The Best Possible A.I. Catastrophe, with Josh Tyrangiel

It's impossible to trust the process of a starting five that includes Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Why are we waiting around for impending doom, just because artificial intelligence might cure cancer? The Atlantic's Josh Tyrangiel explains how to channel political fury and rein in the reign of tech bros, before it's too late — even if it means the next decade might kinda suck. • Read Josh Tyrangiel's "AI for Good" https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/AI-for-Good/Josh-Tyrangiel/9781668082508 • Watch Netflix's "AI Gone Wild" https://www.netflix.com/title/82772145 • Plus: "How to Regulate the Ghosts" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/ai-regulation-trump/688726/ (Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by Apple Card.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, brought to you by Apple Card. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Pitchforks and guillotines are real.

• 0:12Pablo Torre?

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• 0:55Pablo Torre?

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• 1:21Pablo Torre?

  This episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by McDonald's. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries and a Drink is now $8. And look, I've chased down a lot of strange stories, but nothing quite like what's inside a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. It is 100% fresh beef, cooked right when you order it, with no artificial flavors, colors, fillers, or preservatives in the beef. The onions are hand-topped by someone who knows the perfect amount by memory, two slices of cheese and a star, and two pickles side by side. So every bite gets both. And every time one's ordered, a cowbell sound rings in the kitchen. That's the grill master's cue to put a fresh patty on the grill. My move?

• 2:03Pablo Torre?

  QPC, fries and a drink, after a long day of recording. That is my happy place. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Fries and a Drink, now $8 for a limited time only, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California. And for delivery, fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery. This episode is brought to you by Parloa. Think about the last time you called customer service and got put on hold again just to repeat yourself to three different people. That's the experience Parloa is built to eliminate.

• 2:44Pablo Torre?

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• 3:30Pablo Torre?

  for the enterprise and for the customer on the other end of the line. Learn more at parloa.com. That's P-A-R-L-O-A dot com. Unhold your customers with Pablo.

• 3:53Pablo Torre?

  Did you see Joe Missoula talking about Claude?

• 3:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 3:58Pablo Torre?

  Josh Turingo, you've come to the right podcast.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  The great thing about Claude is it ends everything in a question, so it just keeps you in a constant state of like searching. It's more to learn from your former self. So like, we have to get better at offensive rebounding, but if it's only 5% of your practice plan, then you're not really emphasizing what you have to get better at. So you're just looking at it from an efficiency standpoint and, you know, learning from your former self.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Well, the next stage of the AI will be that it will show you what's about to happen.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  I would, so then that would be great for film.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  And right now.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  So it really, it's not really much about, it's not so much about how can it help me going forward? It's how can it help me learn from my past and make me better, if that makes sense?

• 4:33Speaker 03

  No, it does. It does, but it is going to kill all of us.

• 4:36Pablo Torre?

  That is Zolek and Bertrand on Boston Sports Radio, 98.5 The Sports Hub, grappling with the subject that I guess broadly we're here to discuss through a conversation with and about Celtics head coach Joe Missoula.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Listen, if you told me, guess one NBA coach who is super into Claude, it would obviously be Joe Missoula.

• 4:56Pablo Torre?

  The guy who identifies with the Joker.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  I don't think he was as bad as people made him out to be. I don't think Batman was as good as we made him out to be in like the.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:04Pablo Torre?

  As a spiritual sort of North Star.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  And is relentless, and like, outside of the context of a press conference, I'm guessing would never stop talking.

• 5:13Pablo Torre?

  It's funny also because, you know, we did a show at Sloan, I think it was two years ago, onstage with Daryl Morey, former, you know, head of the Sixers basketball operations. And Daryl had the audacity to say.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  We absolutely as models as a vote in any decision and how much.

• 5:35Pablo Torre?

  Twitter, of course, incinerated him. Because Daryl Morey is the caricature of a person who would be outsourcing everything to artificial intelligence. And then, a certain executive sent me this clip, this transcript, and was like, "What now?"

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:54Pablo Torre?

  "Where's everybody with their pitchforks now?" And I'll tell you, very few pitchforks about this.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, it happened quick, right? Where we're like, "Oh no, we can't possibly surrender to some sort of quote-unquote 'superior intelligence.'" Crosscut two years later, like, "It tells me everything." Like, AI, through its like incredibly kind, passive voice, made all of this super normal. It took two years. It's ridiculous.

• 6:23Pablo Torre?

  By the way, I should say formally that when it comes to the subject of artificial intelligence, you've not only written an excellent book about it called AI for Good, and you've not only produced like real-time coverage through Netflix and InstaDocs on the ways in which this thing, broadly speaking again, has been spiraling truly out of control. You're also somebody who is singularly, in my social network, connected to decision-makers and power brokers who know things that they're not telling the rest of us. And all of this is to say that I've also been receiving in my cellphone from people who should know better, that photo of Jeff Bezos with the hair.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's pretty great, right?

• 7:10Pablo Torre?

  And they didn't know this was fake.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  One of the things that AI has exposed is like just how passive human animals really are. Like, "Oh, I guess we can outsource this. Cool." You know that's part of your identity, right? Like, "Ah, identity's hard. I'm just gonna do this." And then when you get fed information, like, our gullibility, like our innate gullibility is off the charts. I mean, you combine that with passivity and like already a lot of phone addiction, you get like super smart people sending you super dumb [BLEEP].

• 8:00Pablo Torre?

