AI News Crossover: A Candid Chat with Liron Shapira of Doom Debates

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, we're sharing a crossover episode that I recently did with Liron Shapira, creator of Doom Debates, who you may remember from his interview with OpenAI's Rune, which we cross-posted late last year, and which I still think, by the way, is very much worth listening to. To be clear from the jump, today's episode is not a debate. Liron did challenge me early in the conversation to be a bit more, shall we say, consistently candid about my genuine sense that almost anything could happen, from the unimaginably positive to the devastatingly negative, as we develop and deploy more and more powerful AI systems across society. I appreciated that challenge, and as you might have noticed in recent episode introductions, I have adjusted my approach to make sure that I at least mention the incredibly high stakes of advanced AI development at some point in every episode. Beyond that, though, this is a news and analysis episode in which the two of us compare notes on some of the most recent AI releases and discourse that we each found most interesting. Among other topics, we discuss GPT-40 image generation and what it means for graphic designers and related businesses like Fiverr and my own Waymark. Replit CEO Amjad Massad's declaration that he no longer thinks you should learn how to code. Peter Level's provocative claim that being an entrepreneur now has more job security than a job.
Gary Marcus, who ridiculed OpenAI's latest $300 billion valuation and why, though his AI denialism is now totally indefensible, his question as to whether or not OpenAI will ever actually pay off for investors remains a good one. Emmett Shear's new AI safety organization Softmax, their organic alignment strategy and how that fits into the overall alignment and AI safety big picture. A viral AI not kill everyoneism tweet about the human caused sixth mass extinction event on the planet Earth and what we should infer from that as we consider our own AI future. Anthropic's new mechanistic interpretability paper, which I found characteristically outstanding, but also honestly kind of worry has been overstated in the understanding it actually achieves, such that it could perhaps be used perniciously in political debates going forward. And finally, how much hope we each have that effective international cooperation can be achieved either via some sort of emergent stable equilibrium, or via AI governance treaties, which would be backed by monitoring and verification regimes. I had a lot of fun recording this, and I'm very interested to learn how much value you find in this format. Would you like to see more of these rapid response news and analysis discussions, or do you get enough AI news elsewhere such that you'd prefer that I stay focused on deep dive interviews and analyses? Your feedback will help shape the future of the feed, so please let me know what you think, either via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. For now, I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Leron Shapira, creator of Doom Debates, as we break down some of the most interesting recent developments in AI.

**Liron Shapira** (2:59)
All right, let's do some news in social media. Connor Lay finally got a haircut. So this is Connor Lay with a haircut. This is what he normally looks like. He looks really good. I think this new hairstyle is working. It's a stock wet from a peak of around 150 down to 104.05. So I'm embarrassed to say I went long when it was up 150 Like I bought some options. Like I'm kind of destroyed here. How about you?
Welcome to Doom Debates. Today, I've got a very special episode. It's a collab with Nathan Labenz from The Cognitive Revolution. Nate and I actually go back all the way to 2010, when we were both living in Silicon Valley. We were both doing startups, and he was recently an undergraduate in chemistry at Harvard. That's his education background, even though he later went into Silicon Valley startups. As you know, Nate hosts the popular Cognitive Revolution podcast, which is a highly educational podcast. It's one of the deepest dives that you can regularly see, interviews with people who are hands-on deep in the field, all kinds of AI engineers and safety researchers, diverse topics and perspectives, and it's driven by Nate's own interests and curiosity. It's a very authentic podcast, highly recommend it. Nate is also a software engineer. He's the founder of Waymark, which is a turnkey solution for small businesses to generate video ads. It's known as one of the first companies to integrate GPT-3, when nobody was even paying attention to that technology. They currently offer a watch-first experience, where you can easily generate a candidate video ad, and then watch it and iterate. You can check out Waymark in the show notes. Nathan Labenz, welcome to Doom Debates.