AI Expert WARNS: "You're Not Ready For 2027" – Transcript

00:00Roman, make your case. >> I want to agree with you on something you said, but I'll define AI, and that will help us. We use the term AI to mean three different technologies, completely unrelated, and that's what probably creates this debate.

00:13AI as a useful tool, as a standard technology we always had, narrow system, makes you more productive, more creative. Everyone loves it, supports it. I'm a computer scientist, I'm an engineer, I want more of it. It helps economy, it's great. We know how to control them, how to make them safe, we understand what they do.

00:33Completely on board with that AI. AI we're starting to have now, GPT-6 level, human level, AGI level, we can argue about what that means. Some dangerous, like any human. They're unsafe like a human would be unsafe.

00:48But if we introduce them into the research cycle, they're automated scientist, automated engineer. >> What do you mean by that? Introducing them into the research cycle? >> So right now you have humans doing research to make GPT-7. >> Yeah. >> But they're starting to add AI tools.

01:03More programming is done by AI, design of the next parameter set. What if the whole process is fully automated? What if GPT-6 is writing GPT-7? >> Is this what they call recursive self-improvement? >> Which is exactly >> Not a foregone conclusion though.

01:18>> A lot of people are predicting, including all the top labs, that they will get there. They're introducing junior machine learning researcher in 2026. They want the cycle to start in 2027. >> Which is when the AI will start building the new AIs. >> Right, self- >> Once that cycle starts, we're going to create something called superintelligence. A system smarter than all of us at everything, or capable of learning to be in any new domain.

01:43We will become secondary species on this planet. We will not be in charge. We will not decide what happens to us. Superintelligence doesn't hate you, it just doesn't care about you. We didn't learn how to make it care about us. And if it decides to, I don't know, cool the planet to make compute more efficient, it will freeze us.

02:01If it wants to convert this planet to fuel to fly to Mars, so be it. We have not learned how to control those systems. The capabilities are getting exponentially better. Our ability to control those systems is non-existent. We have filters and we have bands. We put guardrails of don't say that word, don't talk about this topic. And that happens after the fact, after the model already made the decision. Sometimes you see it scraping the result.

02:27>> So they build the model and then they put filters around it to make sure it doesn't >> Exactly. We cannot have it say the N-word and they are like, we need to make sure that never happens. That will kill the profits. So that's all they have, guardrails of that nature. The model itself is completely unaligned.

02:43Doesn't care about you. It's wild that we're developing this and not just developing it before we deploy it through economy, before we get benefits of having GPT-6 propagated through economy. It can do so much. There are trillions of dollars of value in that model alone. We forget that. We switch to making the next model as soon as we can.

03:03>> Roman, I've just got a follow-up question for you there. It would appear to me that the new chat GPT-6 model, the Fable 5.1 model, is arguably smarter than 99.999% of humans on planet Earth already.

03:16Is it conceivable that a intelligence that is much, much smarter than humans, is there any case where it could be controlled by humans? Does form factor Does the fact that it doesn't have limbs and legs and Does that matter at all?

03:29>> I think long-term control of something that much smarter than us is impossible. It can be for reasons we don't yet know, friendly to us and decide to keep us around and make us happy, but it's not a guarantee.

03:44>> Let me pick up on Steve's question cuz I I like the phrasing a lot. Let's say that that Fable or whatever the latest release from OpenAI is really is smarter than I don't know if it's 95 or 99% of the people. Are we only being saved from extinction by the 1% who are still smarter than the AI?

04:02>> No, no. The concern is not the model we have today. The concern is what I >> But if I believe your argument, then we really should be concerned about the model that >> like having another human. If there was another smart human that is Einstein today and he's malevolent, I'm not worried. He may cause some damage, but he's not going to exterminate 8 billion people.

04:20We competitive at this stage. There are people just as smart who can understand what happened with recent hacking accident and do something about it. My concern is that in a year we're going to have a model that's so much smarter. It's like squirrels fighting humans.

04:35They don't understand what we can do to them. They have no concept of poison straps, guns in their world model. They think you're going to chase them up a tree and bite them really hard. >> Is that also why recursive self-improvement was central to your argument? Because at some point, if it starts improving itself, then it's kind of like a runaway train of intelligence.