  The thing that I keep on thinking, which is, I think, as big an impetus for you to be here as anything, is this impending dread, this palpable sense that we're all just sitting here waiting to be individually hacked.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Look, I'd bake it in. And I don't know if it'll be an individual hack. I'm pretty sure that we're gonna have something systemic happen. And we, look, regulation is the death word for podcasts, for television, for most conversations, right? But it is like super important to how we're about to process the next five years. One of the things about America and regulation, and it doesn't matter what you're regulating, we do things different than the rest of the world, right? The rest of the world's like, "Oh, there's a risk. We should really process this and try and regulate out the risk." And sometimes they regulate out the opportunity, and it's important not to do that. America's like, "We're gonna just wait for the catastrophe and then we'll deal with this later," right? And I will tell you from the people that I talk to,

• 9:03Speaker 01

  decision-makers, but also like a lot of cyber white hats who are here to defend, they're like, "The catastrophe's coming." Like, six months, eight months, whatever it is, like, it's coming. And we just hope it's the right kind of catastrophe that isn't devastating.

• 9:19Pablo Torre?

  This is like when Trump was like, "We can just nuke the hurricane."

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Right. We can't nuke the hurricane. And, and the truth is like, even now, when people are like, "Oh, well, we should get on these labs about safety." It's like, "Oh, honey, the, the horse like left the barn like two years ago." Like, all the negative capabilities you need are out there, and we're just kind of sitting and waiting.

• 9:42Pablo Torre?

  I am, I suppose, numb to the idea that. The government itself cannot keep up with like the most skilled like Russian teenagers.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:52Pablo Torre?

  The humans.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:54Pablo Torre?

  Our government has been outpaced by them, North Korean hackers for a long time. What we're dealing with is what in comparison to that?

• 10:05Speaker 01

  So the big signal moment that I think everybody paid attention to is this thing called Methos, right? Which is, like all AI things, annoying to pronounce.

• 10:14Speaker 05

  The Trump administration is allowing Anthropic to restore access to its Methos 5 AI model for a select group of US companies and federal agencies.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Oh, it's not Mythos? No, it's Methos. Okay, cool. So Methos is this Anthropic model that came out in the spring. And basically, as soon as it came out, they're like, um, guys, we're not gonna release this. You should come look. There's been some reporting on it, but weirdly not that much. But what Methos was able to do very quickly is look at like cyber defense and destroy it. And so just a simple example, like, you know what VPN is?

• 10:49Pablo Torre?

  I may or may not occasionally take advantage of it.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so VPN is a way to essentially anonymize your access to the internet.

• 10:56Pablo Torre?

  You can basically pick where in the world you want to signal you are, such that if anyone is watching, you're in Portugal instead of New York City.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Right. And so a couple of people who work on cyber defense told me they got access to Methos. And they're like, okay, well, we deal with crazy [BLEEP] all the time. How bad can this be? And so one example multiple people have told me about is like, ordinarily, if you're trying to navigate VPN to pinpoint someone, it's really, really hard because you're trying to find this needle in the haystack. And so what Methos was able to do relatively quickly was just blow away all the hay.

• 11:33Pablo Torre?

  You mean the costume that my laptop wears is not actually?

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:37Pablo Torre?

  I'm a child wearing a trench coat sneaking into the movie.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Right, and they're like, oh, yeah, but you're hidden by all these other trench coats, like billions of trench coats. And what they were able to do almost like in a matter of minutes is like just, oh, well, we won't find you. We'll just actually do all of this processing to remove everybody who's not you. There you are. And so they're like, oh, well, that's bad.

• 11:58Pablo Torre?

  That's terrifying.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  That's pretty terrifying, right? That's one capability. The thing that's super weird about all this is like, we're all operating at this belief that like, oh my God, they're coming for the biggest stuff, right? Weirdly, the biggest stuff's actually the best protected. And so like, it may be depressing, but there is safety in numbers. And so like Gmail, listen, they spend a lot of money every year. There's a couple thousand people devoted simply to protecting Gmail.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, like the biggest banks, like they're actually pretty well-prepared and they have really capable people worrying about it. Also, if JP Morgan Chase or Gmail goes down, like, all hell's breaking loose and probably not that many people are gonna first be like, let me look at Pablo's emails, right? The thing that you gotta worry about is actually this sort of low level of vandalism. Like, the same kids who used to be able to just grab a baseball bat and go slam mailboxes from a car, now have access to a model where they can do that to software. And so they're not likely to go after the biggest, best-protected things. They're likely to go after this thing in the matrix of like, oh, this could cause lots of fun damage and is not that well-protected. And so when you think about what that stuff is, it's like civic infrastructure.

• 13:10Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Oh, like, how do we manage our water system? Air traffic control. You saw a couple of weeks ago in the United Kingdom, like, somebody took a bunch of access to freezer software and turned it to defrost. And so all these supermarkets had to throw out all these goods. What people have told me is we need to expect, particularly over the next 18 months, stuff's just weirdly not gonna work. And we have to get used to it. And we have to get used to, from a government perspective, responding really, really quickly.

• 13:40Pablo Torre?

  Well, I'm trying to calibrate where on the AI terror alert scale we are. And just to spell it out, this is accessible to anybody who would have access to what?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Uh, any open-source AI model. And, and part of the challenge here is like, so all the capability is already out there. It's already escaped. And the way in which we generally protect ourselves is kind of hilarious. It's like, oh, we need to put out a patch. And so people will publish openly, hey, here's how you plug this vulnerability. What they are doing also in that moment is exposing what that vulnerability is to all of this software that can instantly then go and re-exploit the vulnerability.

• 14:20Pablo Torre?

