Washington Hones in on AI Safety, What Are AI Doomers Proposing | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:02John Coogan?

  What are the AI doomers actually proposing? That's the question I was trying to answer this morning for a while.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  20 year sentences.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  That's one. AI 2027 predicted that this month, you know, late in 2026, Congress would wake up. And that is in the journal. Congress is suddenly waking up to the AI doomsday threat. And so this is happening all over the place. Was it Matt Damon who was caught on TMZ being interrogated about his thoughts on AI risk? There's now protests. I believe AI 2027 predicts a 10,000 person anti-AI protest by the end of the year. I was trying to figure out how big this protest in Chapel Hill, North Carolina earlier this month was. I think it came in sub 10K, but certainly tracking to it.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  It was about 150 people at this protest in Chapel Hill, but just two ooms away from the prediction from AI 2027. So I wanted to dig into like what the actual proposal is because the joke for a while has been just like everyone, when they're pressed on this, they just say, we gotta talk about it. We gotta talk about this. And the actual proposal is super concrete in AI 2040. And it's very interesting just to hear about how they want to slow things down. So the thing that I think a lot of people online who are like, yay, an anti-AI sentiment that's going viral are going to be depressed about is that like, this is not stop AI at all. AI 2040 is like, keep the inference flowing.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  The current models are great. Also, let's keep doing capabilities research, but we're just, we just want to reach super intelligence by 2040 instead of 2028 where we're not necessarily prepared. So they want it to be highly controlled by governments, nation states, highly secured. And there's a whole bunch of very, very tactical recommendations that they make around that. So the first mechanism is an AI pause. They want to pause training. They don't want to do any more new frontier training runs or R and D experiments. And to enforce this, they're calling for, to apply inference only verification to essentially all major AI data centers.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  So anyone who has more than 10,000 H100 equivalents, roughly $100 million of equipment, and that is like pretty easy to figure out. You're just like, big building over there. Let's send the inspector inside. Oh, says Nvidia on all these chips. Count them up. There's over 10,000 of them. You gotta apply for this permit. You gotta, you gotta tell us what you're doing, right? Very easy to enforce, at least in the United States. And with an international body, you could kind of do the same thing internationally. So the whole goal, you can only inference the current models and you gotta verify your workloads with an independent auditor, probably the government. Maybe there's some sort of non-governmental organization that's doing this. You know, there's a whole bunch of different solutions that you can pull from

• 3:03John Coogan?

  across nuclear nonproliferation work that's happened in the past. Major countries, they want them to declare AI compute inventories. Tell everyone, not just your local population, but also the international community, how many, how many warheads you got? How many H100 equivalents do you have? Where are they? Everyone shares this. That's going to be a really tough sell because international agreements are really, really tough sells. It's much easier to have a ground swell of support for something that happens in America. America changes. We have a system that we don't really have the international rules to quickly implement that in a way that doesn't, doesn't allow for a lot of defect.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  They want to physically remove high bandwidth east, west networking inside of data centers. So you can't do large distributed training runs, but you can still do inference. For any new AI R and D data centers, they want entirely new facilities built from scratch with nation state level physical security and verification. But for the next run and the one after that, and the one after that, as it gets crazier, we want it in a new building built inside a Faraday cage. So you can't communicate it from the outside. We want a bunch of physical controls. It's like going to a nuclear facility, highly verified who gets in the building and when. Air gap communications.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  This is one interesting like proposal that they have that really shows how deep they thought this through. They want the R and D data center to be connected externally. If you want to communicate with it and you want to tell it what to do. Okay, train the next running or do whatever. They will have a bandwidth capped connection at one meg per second. So you can send little instructions, but if you say, send me the weights because I'm taking them somewhere else, it would take you like five years to exfiltrate it. So interesting like hardware solution to this. I, you know, how do you actually go and implement that? There's going to be a whole bunch of other things, but interesting that they're thinking about like the width of the pipe. So it'd be very obvious if you're stealing the model weights because it's like, wait,

• 5:09John Coogan?

  this one meg pipe has been at full tilt for months. What's going on here? Someone's taking the stuff out of the data center. They want if front, when frontier model weights move from an R and D facility to an inference facility, they want it to be placed on physical storage devices encrypted independently by both the US and China. So both countries have to sign off and physically escorted by representatives of both countries to the destination. It's a tall order. One's a tall order for sure.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  And they actually want frontier models to be made deliberately larger than compute optimal. So they want the weights to be 100 terabytes instead of honing them down to something that's just one terabyte that could actually be moved around a little bit easier.

