20VC: Why "Pacing the Frontier" is BS | Instinct Raising $1BN at $10BN & Meta Launches Muse | Miro Sells for $1.35BN After a $17.5BN Valuation | Mistral Raises €3BN & Could Sam Bankman-Fried Win His Freedom?

Harry Stebbings (0:00)

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and it's the best show of the week. Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lamkin, discussing the biggest news in tech. So this week, number one, Pacing the Frontier. We discuss what it means for infrastructure, what it means for energy, and what it means for the biggest frontier model providers. Next up, AI Assistant War. We've got Town, we've got Instinct on the startup end, and we've got Zuck and Muse on the incumbent end. What happens here? Who wins? Next up, Bending Spoons, baby. They are on an acquisition spree, having bought Miro for $1.35 billion.

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Rory O'Driscoll (3:41)

You have now arrived at your destination.

Harry Stebbings (3:44)

Boys, we are back. Now, I was thinking about where we should start. And in all honesty, I just thought it'd be egregious to not start with the most important thing I thought, which was Dario coming out and saying that we need to pace the frontier, to which Sam Altman then agreed with him. And then Elon too agreed that it is important now to put in place some form of external regulatory body to slow down, regulate the capabilities moving forward of model providers. How did we think about this?

Rory O'Driscoll (4:14)

It's been fairly universally panned. I tend to be on the side of the people who are saying that the hostile reception is deserved. What is the problem you're trying to solve? Dario, if you read the note, Dario's definition of the problem was fairly well defined. It was cyber attacks, it was economics, and then it was we lose control of the AI. So even though that sounds like a lot, it's fairly controlled. The guy who quit and started this crazy thing as a coxton or whatever his name is, and then the employee within Antropic kind of chiming in saying, I think there's a 10% chance of human extinction in 10 years. That's a very different thing. So let's deal with that first of all, because I'm just going to call such bullshit. And to be fair, and this is why I'm saying it's complex, every time Dario makes a comment, a lot of the tweets back are, hey, if you're going to blow up the world, you should stop. And they're right. The truth is he didn't actually say they were, to be fair. He didn't talk about P-Doom, but I'm going to do the same thing as everyone else. I'm just going to throw some rocks first. If the Feds really thought that there was someone in downtown San Francisco, building a technology that was going to blow up the fucking world had a 10% chance of blowing up the world in the next 10 years, they would move in with a SWAT team, kill everyone in the place and close it down. Replace the word AI with, we're building a nuclear reactor. It's totally safe right now, but there's a 10% chance it goes wrong in the next five years and blows up the world. Issue that statement. How many seconds after that before the entire weight of the US military is shutting you down? What it says is this kind of 10% P-Doom people, the truth is either the US government is asleep, which I doubt, or B, it's looking at this going, this is a bunch of excited teenagers, we'll step in later if it gets crazy. My first point is the, to be fair to Dario, not Dario, but the, oh my God, the world's gonna end, we're gonna destroy the world, but we're gonna keep doing it people. I cling to the hope that the US government, if it was a real issue, we'd do something, right? So I think all that's overwrought bullshit, which is different than saying what Dario said is overwrought bullshit, it's just not realistic. Dario stuff, on the other hand, it's hard not to disagree that the cyber risk is real. Of the three risks he raised, the cyber risk, real, the economic risk, I will all be unemployed, I think it's a little bit bullshit, and then the third one, we lose control of the agents, hard to assess. So okay, that's the problem he's trying to solve. And then the solutions range from the unlikely to the impossible. The unlikely is, yeah, we're going to install third-party monitoring agents voluntarily, but then the ask is that it be made a requirement. That's the first thing. Then the second thing is all the democratic governments have to agree, and that'll be easy because we get on so well with Canada and Europe right now.