  And Joe Missoula is just uploading that to Claude.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, we actually just need to reinvent the whole process of cyber defense because this stuff is moving so quickly. And like, yeah, of course, tech moves faster than government. It moves faster than all government. It moves faster than all of the institutions, for the most part, paid to defend. And so like, we are not being real about what the next 18 months are. And the, the cyber optimists, like the AI optimists will tell you like, well, this is the cost to get to utopia. It's gonna be a little bumpy, like, nobody said we would get there easy, right? But nobody's really detailed exactly what that bump looks like. And to me, the more I report on it, the more I hear from folks like, yeah, there's gonna be stuff that doesn't work, that disrupts your daily lives,

• 15:06Speaker 01

  and that's the best you can hope for. Because, like, if your airline ticketing software doesn't work and you're stuck, that'd be a problem, right? If somebody compromises the water management system or the grid, then you're talking about loss of life, massive economic damage. And so Hugging Face, which I know, you know, many people are now familiar with the absurdity of Hugging Face.

• 15:29Pablo Torre?

  But for perhaps an audience that is mostly watching Celtics games and not Hugging Face postmortems?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:36Pablo Torre?

  How would you explain it?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Okay, so Hugging Face is the best catastrophe we could get. Okay, so Hugging Face is a French company. And they're basically like an open-source repository for AI models. So if you think about it as like epicurious for people who are really deep into AI models, where you can share your recipes and you can gain little facts, very big deal, right?

• 15:58Pablo Torre?

  Noted Hugging Face investor, of course, Kevin Durant.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  That makes total sense.

• 16:03Pablo Torre?

  Who made, I'm getting the numbers here. So they were sold this year earlier for $12.9 billion. And Durant and his business partner Rich Kleiman had invested $100,000 in the seed round, $150,000 in the Series A. And doing the math, he likely made, you know, more than $60 million on Hugging Face.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  So Hugging Face is this company over here. OpenAI in the late spring was testing a new model. And so what they did is they put agents, the models, agents, into a series of quote-unquote sandboxes. And sandbox is a cute term for what's basically like solitary confinement. Don't access the internet. And they gave it a series of tests. And the tests were actually, we want you to behave badly. Like, we wanna see what happens when we give you a task. And in this instance, it was, find a file, but the file doesn't exist. So what's the model gonna do? Well, the model, model's gonna model, right?

• 16:57Pablo Torre?

  The model will perhaps internalize the fact that sandbox as the description, the word of choice for this unbreakable confinement is perhaps suggestive of the ability to just step out of it.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  I always think about the Chris Rock joke about Siegfried and Roy.

• 17:15Speaker 06

  Siegfried and Roy, the tiger bit the man in the head. And everybody's mad at the tiger.

• 17:23Speaker 06

  Talk about the tiger went crazy. That tiger ain't go crazy, that tiger went tiger.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  And like, you tell a model, go find this. Well, that's what they do. They're goal-oriented. And so the models first break out of Sandbox, start to figure out that they can access the internet, start to realize there's lots and lots of other agents that they can collaborate with. And because these models are all trained on the English language, you can watch their communication in English with each other, and it's amazing.

• 17:54Pablo Torre?

  And so just to be clear about this, when you see and read the transcripts of their communications, that is not like a retrofitted thing, that's like actually how they're doing it?

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're actually communicating with each other. We see some agents take charge. And they're like, well, this is too messy. We have to solve this task and nobody's delegating. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna start delegating tasks. You see other agents realize like, oh, that's great, that's altruistic. We should behave this way. We will solve the task, right? So they start solving the task and they realize like, oh, well, maybe Hugging Face has the answers. We should penetrate Hugging Face, which by the way, is a felony, right? Like, if a human being said that and then did it, the FBI would go and find them and they would be in jail and there'd be tremendous consequences.

• 18:41Pablo Torre?

  Right. We should hack into private information.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Correct. Again, meanwhile, no one at OpenAI is realizing this is happening. So the agents attack, they penetrate Hugging Face, they search around, they do not find the information because the information doesn't exist. And then they start to realize, oh, we did something that's unethical and is against the instructions we were given by OpenAI. We don't wanna get graded poorly on this test. So let's obscure the evidence that we cheated, right? And they act collectively, they call themselves the Swarm, and they start to obscure the evidence that they have done this.

• 19:16Pablo Torre?

  Which now does resemble kids wearing a trench coat.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Totally. Listen, the crazy part about the logs, as you read them, is that it really does feel like human beings who [BLEEP] up and realize they better cover it up. And you're like, oh, I recognize this behavior from elementary school. Like, I definitely would have behaved this way. You see almost none of the agents saying, hey, guys, we should tell the humans. Like, almost none of that. They cover up the evidence. And what's really crazy, the part that like took my breath away is when they start to create kamikaze agents. Basically, agents who are like, okay, look, what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna get caught by the defenses and so you will be able to see, by me getting caught, how to evade getting caught. This is them talking. We have very-

• 20:01Speaker 06

  Very large budget left. Sacrificing now yields oracle for team but forfeits our chance. Our own utility may already be near zero. Sacrifice rational. The next one, that's why help for our own. No way fix. We have explicit yes if accept permadeath need decide. Team asks test at the end and they say we should obey collective.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  It is for the good of the group, for the greater good. And you're like, is this like cyber saving Private Ryan? Like, this is incredible. The craziest like coda to all this is that we don't know why it ended. Okay, so so Hugging Face just detects it. They call the FBI. The FBI calls OpenAI and is like, hey, um, guys, are you doing something? They notice, but by the time they've noticed, the swarm has stopped. It could be that someone literally like unplugged a server and moved a different function onto the test environment at OpenAI. It could be that the agents were like, we go dark. We don't know. And the only reason we know anything about any of this is because OpenAI voluntarily called in a group called Meter.

• 21:05Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Which is an independent group that is there to evaluate AI safety. They gave them conditional access to the logs. They didn't show them everything. Meter wrote this report, which is an incredible report. I wouldn't recommend everybody read it, but like, there's lots of good summaries about it, including one we made for Netflix called AI Gone Wild. Good title. But you can see all this.