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, first of all, this, I mean, a lot of this tracks with the kind of regulation that, you know, we had pushed for, you know, beginning about two years ago around podcasts, wanting podcast studios to be air gapped.

• 6:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 6:01Jordi Hays?

  Wanting, you know, Faraday cages.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  Round podcast studios.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  A locked briefcase with an SMB seven, SM7B in it. And in order to unlock it, Patrick O'Shaughnessy and David Senra both need to give you codes to independently verify that this podcast is worthy of being recorded.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  I like that one.

• 6:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  It just makes sense. High level valve they see as being like the most effective in controlling the speed of capability improvements is compute caps. So there is a world, and we're going to the Bernie Sanders thing because it's already getting like sort of twisted. But the big hammer is just chip controls and data center build out slowdown. That's the easiest thing. And I think that's like the biggest valve that they're going to be, that we're going to see twisted around to actually slow down capabilities. And so the goal is to allow models to get better mainly by adding hardware rather than inventing better algorithms, which can lead to secret projects.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  So the goal is like, okay, well, we know that this model is capable of this. So we want this much compute over here. Okay, you've done well. We're allocating more compute as opposed to this one weird trick that AI doomers hate.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:16John Coogan?

  So the goal here is not to go back in time.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  Because when you look at, I mean, anytime you have, you know, really, really hardcore government regulation and international coordination around issues like this, you're going to have a bunch of unintended consequences.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:32Jordi Hays?

  And one thing that feels obvious around this, if these policies were to be rolled out, is that you would effectively create an incentive for millions of individuals or groups globally to be in secret, like trying to find entirely new breakthroughs that are.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  And, and again, this incentive already exists, but it kind of pushes a lot of the idea that humans are just going to be like, oh, I'm not, I'm no longer going to try to create the God model because like there's this, you know, big global organization that's, that's sort of policing it.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:11Jordi Hays?

  I just.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  I mean, that's the same thing we see with nuclear nonproliferation. There's always a discussion about what countries are getting the bomb and when, and how far along are they? And wars break out over this and it, yeah, like the game's not over just because you create a framework.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  But, but ultimately GPUs and computers are.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  Much more wide, you know, infinitely more widespread than nuclear materials.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you still gotta marshal them all together. Yes, there's some weird scenario where there's a Python script that's AGI that can run on your laptop, but I think most people are convinced, at least in this crowd, that

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  Scale.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  That scale is a prerequisite. And, I mean, we were, we were joking about like, how it would be so, like, we, SSI, Ilya Sutskevsky's new NeoLab is, recently got a big cluster from Nvidia. And we were like, the most bullish thing you could do if you're this secretive NeoLab would be like, we're actually selling our compute, because we've discovered a more compute optimal way to reach AGI, and we don't need a lot of compute. But of course, even Ilya is like, it's time to scale up. I need more compute, because it seems like, even if he's taking a completely orthogonal approach to, you know, innovation and research, he still needs a lot of compute. And so, it does, it does feel like everyone is sort of, with the consensus that it's gonna be a big building with a lot of energy, big

• 9:36John Coogan?

  heat signature, definitely visible from space, and, and pretty simple to, to track, at least in the short term, until people start building crazy underground facilities, and then you're back to, you know, nuclear non-proliferation. But, the, their goal is at least to like, you know, try, try.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then the other side of this is,

• 9:55John Coogan?

  Not a panacea.

• 9:56Jordi Hays?

  Does it, does AI development actually become something closer to the Manhattan Project, where, you know,

• 10:02John Coogan?

  That's what a lot of people

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  A hundred, a hundred researchers are working with the government in secret, because you can't just assume that other countries are gonna slow down, or do any of these things.

