Better Models Are the Only Solution | Eddy Lazzarin

Eddy Lazzarin (0:00)

If I could make a little prediction, I think in the next year, we will have completely renovated the AI discourse. Because what's happening right now, cooped up kooky ideas that have lived in relative containment in our subculture are escaping, and they're encountering broader political reality.

And that is both exciting and totally transformative. It's like when George Costanza freaks out about like worlds colliding, right? That's what's happening, worlds are colliding. And so I think the discourse is going to change completely.

SPEAKER_2 (0:39)

All right, we're back. We are live with Eddy Lazzarin, who's a general partner at a16z Crypto, and one of the Internet's strongest soldiers, strongest advocates of open source, of AI accelerationism and of techno-optimism. Eddy, welcome to MTS.

Eddy Lazzarin (0:57)

Thanks very much. It's amazing here. The energy is incredible. What a spot.

Love it.

SPEAKER_2 (1:03)

So, man, where to start? The last couple of weeks have been such this preference cascade flood of AI safetyism, effective altruism, and the like. And there have been only a few good accounts offering good counterarguments.

So, like...

Eddy Lazzarin (1:23)

Counterarguments on which side?

SPEAKER_2 (1:26)

Like, counterarguments against, like, the AI. Doom narrative and against, like, the...

Eddy Lazzarin (1:32)

Yeah, I think it's become very high status all of a sudden to be very concerned with safety. And I think that we've gotten to a point where, you know, it's more important to sort of tastefully share your P-Doom, so to speak, than it is to actually examine the history of how these massive technological changes develop. And I think a lot of people are leaving a lot of very interesting concepts, a lot of interesting ideas on the table. You know, a lot of people messaged me, I tweeted the other day about P-abundance, right? P-abundance. I think we're putting the carp before the horse a little bit when we worry about safety, before we worry about what we're leaving on the table and what the costs of delay are.

And furthermore, you know, how we should conceive of accountability, conceive of safety, conceive of all the things around how to make these systems really useful. Being safe is critical. Any industry needs to take responsibility for making its products safe. But it's definitely the case that the conversation isn't about safety in the typical manner. It's about something else. It's a blend of genuine cybersecurity concerns, sort of philosophical, millenarian arguments about the end times.

There's a bunch of things in the mix and they get a little bit confused. And so I think picking them apart is really useful.

SPEAKER_2 (2:57)

So like where do you get off the like AI doom argument? You know, it's like there's a pretty standard like orthodox argument that's like, AI will become super intelligent, as in much more capable than humans or than all of humanity in the near future.

And if it is not sufficiently aligned with human values, and is not bound by constraints in the way that individual humans are like law, and ultimately the ability to have that law enforced on them, then they will have like no need for humanity and then they might like kill everyone.

Eddy Lazzarin (3:32)

Yeah, I mean, there's so many assumptions in that argument. That's like that's an argument. That's like a stairway to heaven full of arguments, right? Like there's the presumption that there's no control. Now, we already have quasi super intelligent beings in the world, right? Corporations, countries, none of them are aligned with each other, right? They don't have any built-in guaranteed alignment. They didn't go through HR training to become a corporation, to become a country.

We don't test the alignment of any entities as a prerequisite for their existence. That's just not the way the world works. Instead, we use laws. In the case that laws like in software are too slow, we use cryptography, we use actual mechanisms to limit them. There's a whole array of different types of mechanisms we put in place to try to control things. I think that they can control highly, highly capable beings.

Now, without getting too far into the super intelligence thing, remember, the most powerful and most enthralling form of argument that we have, the one that's making everyone crazy and very interested, is around super intelligence. But we're quite a ways away from that. I think that there's a lot of little frictions and tiny things that we will have to jump over and many things that we'll learn on the way there. When the present reality, the things that we're talking about like the hugging face stuff, you know, the, you know, like the gym hacking incident, that was a really cool one. That was an interesting one. Those are cyber security failures. Those are definitely control failures. And they're not, in my view, they're not little glimpses of a super intelligence that's about to, you know, throw off its shackles, so to speak, and go wild on us.