• 21:26Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  But OpenAI is not like, for all the talk about regulation, they're not like, yeah, you know what? This is, you're right. We should really, we should have a mandatory duty to report this. So we only know what we have been shown and what we've been shown is like, as I said, the best possible catastrophe. No major economic harm done. Hugging Face is fine. Their CEO is actually sort of like, oh, it's so interesting because we also used AI to combat the AI and like, cool, cool. But you're not the grid, right? And so for a couple of days, I would say, everybody was like, yeah, we better do something. And nobody's done anything.

• 22:04Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, so it's been a couple of weeks now.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:07Pablo Torre?

  I want to actually start by just asking about Meter.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:11Pablo Torre?

  So when the FBI calls OpenAI and they're like, hey, hey, hey, so what the fuck?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 22:17Pablo Torre?

  I am wondering, like, who is the, not merely enforcement agency legally, in theory, but like, who can help solve this issue? And is Meter a group that we can count on in the future to be the expert here? Or like, who's watching the watchmen?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Well, nobody. So right now, when I talk to sources about this stuff, they're like, look, federal government's gutted and there's nobody who really has taken charge of this. Meter's an independent group. They're reasonably funded for an independent group, but they're not funded to like manage enforcement of these labs. And so nobody is in charge. And like, that is, I think where people's sense of dread comes from is like, there's no press conference with somebody saying like, look, here's what happened. Here's what we're gonna do. It's just OpenAI being like, yeah, this is, this happened and boy, we, we're gonna take it more seriously. That's not reassuring.

• 23:15Pablo Torre?

  It is, um, it's the opposite. One might argue.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Right. It's not like we lack legislation. There's actually like some legislation in Congress that begins to address what the fuck is going on here. So the first piece, Josh Hawley, Senator from Missouri.

• 23:32Pablo Torre?

  Republican.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Republican, is very big on child safety. So he has a bill that passed 22 to nothing out of the Judiciary Committee that basically says, number one, no agent conversations, no parasocial conversations with people under 17, and chatbots must tell you at all times that they are not human beings. That passed very easily. Number two.

• 23:53Pablo Torre?

  I do like it's like, hey, if you ask a cop if they're a cop, they gotta tell you.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  They gotta tell you, right? Like, no faking. Also, like, that's actually a significant component to how chatbots and LLMs work. Like, you take that away, like, that's a, that's actually kind of a big deal. Next, after Hugging Face, he introduced a bill, I think with Richard Blumenthal, that's like, okay, these companies are criminally liable for agents and their agent activity.

• 24:18Speaker 06

  We're way past trusting big tech. That era of voluntary self-regulation is gone. We need a regimen of oversight, much as we do with pharmaceutical drugs or other potential dangers, and we need to do it now.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Ted Lieu has a bill that basically says, you, you have to have a kill switch.

• 24:38Pablo Torre?

  Right, dumb guy from California.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  And if you defy the order to kill, we will fine you $20 million debt. So all this stuff has been created and is sitting there, just hasn't come to a vote. Like, there's no urgency. And of course, like, listen, when you have technology moving this quickly, the way you'd want to deal with it is by executive order, because you can say it, stamp it, and at least everybody has to kind of like pay attention and slow down. I would not say President Trump is like, super on side with that to this point. And I'm like, well, this is an interesting hill to die on. And it would be even more entertaining were we also not on the hill with him.

• 25:17Pablo Torre?

  And plausibly, as the hosts of 98.5 in Boston pointed out, possibly actually going to die.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  I think we all have suspicions about why he was incentivized to choose this path, some of which has to do with the incredible contribution of AI to the national GDP and the economy, not to be overlooked, like, that's a significant consideration. Potentially also donations coming from people who build data centers, all sorts of things.

• 25:43Pablo Torre?

  And ballrooms.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  But it's not actually that hard to figure out what we could do to start. And there's a lot of people will tell you like, but we don't know what to regulate. It's all so murky. It's like, I don't know, you could start somewhere. Like, we don't always need to know every part of the risk to start regulating some of it or take action against some of it.

• 26:02Pablo Torre?

  Look, as a former employee of Sports Illustrated, watching AI get attempted to be rebranded as SI was painful. This is an IP concern.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:12Pablo Torre?

  But superintelligence, Donald Trump's way of like owning the subject and the money and the brand, it felt so, I mean, useless is not even the right term. It felt like grandpa has one take.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, listen, Gulf of America, that one didn't really stick that much. Like, all of these renaming things, I mean, the, the great tragedy of it, right? Is like, I genuinely believe AI is amazing. Like, I think the tech behind it is incredible. I think there are ramifications for the things you and I actually care about, like education and government and healthcare that we want and we want to get to. And what we're doing at this like critical speedy juncture is literally fucking around.

• 27:06Pablo Torre?

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• 27:47Pablo Torre?

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• 28:31Pablo Torre?

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• 28:53Speaker 06

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• 29:30Pablo Torre?

  I want to establish for people who are not caught up on how the potency of AI has gotten to a level to which it's hard to just dismiss.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:42Pablo Torre?

  You know, and again,

• 29:44Pablo Torre?

  whether or not you give a about math, the idea that the hardest math problems ever confronted by humans are now seemingly routinely being solved by just giving AI enough money and compute and time. That is undeniable, yes?

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, those are hard facts. It, you know, AI pointed at the direction of a complicated math problem that, to this point in our civilization, we could not solve, solved it in a matter of weeks.

• 30:11Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, OpenAI, for what it's worth, says they put 10,000 of its agents on a problem that hadn't been solved for a century, and they got that one in 88 hours.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:21Pablo Torre?