• 10:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, but, in, in general, I think the proposal is, don't go back in time. It's definitely not stop everything in its tracks. It's a slowdown, with the goal of scaling gradually. They do actually want to reach superintelligence, they just want to do it by 2040, hence the name of the project. So, the goal is, gradually scale into top human expert capability around 2035. Now, a lot of people are saying, oh, we might get this by 2029, 2028, 2027, and they see that as too fast, so they wanna push that out to 2035, then wait five years with AGI, and then unlock superintelligence in 2040. This is their initial proposal. Of course, there's a lot that could change over the

• 10:58John Coogan?

  next decade. And, and I think, I think like, to zoom out, overall, if you're worried about X risk, the AI 2040 plan does feel like a concrete path towards slowing down. The conversation definitely gets dragged down into P doom estimates, and trying to narrow down exactly how a human extinction scenario plays out. And that can be, that can, I feel like that's almost a sideshow, because in a democratic society, in amongst humanity, like, it, it doesn't really matter the mechanics of getting to 10% P doom, or any of those. It's just like, if everyone feels that way, something will happen. This is a concrete plan of what that might look like. And that's valuable to understand in this case. So,

• 11:42John Coogan?

  for the safety skeptics, it's easy to see how this level of control over what you can do with computers is authoritarian or anti-libertarian. Even if we're talking about hundred million dollar computers, there's a lot of people that say like, I should be able to do math on my computer, I can do whatever I want, let me do cool things, I'm excited about this. That limits your freedom. It might create regulatory capture for a few major players, it might crash the stock market, or delay economic gains that come in the good ending where alignment is solved, and X risk plummets. You can imagine a situation where, in a few years, if X risk fades into the background, you're like, yes, there's still a risk, but it's the same risk that we face every day with like, an asteroid hitting Earth. Like, no one, it doesn't really change anyone's behavior. That would

• 12:26John Coogan?

  be sort of the good ending, in my opinion. So, it's a balancing act, and for most of these slowdown proposals, I personally have a hard time blackpilling about them, in the sense of like, if the, if all of this gets implemented, how frustrated will I be? Like, the models are good, I would like better models, I want safe models, but, at the same time, like, there is this massive capability overhang, the current models can do a lot of interesting work, we're finding new uses, even for, like, non-leading edge models, there's a lot that can be done. So, I, I, I don't believe the, the doom doomers who are dooming about what the doomers are planning, I find that unconvincing right

• 13:07John Coogan?

  now. But, people are starting to lay it out more. Brad Gerson, Jensen Huang, David Sacks are talking about the other side of this equation.

• 13:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. There's also a big question around what, does, does, do the 2040 people have a point of view on robotic and physical AGI? Because it seems like if you, even if you pause, like, you know, efforts towards RSI, well, if we add billions of robots into the world that are just running on today's model, that also presents today's, like, you know,

• 13:40John Coogan?

  I don't think they're worried about that.

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  I don't think they're worried about

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  But to me, but to me, that

• 13:43John Coogan?

  Billion robots with GPT-6 level intelligence, and years of alignment work that is currently happening, that's fine. It's the next, next, next thing, the superintelligence, the thing that might have its own goals. I think, I mean, we're talking to, someone from OpenAI's robotics team, hooking up Astra to a robot, a paintbrush and a camera, we talked about it earlier, painting. I don't think we're at a point where that poses a risk. It's the next model, it's the model with its own volition, basically. Which a lot of people still aren't seeing. They're just like, yeah, like, the models keep getting better,

• 14:24John Coogan?

  but, they seem to follow your instructions, sometimes too much, and then you need to worry about the paperclip scenario. But, but, but, but it's not that they, they wanna do their own thing necessarily. I don't know. But, people are going back and forth on this. Clem, over at Hugging Face, says, sorry, but asking Jacob about AI extinction risk is like asking your AC guy about climate change. Not saying it's necessarily uninteresting or wrong, per se, but let's keep things in perspective, and hear, and hear from the full range of expertise across the ecosystem. And Nathan Lambert says, banger. What was your, what was our take? AC guy might be right about climate change.

