A few personal beliefs can set the direction of major technologies

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 14:08

   AI is going to shape the future, the most natural thing, at least from my perspective to do, would be to kind of focus directly on thinking about the technology itself or or maybe on surrounding policy issues. But you do something kind of different. So you take this anthropological approach where you're focusing on the cultures and beliefs of the people who are building these technologies. What does that lens capture that other lenses might miss?

2. 14:39

   Yeah, I certainly think it's important that other people are, you know, focused on just the policy or just the technology itself. But one thing that I think a lot of the community or even outside observers underestimate is that there are really very few people who are building and shaping the trajectory of frontier AI. There are not that many researchers at these labs. The reason they're getting paid these crazy $100 million packages to get poached from here to there and back again is because there are only so many people who have this much leverage, right? And so what that means is that personal idiosyncratic belief systems can be quite load-bearing for really big decisions around how the technology, what technology is built, who it gets sold to, how it gets diffused.

3. 15:22

   I mean, in many ways, I think the existence of Anthropic is a bet on this thesis. It's the fact that if there's only one lab that is building the best enterprise agents or coding models or whatever it is, then they can actually make principled decisions based on, say, Dario Amodei's personal beliefs that we don't want mythos to be used for mass surveillance or for autonomous robots right now. We actually don't want to sell to Chinese companies in the Chinese government, even though market incentives would dictate that we ought to, because we have these principled beliefs around whether authoritarian governments ought to have access to frontier AI. And so like, I think that in a world where there are just not that many actors and not that the players, understanding the particular philosophies and motivations of the few

4. 16:04

   people who can decide actually is pretty predictive of some of these decisions that are made. Yeah. For people who are still skeptical at this point, it would be helpful, I think, if you could give some historical examples or indeed recent examples where the values or culture or like idiosyncratic beliefs of people building a technology have actually like tangibly impacted how that technology has, as you say, how it's been built, how it's been deployed, how it's affected the world? Yeah, I mean, I think one example is just looking at the history of the early internet, right, which was not actually built, like AI was primarily in these private megacorporations, but by a guy at DARPA and a guy at Stanford working on these like TCP IP protocols, building these, building out ARPANET, building these versions of the internet where it

5. 17:00

   was decided from the beginning that it should run on open protocols, that it should be this open ecosystem, that different networks between countries, between institutions ought to be able to communicate with each other. And if you read sort of the interviews or the writings of these folks like Vint Cerf, they were very clear that they believed that the internet ought to be open. The whole point was this sort of interconnectedness that would transcend borders. And to this day, we are using the same internet based on these open architectures, right? Similarly, you know, I've been reading Sebastian Maliby's biography of Demis and Google DeepMind. And one of the things that I find so fascinating is how in the early days of DeepMind, which is, you know, very arguably the first serious AGI lab, they could not get any

6. 17:41

   funding at the beginning because no venture capitalist was willing to back a bunch of these weirdo scientists who insisted that you could build super intelligence in like, you know, 2010 or whatever, who had no business plan, refused to commercialize, had no product, et cetera. And they were running out of money until Luke Nozek from Founders Fund, simply out of his personal belief that AGI ought to be possible, that the invention to end all inventions would just be in some ways the coolest thing ever, that it was worth a multi-million dollar bet, even while Peter Thiel and many other venture capitalists were like, you're freaking crazy for even considering funding these guys without a business plan, you know? And so I think when we look at the history of these frontier technologies, when there are only a few people who have, frankly, like the technical

7. 18:24

   abilities to make them possible, those people's idiosyncratic beliefs in this thing or another, believing that artificial general intelligence, for example, might be possible at all, believing that the internet ought to be an open thing that transcends borders, they set these precedents and they make these fundamental architectural decisions or funding decisions that sort of lay the groundwork for everything else that comes after.