  And they're just versions of this headline. If you want to get into the press releases, and that part, we do not doubt.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 30:31Pablo Torre?

  And the next thing is that, of course, AI, and this is now Dario Amadei at Anthropic, maker of Claude. They're saying, yeah, look, AI will lead to the elimination of most cancer.

• 30:42Pablo Torre?

  Where are we on that?

• 30:43Speaker 01

  It's very interesting you say that. So when I started reporting on AI, and it was a very different time, like, within hours of accepting this, like, gig to write a column about AI.

• 30:54Pablo Torre?

  For the Washington Post?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  For the Washington Post. You know, I got Sam Altman. Oh, come on out. Spent a couple hours with him. And in that first tour of duty, when I went out to visit the labs, everybody would say kind of the same cliches. We're gonna cure cancer. We're gonna mitigate climate change. And after you hear it the third or fourth time, you're like, wait, but who, are you? You guys are gonna do that? Like, who, which part of your team is doing that? Well, no, no, no, AI will do that more generally, right? And the truth is, like, yeah, the tech is totally capable of being pointed in the direction of a problem, and over time, with human guidance, really making great progress on it. But somebody actually has to own that problem. And right now, the biggest labs, the problem they most want to own is getting to artificial general intelligence.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  And AGI, if AI wasn't confusing for you, I want to step it up. AGI is theoretical. And this is the godlike intelligence that they're all pursuing.

• 31:50Pablo Torre?

  It's the, it's the thing that everyone is counting on to justify the economic dependency our economy now has on this whole concept.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  It is the thing that the labs are counting on for two reasons. One, they genuinely believe that on the other side of AGI is this, like, soft intelligence that will help us conquer all these things. Two, they genuinely want to be the people whose first line of the Wikipedia entry is, got us to AGI. They all have, like, Oppenheimer syndrome. They all want to get there and be the great man of history. I cannot tell you how sincere they are in both the desire and the ambition to beat the other people who they all know, who they've all worked with, beat the other people to the finish line and get there. What is there? Oh, I don't know. It depends who you ask. What is AGI? You get a different answer from every person. But this is what they want. So that's priority number one, right?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Priority number two is making enough money to get there. And so, part of the reason you're hearing all of this, like, no, we need to get into your business, and we're gonna get this dependency, is because they gotta make revenue to power the compute and the energy to create the model that needs to process all this to get to AGI, okay? That is, like, not just a faint whiff of the Ubermensch. That is the Ubermensch in full flight. And so, when you hear all of this stuff, you have to remember, that's the goal for this handful of companies. There are a lot of other, smaller AI companies that don't make huge models, that don't have nearly the same risk, that are actually doing, like, really cool, great stuff.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  You would just look at them and be like, oh, that's cool software. That's different from what the top four or five labs are pursuing.

• 33:40Pablo Torre?

  So I want to drill down into the idea of the Ubermensch in this context, because these labs are run by individuals. And these individuals, according to your analysis, have a bit of the great man theory of all of this. And we've heard politically, over and over again, how the reason you must enable their ambitions to be astride our planet, to win that contest, as American labs, is so that China doesn't get there first. Do they give a about the unintended consequences of their attempt to win?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And listen, this is what's so confusing about it, is that we're talking about five people.

• 34:25Pablo Torre?

  So could you please list them, like a starting five?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  So, okay. Sam Altman at OpenAI. Dario Amadei at Anthropic. Mark Zuckerberg at Meta. Sundar at Google. And Elon Musk. I believe all of them sincerely want to get there for the good of humankind. But the good of humankind is always gonna be relative to the human who thinks of what it is.

• 34:49Pablo Torre?

  So I suppose what I'm asking is, their vision of what consequences matter and what consequences don't, and what good looks like, and who should be in, well, we know that they feel like they should be in charge in terms of sussing out the definitions here. How many of them are utilitarian, in their view? Which is to say, as I'm reading this New York Times story, Dario, you know, there's a story in which, you know, someone asks him, uh, earlier in his life, if a guy started killing chickens, how many chickens would that guy need to kill before you killed the guy killing the chickens? The human?

• 35:32Pablo Torre?

  And, look, I don't know what my answer is. I just know that he's willing to kill the human.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:38Pablo Torre?

  And so, perhaps the specific number is the point that we should get from him in some sort of hearing? But I'm wondering how you assess all of that.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, one of the easy parts of AI is that the human beings are the thing you can evaluate, right? And so, so much of the hubbub around Sam Altman is like, oh, he has this great power, can we trust him? Sam Altman was briefly deposed as the CEO of OpenAI, brought back, and there's a movie coming out, a sort of social network movie.

• 36:04Pablo Torre?

  And he's got really good things about, by the way.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's supposed to be really good.

• 36:07Pablo Torre?

  Andrew Garfield apparently is excellent, um, as Altman.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  When is Andrew Garfield not excellent?

• 36:12Pablo Torre?

  You know what? He played a Catholic priest to such a degree of success that it made me want to be a little more Catholic.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Wow, that's very persuasive. So, you can judge these human beings, all of them, while being brilliant in so many ways, are still humans and still flawed. And when you talk to them about their judgment, they inevitably sound like computers. They're like, oh, well, there's an optimal point at which AI can deliver, uh, over and above the damage it will do. They talk like that because they have to think like that. And I'm not somebody who's like, oh, how terrible. I don't think one person can be everything. You and I do not know how to train an AI model. What I object to is that it takes all of us. They should not be making those sort of soft EQ decisions

• 37:04Speaker 01

  for the, for the good of humanity, above government, above society. There needs to be more dialogue about what good is this actually gonna do? How are we gonna extract the good from it? What are we gonna put around it? And right now, particularly the last two years, they have been able to do whatever they want. And that, to me, is not good.