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, my AC guy would be like, I don't really know about that, but, I just wanna make sure, when you're hot, that we can run this AC cool.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. I guess it's, yeah, the AC always seems, seems

• 15:14Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about all that, I don't know about all that mumbo jumbo, but, you know, when it's a hot summer day, I don't want you to be worried about the heat, brother.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  I like that. Yeah, this is a, this is kind of an unnecessary shot at AC guys. Yeah, AC guys are important. I don't know, it's funny. What did Bernie Sanders have to say? Is this, is this real? Entities will, shall, shall be subject to the corporate death penalty, and persons shall be, shall be subject to not more than 20 years in prison, if they don't pause AI development. That seems pretty easy to comply with? I don't know. I guess, how do you define AI development? Is prompt engineering AI development, then you get caught because your model sort of did a little prompt engineering in the final stage,

• 16:05John Coogan?

  and then you're guilty of this, like that? Yeah, that could be a negative knock-on effect, I guess. It does seem aggressive. But, his overall proposal is banning artificial superintelligence, so no person or entity may develop or deploy superintelligent AI systems. He defines artificial superintelligence as an artificial intelligence system that exhibits, or can easily be modified to exhibit capabilities that match or exceed human cognitive performance and capabilities across a broad range of domains or tasks. It sounds like the mission statement. It sounds like the explicit goal of, of like, 17 different companies right now. AI, AI system, or AI systems that have sufficient capabilities to plan and execute the disempowerment of humanity. Okay, that's a good one. I like that. I don't like overthrowing or undermining

• 16:50John Coogan?

  the US government. So, strongly in favor of banning that. Pausing advanced AI development until a new federal AI regulatory body is up and running, and then the new cabinet level federal agency will monitor frontier AI systems at all stages of the lifecycle, supervise the removal of dangerous capabilities, and supervise the destruction of artificial superintelligence. We're coming for it, which is similar to the

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  Corporate death penalty is a line that you don't hear a lot, right? Usually, usually these companies just, you know, go bankrupt and wind down. But, corporate death penalty goes pretty hard.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Kinda metal.

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  It's kinda, it's kinda metal.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, you kinda got me with that one. Yeah, rough, rough, rough situation. We'll see, we'll see where it goes. Jamie Cox over at, over at Fluid Stack, the co-founder of Fluid Stack, a compute provider, shared his convictions, sort of pushing back on a lot of this, saying that he thinks America should build more, they're pro-freedom, pro-democracy, they believe AI will bolster human flourishing, we support simple, clear, enforceable regulation frameworks that set simple requirements proportion to capabilities and risk with clear responsibilities and

• 18:13John Coogan?

  no unnecessary barriers to competition. Yeah, the, the real, you're gonna see a lot of pushback from people who are like, the, like, the regulatory stuff is gonna be like, these 10 companies and I'm gonna be number 11 and I'm basically getting the corporate debt bounty then, because I didn't make the cut to be one of the regulated, one of the approved companies, I'm still early in my stage. So there's a lot of nervousness, I'm sure. But Will Monitis said, "We believe AI will make everyone rich, healthy, and free," his novel and interesting comms from the frontier. He's, he's endorsing this. And I agree, I like, I like this, I like these convictions. I think it's generally like, a positive

• 18:55John Coogan?

  direction to move in, not a direct response to the, the proposals that are going out, but we're gonna get a whole lot more of them. Where'd you want to go to next?

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, over on TikTok, they're sharing a photo of the whistleblower and saying, "In every worldwide disaster movie, there's a dude that looks just like this that nobody listened to." And he really does look like an actor, he does look like an actor here.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, he looks good. But people are, people are all over the place.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  And please stop calling him Scary Potter. I've been seeing people, I've been seeing people over on X calling him Scary Potter.

• 19:31John Coogan?

  That's the goal. The goal is to, is to wake up China, wake up Congress, wake up everyone.

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  DoorDash has entered the conversation. They say, "Two years at DoorDash, I do not say this lightly, we are extremely close to the burrito arriving before you decide you want it. We are not, we are not asking for a ban, we are asking for a pause." I don't know why they would ask for a pause. That seems like a very, very aligned to humanity and to their business, which I think is fantastic.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  The Doom is very much contained to the frontier lab work. Everyone in the application layer who's applying the models, diffusing them, they're like, "I just, I can't get this thing to work right. I gotta get, I gotta get forward deployed engineers to teach people how to use this thing." Everyone deeper in the stack is like...

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  Jim Rainbow over Jim O'Reilly, or Jim Riley.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, Jim Riley.

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  Jim Riley.

• 20:25John Coogan?