04:52>> intelligence explosion. We don't control it. We don't understand it. We can't monitor it. We can't explain it. We can't predict it. At that point, it's just a runaway process. >> I've heard this phrase from Sam Altman and the others is called fast takeoff. >> Yes. >> Is this what they're describing?

05:06>> That is the debate. Some people think it's going to take a very long time. Yeah, we automated research, but it's still going to take years. We need to run physical experiments. And fast takeoff means, as I said, instead of a year, it's going to take a month, a week, a day, a second.

05:22Cuz you're not having humans doing research. You have let's say 10,000 agents, each one smarter than all of us, doing research 24/7. They don't sleep. They don't eat. They don't get sick. They're much faster than us.

05:35>> And your face tells a picture. It's a I think I could say you disagree. We're spending a lot of oxygen discussing something that might happen while ignoring what's actually happening. And I find that very frustrating because the people that are killing themselves are a problem. The black neighborhoods being poisoned with gas turbines, that is a problem.

05:55>> you cared about climate change, I think I got that right. So, imagine a guy who goes, "It's raining right now. We need umbrellas. We need to do something about it. This is like weather related." While they're completely ignoring climate change, the planet will boil over. So, this is what you're doing.

06:09>> Okay, that's great. Why are we not talking about the thing that actually happened though? Like >> Because relatively, it's not important. >> You don't think someone killing themselves >> one person. We have 8 billion people who are running ethical experiments on >> Being given at AI psycho Why do you not >> Six people, 10 people. Those numbers are insignificant.

06:26>> 10 people have families. I'm sorry, you have a software that's out there >> understand? 8 billion people and all future generations versus like literally a guy with a name >> You're doing so experiment about maybe harm. Jacob Coxon goes on TV saying it can copy itself to this, that, and the other. Jacob Coxon is the guy from from Anthropic who said he was quitting cuz he was so scared of everything despite spending years at OpenAI and having tons of stock, I believe, from there. So, good for him. The thing he was saying was describing theoreticals all while

06:54divorcing the harms, which I think we can agree with that the companies themselves are not taking this seriously enough. But always it was about the AI's too powerful and mystical, not OpenAI and Anthropic, the two largest startups are using hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure to hack. A regular person doing this would be arrested.

07:12>> They're saying 8 billion people are going to die. And it's not just them. I have this long list of quotes here from the people building this technology who appear to agree Um, if you look at some of these quotes from from Elon Musk who said, "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning a demon." You know all those stories where there's a guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like, "Yeah, he's sure he can control the demon." But it doesn't work out.

07:36>> So, one thing I'd say is, you know, I I really wish that the world would only give us one problem at a time. >> Sure. >> And if the world did give us one one problem at a time, I would love mine to be last on the list. It looks to me like we can have multiple problems at once. I think there are current harms. I think we should address them. It looks to me, I do talk to policy makers sometimes. It looks to me like there's a little bit more movement on the regulatory side about some of the current harms. There's, you know, child safety protection acts. There's, you know, anti-deep fake acts.

08:04We have more of those making more headway in Congress or getting passed through Congress than we have sort of trying to make it so we don't have any of these extinction risks. The other thing I'd throw out there is that I agree we we should deal with the current harms, but if you watch the people saying deal with the current harms over time, a couple years ago, they were saying we have to deal with current harms like AI bias influencing who's hired.

08:28Last year, they were saying we have to deal with current harms like kids killing themselves. This year, Garry Tan just on an interview the other day who's Garry Tan? Sorry, Garry Tan is a technologist who runs Y Combinator, which Sam Altman used to run before going to open AI. And on an interview the other day, he said, uh let's not worry about these crazy future risks. We need to be worried about current harms like AI swarms breaking out and taking over data centers.

08:55And I'm like, look guys, at some point we need to look at the progression of like the current harms that we that everyone is saying we have to worry about instead of the the the extinction threats and watch where the puck is going. Play where the puck is going. And I'm like, these extinction threats are coming down the line. They aren't in opposition with dealing with the the problems we have today. We just need to deal with both.