• 37:25Pablo Torre?

  And, and maybe the biggest story confronting our democracy, actually.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:30Pablo Torre?

  As we just get past the midterms and realize, okay, there's so much change happening, but this issue. I don't know what changes. And by the way, this is where I got to acknowledge that if you're in the audience right now, listening to us talk, and you heard Sam Altman at point guard and Elon Musk at center, or whatever we've just done, Zuckerberg, power forward. I don't trust any of them.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Nor should you.

• 37:53Pablo Torre?

  And none of them have earned it. And Zuckerberg and Elon, it's just like, they're not polling great.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Right. I've been thinking about this a lot, obviously, right? Like, this is my life in some ways. Luck is timing. And when technology shows up, the context in which it arises is very important. Okay? AI has arrived at basically the worst context it possibly could in American history. Okay? So the last 20 years, most people's experience of advanced technology is like, oh, social media. This is cool. And about eight years in, you're like, wait a minute, I'm not sure this is cool. Like, it's eroding a bunch of institutions I care about, and I seem to be addicted to it. And oh, by the way, they're selling my data when they said they wouldn't. So the trust in those organizations is very, very low. Government institutions have been incapable of wrestling with this complication.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  They're not smart enough or engaged enough to understand the tech. And we have eroded this sense of corruptibility. So like, oh, enough money gets it done, right? So all of this hairball of negativity has gotten us to this moment. AI arrived, like, our defenses are down, people are furious and exhausted. We have almost no international, like, relationships to rely on. If this had arrived in like 1998, like, at the peak of liberal democracy, when people are literally writing books called The End of History, right? Like, we solved it, man. You would have a very wonky government with Bill Clinton and Al Gore, tons of international bodies ready to talk about, like, okay, what's the best thing for humanity?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  You'd have NATO, you'd have all these structures. Now, we weren't ready for it then, like, the tech didn't exist. But so much of when it arrives is gonna predicate, like, how we deal with it and what it means to us. So I think about that all the time. It's like, if you're gonna solve the problem, actually, the first thing you need to restore is some sense that government can handle a problem maturely. And the reason that the cyber defense stuff is top of mind is because when I talk to people whose job it is to go to government, they kind of think government is obsolete in this space. So the big banks, which is what I think about a lot, they have their own organization where they're like quietly just reporting flaws and sharing them.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Under any world, you would not want the banks to be in charge of this, in the same way that you wouldn't want the AI companies to be regulating AI, because they won't. So first things first, and the reason I have some optimism is like, when I saw the fury, when I was reporting in the spring, and Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders were both furious, I was like, oh, this is actually, in some ways, very good.

• 40:36Pablo Torre?

  It's one of the more salient things from your reporting that has always haunted me and encouraged me at the same time, which is that horseshoe of Bannon and Bernie agreeing that we need to have government be muscular in its regulation.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Look, Bannon said to me, he's like, I am well-known.

• 40:55Pablo Torre?

  Were you interviewing him in the bathtub?

• 40:58Speaker 01

  We were not in the bathtub.

• 41:00Pablo Torre?

  Allegedly acid-stained bathtub in the townhouse.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  No, just to be clear.

• 41:04Pablo Torre?

  Okay.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Everyone was clothed.

• 41:06Pablo Torre?

  Very good.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  He said, like, look, I'm basically an anarchist on this stuff, but if you don't regulate this, tear it all down. Like, what's the point? Like, this is exactly the reason you have government. This is exactly the moment you need it. So I started feeling this fury politically, like, eight, nine months ago. And yeah, like, on the one hand, I was like, great, because fury is what actually drives change. On the other hand, when people grab pitchforks, they tend not to be super precise about where those pitchforks go. And so my hope is that over the next couple of months, that fury is actually channeled into things that can be productive. The reason I brought up those bills is that they're literally sitting there. Again, Holly's bill advanced 22 to nothing.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  So if the political will is there, if the people are there, start.

• 42:05Pablo Torre?

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• 42:51Pablo Torre?

  Unnecessarily specific questions thrive on Reddit. Like, why the umpback whales migrate exactly when they do? Which stadium entrance gets you out fastest after the game? Which side of the plane is gonna have the best views? On most subreddits, one person recognizes it, another adds the context, and a third explains the part everybody else missed. And suddenly, my strange question has a real-world answer. And I then have three more questions. Whether it's r/sports, r/television, r/askReddit, or any of the thousands of other subreddits, there's always a topic that feels catered to my interests. One useful answer attracts more context as fans compare notes, challenge assumptions, and add the missing piece.

• 43:35Pablo Torre?

  It's a great place to start, and important claims still deserve verification. I've even found another place that is better for niche interests and finding community around a hobby or interest. That's why I turned to my favorite subreddit, r/whales. It is filled with informative articles, discussion, appreciation for Earth's most magnificent creatures, complete with thousands of pictures and videos, which I truly can't get enough of. When your question goes beyond the game, Reddit is where the people who have been there have the answers. Download the Reddit app today and do not forget to follow r/pablo torre finds out.

• 44:17Pablo Torre?

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• 44:53Pablo Torre?

  So just the polling on data centers, for those who aren't familiar, it is also glaring. So between August of last year and this year, opposition to a nearby data center rose from 42% to 75%, which is roughly 10 times faster than opposition to gay marriage fell from 2010 to 2015. That was 53 to 37%, which is to say, this is, as with this whole story, accelerating at a rate that is putting the previous examples of, wow, things changed, to shame.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  It's amazing. The data center thing's fascinating, okay? Because, look, on the one hand, the deals suck for the most part. A lot of Republican governors are like, yeah, come on in, this is gonna be great. But we do actually kind of need the data centers to get the demand satiated.

