, the world needs more of that. I think it's got enough people who are say, you know, pro tech, uh, no regulation. I want more AI products. And I think there's also enough people who are saying, hey, there's too much bias in these things and they're, they're bad for society. Uh, I think there's not enough people saying, hey, these things are really risky and we should invest more into safety.

• 1:40:36Speaker 03

  I'm also want to surprise people, I'm team accelerationist, I'm team pro tech, but I think that we should absorb some parts of EA. I think EA is beaten down, they have wounds, and we should pay for their hospital bills and bring them into our tribe and team up against the AI bias or AI ethics. Some who have some legitimate points, I will concede that, but also some points that I also very much disagree with. And I think my call out to accelerationists is to take AI safety seriously. I think they worry that if you concede that P Doom is even a concept or that there are AI safety concerns,

• 1:41:19Speaker 03

  that you sort of throw out the baby with the bathwater and you go as extreme as some of the most extreme EA people. But I think we should find a way to have more common ground with AI safety people, acknowledge that there's 95% agreement with most of them, and work on alignment, and then fight the right enemies, which as Haseeb mentioned, it's the AI ethics people, AI advice people, regardless of what you think of them, they have a lot more power on the regulatory stage, and that's where the battle is really taking shape. So I'm an accelerationist with some humanism, and I think we should extend an olive branch to our most rational and reasonable AI safety people.

• 1:41:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Nothing unites us like a common enemy. And so maybe that common enemy is the EI bias people, that people are just trying to censor all these models. Haseeb, Eric, thank you for this fantastic conversation. I think this will leave Bankless listeners with a lot to think about on this subject. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:42:13Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:42:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thanks for having me. Got to leave you guys with this, of course. I usually say crypto is risky, but we talked mostly about AI. I think AI is risky as well. This is definitely the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.