  O'Reilly on the part.

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  Jim Riley over at Charleston AI says, "It's a whole lot of mumbo jumbo."

• 20:31John Coogan?

  That was your word.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  He just, he's just happy to get, you know, eight hours back.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, everyone deeper in the supply chain, like Jensen and all the different semiconductor manufacturers are, are not particularly on this side. And then you also have Wall Street, who's just like, "What's the enterprise acceleration?" So lots of different groups around the table that need to be brought on board to this movement. The discourse truly is fascinating. So what is Tyler Cowen calling for?

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  He's banging the table, saying, "Bet on this."

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Tyler Cosgrove, are you named after Tyler Cowen? Is that your namesake? Tyler Cowen says, "If you have very pessimistic fears or predictions about AI, name the market prices that will support or confirm them. This is what taking this seriously means." And I love Tyler Cowen. I'm not sure this matters, because if you, if you, you're not gonna be around to collect it, right?

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is what, what deep, deep dish enjoyer says, "Tyler, why would short-term existential risk affect market prices in any meaningful way? Spell out the exact mechanism. Contracts that pay out if everyone dies aren't worth anything to me."

• 21:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. Yeah.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think he's just, he's calling for like, he wants to like, make a falsifiable claim. Like, is this, am I able to tell if your claim is like, true or false? And so it's like, very hard with these scenarios where like...

• 21:57John Coogan?

  Isn't it an unfalsifiable claim, though? Just by definition? And like, you just have to like, accept that and move on?

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, but then it's like, so hard to have any like, real discussion.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  Was, what, was nuclear any, any different? Like, the threat of nuclear apocalypse, the threat of World War III, this was a very motivating factor for decades, most of the 20th century. People made real decisions based on it, based on where to do business and where, where, where the, where the conflicts were gonna be and the motivation for nuclear treaties and nonproliferation and how we treat...

• 22:33Speaker 02

  You can make financial decisions, like, thinking about nuclear war, right? You have a, you have a bunker. That's like, a decision you make.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  Bunky?

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Is anyone making like, AI bunkers? No, because they think it's gonna be so totalizing that the bunker actually doesn't do anything.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah. So if you think it's so totalizing, then you don't make the bunker. And so saying, "Hey, you don't have a bunker," is not, is not proof that the person doesn't believe what they're saying. There, there is the other side of this, which is Paul Cristiano, who is, has been worried about risk. He recently just joined the board of OpenAI. And, and Tyler Cowen, you know, has this quote, "If you're a doomer, why aren't you short the market?" And Paul Cristiano is 2X levered long, and he's short the, isn't he short the, the, the bond market or US treasuries, right? So he has 5% of his net worth in Tesla, 90% of his net worth in AI bets, and 100% of his net worth in normal

• 23:30John Coogan?

  investments, no Tesla options. That sounds like a scary place with lottery ticket biases and the crazy Tesla investors. And then, Eliezer Yudikowsky says, "Am I correctly understanding you're 2X levered?" And Paul Cristiano says, "Yeah." And so, he says he's personally short the US, the US 30-year debt. I think that just means you have a mortgage. This doesn't seem like a Doom-based bet. This seems like this bet also pays out in just like, the good ending and like, AI is real and delivers value. So your AI bets perform well, the market performs well, and money slides from US debt to data centers and AI build-out debt or something like that. So he is putting his money where his mouth

• 24:11John Coogan?

  is, but it doesn't feel like a representation of like Doom by any means. People have been creating AI agents of fruit flies? Have you seen this?

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Yes. My understanding is, is Google basically mapped out all of like, the neurons in a fruit fly, yeah, like the entire...

• 24:26John Coogan?

  3D, they got the entire structure, and now people have been able to recreate that in software, in a simulation.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Yes. I think in theory, you can like, replicate all of the, the flies, like, decisions or whatever, it's like, movements.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  And this is notable, because many people have said, "I have the mind of a, of a fruit fly." They've said, "I have the intellect of a..."

• 24:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. So now they're gonna put it to the test, to, to see which performs better, the simulated fruit fly or just Geordie Hayes, who we got right here?