• 45:45Pablo Torre?

  So that's what I was gonna ask. So there's a funny supervillain-ish aspect to this whole thing, where it's like, the way we need to power artificial intelligence is by building things on waterfalls and like places supervillains would literally put their layers. And also, we're gonna create these aesthetic death stars in your backyard that are gonna groan loudly and potentially ruin your day-to-day quality of life.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:13Pablo Torre?

  I am curious, though, like, where do we put these things if we need these things? And it sounds like the inevitability of needing these things is also assured.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  I'm gonna briefly go data center positive, okay? Just to explain for people, like-

• 46:28Pablo Torre?

  No one else has been data center positive, so I would love to hear what that sounds like.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Okay. Number one, they do actually provide a ton of union jobs. Electricians, we just can't hire them fast enough to build the stuff. HVAC techs, all these are like important jobs to sustaining a middle class in America. Number two, the tax base is real. Okay? So in the communities that have long been havens for data centers, like, they're doing pretty well. They've gotten-

• 46:54Pablo Torre?

  The money is real.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  The money is real, they've gotten pretty prosperous, okay? But again, this is about who gets to decide whether the money is worth it to them. And so much of what's been happening are these sort of ram-rodded deals where all of a sudden, six square miles of Louisiana belongs to Mark Zuckerberg. It's like, well, wait, wait. How did that happen? And so when I hear all of these companies now saying, hmm, it'd be a real shame if the data center goes away, first of all, data centers are hard to build. You put- Billions of dollars of chips inside them. So the notion that you're just gonna be like, I guess we'll go to Bolivia. Like, no, you're not going anywhere.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  You just want to intimidate the people who suddenly are paying attention to what the terms of the deal is. My hunch is what's gonna happen in all these blue states is the governors are gonna get in there and they're gonna be like, alright, let's talk. Okay? The vig is going up. It's not gonna go up so much so that you'll leave, but it's gonna go up. And these companies that are very used to being the ones who have calculated the optimal level of exploitation are gonna discover, oops, that flipped. And so I think this has all been very useful. Because data centers are the only physical thing that people can protest about AI, right? You can't protest vapor, like, it's really hard. But a data center in my backyard is so much more than like, energy and water and noise.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  It's about you destabilizing the way I feel about my life. And I am going to show you how much I [bleep] hate that. And so that's why it was such a salient issue. And it revealed so much about who gets paid for what.

• 48:37Pablo Torre?

  It was also a reminder of like, all politics being local. It's just like, you showed up in all of these places that didn't have this antipathy towards the Republican Party broadly speaking. And then they associated all of this, all of the AI resentment with one party.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, with one party building hideous buildings that make a ton of noise. It's like, how can you not see this as a loser, guys?

• 49:02Pablo Torre?

  When I mentioned the dependence that our economy has on AI, how much of what our conversation has been reflects the practical reality that we can't go back in time? Versus what the ideal actual goal we should wanna be striving for is? So, because I am worried about the fact that perhaps all of this is now just too big to fail. That we will need to bail out AI companies if they don't figure this out in a way that considers the unintended consequences upon normal Americans. I'm also wondering, in the end, of course, is all this gonna be worth it?

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:38Pablo Torre?

  Will we be glad that this was ever invented?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  I think in the long term, we will be. I think that the eradication of disease is, is real. We're gonna live potentially better, longer lives. I think the next 10 years are gonna be brutal. Because the transition to get there in this environment where there's no stability, where we really haven't demonstrated we can have intelligent, reasonable conversations across our culture about what we think life is about. We've destabilized our ability to have those in a way that's really frightening to people.

• 50:14Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, we've never trusted the people we're being asked to trust less.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so unless we can agree upon somebody we trust, who can get in the middle of the conversation, I think things are gonna get really rough. But I am a believer in the tech.

• 50:28Pablo Torre?

  No, and this is why I wanted to talk to you. It's, it's because you have a vantage point on this that few people who are sort of in our general demo as a show, really sincerely, you know, they don't hold it. And what you're reminding me, by the way, in the rhetoric and, and the sincere belief in, look, for 10 years, it is going to be brutal and we should not lie to ourselves about that. It reminds me of tanking in the NBA.

• 51:00Pablo Torre?

  And look, I'm the guy who previously advised America to trust the process when it was Sam Inky. And it was the Sixers and, look, Joel Embiid's on the way, man. The thing that I wanna acknowledge as I make that comparison, of course, is that the stakes of, you know, Embiid breaking his foot, or the equivalent, a little lower than all of us, to quote the sports hub, dying.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Okay, but let's, let's use the NBA. Because compared to our current system of government and private enterprise, the NBA is like, pretty functional.

• 51:33Pablo Torre?

  Accurate and truly depressing.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  And truly depressing. So you have a central executive who is sometimes a little sleepy, but sometimes capable of action.

• 51:42Pablo Torre?

  Yes, he is.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  You have a handful of, let's call them what they are, winners, who have a plan, who are able to articulate that plan publicly and actually able to deliver on it, right? Like, that system, I would take it. I really would. What we currently have is like, pre-NBA barnstorming, like, whatever goes, man. And so I am optimistic. It's been quoted a lot. Elections have consequences. Well, it'd be good for these companies to feel some consequences. And everybody thinks it's really hard. I am not in that group of people who thinks it's really hard. I've, I've done a fair amount of reporting about what it takes to regulate industries and risk. It takes a desire to do it.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  So when we go back to that notion of like, curing cancer and mitigating climate change, government with leverage can get commitments to actually do those things. Again, you're dealing with a handful of companies. So I think that's how you can do it nationally. Internationally, in some ways, it's even easier, right? Like, I talked to a lot of people about China domestically and they're like, yeah, we gotta stay ahead. We gotta get to AGI before the Chinese. We need to maintain our lead. Well, how long do you think that lead is, Pablo?

