AI, the Modern Enigma: Nathan's Keynote at IT Revolution's Enterprise AI Summit at Bletchley Park

Nathan Labenz (0:00)

Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. This is Nathan's AI voice clone. Nathan is traveling, so today we have a special episode. What you're about to hear is a keynote he gave on November 2nd at the Enterprise AI Summit, hosted by IT Revolution at Bletchley Park in England. The talk is called AI, The Modern Enigma. Bletchley is where Alan Turing and his colleagues worked to break Enigma during World War II. It also hosted the first AI Safety Summit in 2023

Then the challenge was reading a machine's messages. Now it's understanding the machines themselves.

If you listen to this show regularly, you know Nathan is an enthusiastic user of AI. You'll hear some of the personal reasons for that. You'll also hear why his experience with these systems left him increasingly concerned about where we're headed. The question running through the talk is one that comes up a lot on this show. How do we get the enormous benefits of AI, while keeping the ability to understand, supervise and, when necessary, intervene?

Nathan also explains why he's now starting to advocate for a pause on frontier-scale training. Early in the talk, Nathan hands the stage to an AI version of himself, made with Google's latest text-to-speech model. So, yes, you're hearing an AI clone introduce a talk that includes an AI clone. The actual Nathan does most of the talking. This is a conference recording, so expect room audio. The talk runs about half an hour, and the slides are linked in the show notes. Thanks to Gene Kim and Ben Grinnell at IT Revolution for having Nathan, and for letting us share the talk here as an episode.

We'll start with Gene's introduction. Here's Nathan, live at Bletchley Park.

Gene Kim (1:59)

So I'm a huge fan of our next speaker, Nathan Labenz. He hosts the Cognitive Revolution podcast, which has been one of my favorites over the years. And I'm not alone. I was delighted to find out that Ben also ranks his as one of his favorites. And so before Nathan and I met, I actually wrote to him about how much I loved his story about him being part of the Red Team effort for GPT-4, the mall that was released in February 2023 That shocked the world because of how capable it was. And boy, that just seems so cute and quaint now because we had no idea how dangerous AIS could really be. But Nathan told this amazing story about discovering these kind of dangerous capabilities, how it could be used by bad actors. And it reminded me so much about internet security from the late 1990s, where people were finding vulnerabilities, that it was no one's job to do anything with them. And so Nathan ran into that barrier. And the reason why I sort of laugh sharing the story is that, boy, GP4 dangerous? Holy cow, right?

The story about open AI models spinning up 5,000 agents to attack hugging face, like now we know what dangerous AI models really are. So what I admire about Nathan is that he's a true boundary spanner across AI, national security, and foreign policy.

In particular, I loved how he interviewed Jake Sullivan, the former US National Security Advisor on how to coexist or compete with China on AI. So I'm so grateful that Nathan's here to show us a glimpse of what AI is really capable of, and the risks it could potentially pose, as well as what we can be doing about it. Here's Nathan.

Nathan Labenz (3:41)

All right. Thank you very much. Honored to be here. It is, what an incredible venue. I was immediately inspired to come take a pilgrimage to this place, not least because when you go to San Francisco today and you talk to people that work at the frontier companies, they have increasingly what I would call a World War II mindset about their work. One told me not too long ago, I'm honestly just tired of being a bad friend, but I can't put this work down until we're through. So that really is the attitude that is permeating the Bay Area companies that are leading this revolution. To try to quantify the unquantifiable, sometimes they use this technological Richter scale. The bottom is just one year, the kind of technology that comes along once a year, then it goes to 10, then 100, like the real Richter scale, each number is 10 times bigger. So this was at an event called The Curve, a lot of insider type people were there, and you were just asked to put a sticker on the poster to indicate where you thought AI would fall on this scale. The number nine, that's like agriculture, fire, the wheel. 10 is like an entirely new epoch, like the rise of humanity on the planet. So again, the people, not only are they adopting increasingly a World War II mindset, but they are looking at the rise of AI as something akin to a new species, which potentially could become the dominant species on the planet. Of course, everybody these days knows this. I had the chance to go to China this summer and attended the WAIC, where President Xi gave his first major keynote entirely focused on AI. He said, a man of wisdom adapts to changes. So with that in mind, I'm going to give you just a little bit of a glimpse of an alternate timeline where instead of coming here, I sent my AI to give you the entire talk. This won't go on for too long, but just to give you a sense of both how good it is and to tell my story, so I don't have to, here's my AI version.