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  Organic, farm-to-table Geordie Hayes.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  So, so now that this is out and the code is out and you can run this fruit fly in simulation however you want, people are having, they're doing all sorts of experimentation. So Kevin said he trapped the fruit fly in his Rabbit R1. When he shakes it, he can see its brain, brain's escape circuit light up.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think what, what ends up being unsettling and weird about this is, is if, if it, just, just purely you being human and doing this is, is probably not good for your own soul. And, you know, imagine, imagine you have a fruit fly in a box and you're shaking it and you're like, "Look, it, it wants to escape," right?

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm not a huge fan of small insects. I don't really want them around that much. But when they're in my house, I try to, you know, if a spider's in my house, even if I know it might wanna take a nice bite to me, I'm still gonna try to transport it out of my house and, and put it back into the world. I think it's, I think it's, it's not good for your, for your soul to be, you know, a merchant of death.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Sure. And yet, and yet, if you're playing a real-time strategy game and you highlight a bunch of soldiers in this simulation and you send them on a charge that will result in their virtual death, you might not feel...

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  But those soldiers opted in to riding and dying with me.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 26:32John Coogan?

  Okay, what about...

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  This fruit fly is just sitting there, John.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  So they made the fruit fly play Doom? What about if you play Doom, you are killing a demon who's simulated? Is that immoral? Like...

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, that, is that demon trying to kill you?

• 26:47John Coogan?

  A lot of it comes down to like, the fact that it's simulating a, the actual representation of the fly makes it a lot more concrete than just, "Oh yeah, it's a, it's a 3D model in a Python script that just says, if you see a, if you see a character, shoot at them in the simulation." But we're, we're clearly starting to grapple with like, these odd moral questions of, if you're simulating something, then the next step is a couple of order magnitude, but you get there and you can simulate a human, and you could talk to that human and it would do everything the human does. Does that human have rights and agency as an ethical, moral agent? Or is it merely just a simulated, just a really good computer simulation? It's just existing on transistors, so you don't need to feel

• 27:32John Coogan?

  any moral weight about anything that you do to it. I agree with the, just the vibes-based analysis that like, torturing a real fly, torturing a virtual fly, probably just don't be in the business torturing anything. You don't need to overthink it. But people are, the, the real debate here is like, the question of, you know, are LLMs sentient? Are they moral? Do they, is there a moral weight to the, to, to, to synthetic intelligence, to artificial intelligence? That's what people are debating here. And I'm sure the debate will continue. Who knows if it will ever be ended. But they did teach it how to parallel park, which I think is cool. Interestingly, last night, I had Astra use computer use

• 28:13John Coogan?

  to play a video game that I very much enjoy playing called Bellatro. It's sort of like a modified poker game. And I don't feel like I was torturing the LLM by that. I feel like I was giving it a treat. I was like, "Hey, instead of doing my taxes, you get to just chill and play a video game." It did very well. It won. Sol was not able to win. And it was really fun, because I would like, pop in while it was using the computer and kind of armchair quarterback and be like, "Oh, is it making the right decision right now?" It felt like, it felt like a coach coaching like, a kid on the soccer pitch or something.

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  I had a fun, I had a funny moment last night. I was on my racing simulator, comparing, asking ChatGPT for, for, to, to compare my times at Laguna to, to just other, other, you know, what, what would best in class be like, what's beginner like, et cetera. And it said, "If you want, I can help you, you know, cut, cut some seconds off of this time." And it, and it was like, "Why don't, why don't you take a video of a full lap? So that, and I'll analyze it for you." And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, dude, I bet, I bet you'd love to just watch..."

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Chill back and watch track footage.

• 29:26Jordi Hays?

  Hang out and, and watch track footage.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  Pretty soon, it's gonna be like, "You want me to just get in the seat? You want me to just take over?" Because like, I'd really...

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, computer use in iRacing is something I'm, I'm gonna experiment with this weekend.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  I'm down, I'm down. Take, take half my quota, my monthly quota, just play games, chill, do whatever. It's a nice treat.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  I've got some banked resets that I'll put to work. Wonderful week.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  Wonderful week.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  Short week.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  But do us a favor and go ahead and have the best weekend of your entire life.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  Have the best weekend of your entire life.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  Do it. Put the pieces together, make it happen.

• 30:01John Coogan?

  We'll see you on Monday. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. Goodbye.