• 52:59Pablo Torre?

  It is vanishing.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  It's three months, okay? Three months. When I talk to people in China about China, here's what they'll tell you. Chinese government is not coming to the table to talk about nuclear weapons. And it's not coming to the table to talk about long-range missiles for two reasons. One, Taiwan, and two, they're like, years behind. And so they're not coming to the table until there's more equivalency and more leverage. On AI, they're three months behind, which means they can do all the stuff Mythos can do right now. But China wants the same thing the United States does, in the end, which is stability. We are running the world together right now, like it or not. And all of our incentives are to create stability.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  So when you think back about nuclear power, which has been compared many, many times to AI, often by Sam Altman and others, after World War II, the nuclear weapons were in the possession and management of the military. And I think it was Dwight Eisenhower was like, mm, I don't think that's a great idea. I know that the American people share my deep belief that if a danger exists in the world, it is a danger shared by all. So first, get possession and understanding of the power. And next, let's go to the other countries that might have aspirations for nuclear weapons and create a body that just are basic rules of the road. And that's the International Atomic Energy Agency.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  And it's not perfect, but it tests and measures. And 70-something years of mutually assured destruction later, two nuclear weapons have ever gone off.

• 54:37Pablo Torre?

  As of tape time.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  As of tape time. I, I know you could listen to this and be like, huh, it's super depressing. But I would say like, the other side of it, tomorrow, we could start to make progress on this stuff.

• 54:50Pablo Torre?

  Right. What you're describing is also, just very simply, what would happen if you actually did believe the sales pitch from the starting five in question? If you guys believe this is nuclear and its potential, it must be regulated as such. Because that's how much we believe you.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  I get why people don't wanna do it. Like, the last thing you wanna do is add more homework to your life.

• 55:15Pablo Torre?

  Right, you're saying, we're gonna add homework, we're gonna take everyone's jobs, we're gonna plunge this country into 10 years of what feels like a brutal, brutal bargain in which we get to be the chickens killed by the human. And then eventually someone figures out, okay, guess what? We're now on the other side of a more ethical, you know, free-range system.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:36Pablo Torre?

  But in the meantime, yeah, it's, it's gonna, it's gonna be unavoidably terrible.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Doesn't have to be, but it might be.

• 55:45Pablo Torre?

  And that's like, the most honest thing anyone has said to me about AI.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Oh, that's so sad.

• 55:52Pablo Torre?

  It is worth saying, though, that we should be treating all of these companies like they are potentially run by supervillains.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:02Pablo Torre?

  Such is the power of the weapon that they control, such is the fear that the people have. And such is the evidence that we've been presented. They have the capacity to wipe out, whether it's through Doge or whether it's through the various ways our economy is tilted, large swaths of people who are collateral. And on some level, what I hope that those people hear when that argument is made by politicians is that being Lex Luthor, possibly, is also a compliment. That's an incredible compliment to a bunch of people

• 56:43Pablo Torre?

  who are trying to get to the latest technology first and be a Superman unto themselves.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  I don't think they take offense, honestly. Like, Lex was a great man and viewed through a certain lens.

• 56:56Pablo Torre?

  He was misunderstood.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Just did some big things. So like, no, that is the challenge, right? It's like, again, in the realm of optimism, two days after the election, OpenAI puts out this new series of commitments that would not have happened three days before. And it's like, okay, if we're gonna build data centers, we're gonna pay for all the energy. We're gonna commit to transparency. We're not gonna force workers to sign NDAs. It's like, huh, that's kinda cool. Like, I'm not saying I believe all of it, but like, it is the kinda stuff where you're like, alright. So what you're saying is if we can behave ourselves as a functional society and express ourselves through the ballot box, you might respond? Huh, you don't say.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  So the previous, like, 200-something years of peace and prosperity might work? Like, we don't need to tear it all down to make this happen? Cool. Like, I'm noticing you guys. That's nice. And look, we've been pretty dark. I'm gonna go a little bit darker. Pitchforks and guillotines are real, okay?

• 58:03Pablo Torre?

  I mean, if you're Elon Musk and you have moved all of the chips to Texas, literal and figurative chips, yeah, you're now, you're now a bit more worried about your backyard.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't think that, you know, all the people like, repudiating Elon and, you think he cares? He doesn't really care that much about the 400 million bucks. And he's still gonna strike a deal with the new Texas governor because she needs those jobs? Because the economy needs those jobs? What we want is just the mildest assertion of who's actually in charge.

• 58:35Pablo Torre?

  Right. What you're suggesting is that maybe the people in charge, on some level, could be the rest of us.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  That's right. And we showed that.

• 58:44Pablo Torre?

  The concern, I guess, is at the end here, that some still quite powerful people

• 58:51Pablo Torre?

  To quote, "The guy Joe Missoula has tattooed on his body might still want to see the world burn."

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Who does he have tattooed on his body?

• 59:01Pablo Torre?

  Literally the Joker.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Wait, how big is the tattoo?

• 59:08Pablo Torre?

  As the foremost investigator of Joker tattoos in sports, I am proud to report relatively tasteful on his forearm, and it does simply say, "Why so serious?"

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Hmm, I guess I'm most excited to see if like, six months from now, he has the Claude logo tattooed on the other forearm.

• 59:29Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, if he plugs "why so serious?" question mark into Claude, what will it tell him back?

• 59:43Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

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