And Now For Something Completely Similar: Untangling the Power from the Pretense of Our AI Circus

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It is Friday, 25th of September, 2026, the last Friday of the month. It's been another astonishing week in technology this time. The soap opera, if that's the right word, of AI and regulation and big and little tech, the United States, Silicon Valley, China, all moved to New York, to the United Nations, where AI leaders, quote unquote, at least according to some European media, warned the UN Security Council of risk to humanity as a whole. I'm not entirely sure what humanity as a whole means, but certainly Sam and Dario came to the UN to warn the United Nations of a possible peril absent a global response. Very interesting week. Lots of other European leaders, including Andy Burnham got involved, Australian leaders as well, getting involved over rogue OpenAI. And of course, Donald Trump played his role, suggesting that AI should be renamed super intelligence. He's much less worried than either Sam or Dario or Andy Burnham or the Australian Prime Minister. So this whole thing has gone international. And who better to talk about the internationalization of our current AI crisis or opportunity than Keith Teare, highly international fellow, English-born, living now in Silicon Valley. Keith, another remarkable week.

Keith Teare (2:16)

Yeah, boringly so, right? Because the parameters of the remarkable are incredibly static. On the one side, you've got do-mers on the other side, the anti-do-mers and the debate, which I thought was resolved last week clearly hasn't been resolved.

I thought Amodei and Altman were put back in their box in a way when they promised with Elon Musk to control their own software stacks. I thought that was it, no more discussion.

Andrew Keen (2:52)

Just wishful thinking, Keith, I think in terms of putting those two guys back in their box, neither of them seem to be your flavor of the month.

Keith Teare (3:01)

Well, it's not really about taste, it's about logic, and neither one of them is displaying any signs of being scientific. And given that this is science we're talking about, it's incredibly political what they're doing.

Andrew Keen (3:23)

There's almost no science. Keith has given them the worst insult, Sam and Dario. They are not scientific. Let's step back a little bit. Last week, actually, you misled me in our audience. You told me all this was over. So as you know, you were wrong, not for the first or the last time, like myself.

What's changed? I mean, did they use... One of the things that strikes me about the UN is it's so insignificant that anyone can say anything, and it doesn't actually make any difference.

Keith Teare (3:55)

Well, this is the UN Security Council, which has, you know, not very many, but some teeth. So it's not the General Assembly.

So it's basically spies and people who consider security. So they would both consider this is the, globally speaking at least, the biggest possible forum they could appear in. And they're not wrong to... I mean, AI has globalized, but not in the way that they like. It's globalized through the spread of open source models.

And every single country on the planet, there are people, individuals and companies using AI, most of which originates in the United States, but some of it comes from China. So globalization is real, but that's a technical fact. What they are focused on is, what they want to see is political globalization, almost like a super state view of AI, coming from the UN Security Council, setting rules. It reminds me a little bit of when Facebook launched their crypto token called Libra and stated upfront that they'd only actually ship it if they could get all the governments of the world to agree. And you and I spoke about it at the time, I said, well, therefore it's gonna die.

Andrew Keen (5:24)

And it did, of course, that's the last thing, that's the last time I think we even talked about Libra.

Keith Teare (5:29)

Correct. And this is very similar.

Wanting to get the world's governments to agree on anything is super hard. Getting them to come together to put in place some rules that they, AI companies can use to defer liability from themselves. You know, hey, we're following the rules. Of course, when there are no rules, there's 100% liability.

Andrew Keen (5:53)

So your position on these guys, and you're certainly not alone here, and I think your argument is credible, that they're doing it to maintain their advantage, that Sam and Dario who don't agree on very much and certainly don't like each other. The one thing they agree on is if they get a little bit of global regulation of some kind or another, it will protect their competitive advantage. Is that fair, Keith?