“I’m Pro Capitalism” – Why Ex-Anthropic Researcher Still Wants AI Regulation

Patrick Bet-David (0:00)

What do you say to the people that say, you know, David Sacks, some of these other folks came out, very reputable people, respect these folks. And you saw Marc Andreessen came up and he wrote his Humanity Manifesto with AI and saying, hey, this is a, let free market do its part, this is a beautiful thing. He believes, you know, we can handle 50 billion people living in the world, you know, and we have bandwidth, and this is gonna make people more financially free, it's not that scary.

Some of those guys said, this is purely used by Anthropic and OpenAI to eliminate future competitors and own bigger market shares, and they're like, yeah, Bernie, come help us out. Come prevent other people from competing with us. What do you say to that?

Jacob Coxon (0:41)

Yeah, there's a few things. One is, I think I agree with Marc Andreessen and David Sacks about the positive benefits.

What I think, where I think we differ is their case. I think we get their world if we slow down.

I think even if we slow down AI development, the changes from next year's technology will be so rapid and significant that there will be huge changes in the way that they're thinking. I just think they haven't fully internalized how crazy it will get if we don't slow down. I think their case for, their optimistic fast case is my slow case. And my fast case looks like we have no control over it. We're just watching robots make themselves smarter. Like every day, massively, it's completely out of our control. It's not like 50 billion humans, it's humans and then this massive AI economy that's happening without we're just sitting around watching them do inscrutable things we don't understand. I think Marc Andreessen and David Sacks will agree with me when things get crazy because I think we want the same thing. That's my guess.

Patrick Bet-David (1:44)

How many people when you work at OpenAI Anthropic, guys that are actually doing the work, not executives at the top, I'm talking the engineers, the mathematicians, the guys like you that are doing the work, the researchers that are doing the work, how many of them are in their 20s?

Jacob Coxon (2:00)

Probably half or a bit less than half.

Patrick Bet-David (2:03)

Okay. That's a big number.

Jacob Coxon (2:04)

Big number.

Patrick Bet-David (2:05)

Just fresh out of college, right?

Jacob Coxon (2:07)

In their 20s. Maybe more like 30%, 30, 40%.

Patrick Bet-David (2:11)

30%.

Is it fair to say that that audience just got out of college, not all of them, some of them, and maybe they're going to lean a little bit more on the liberal side, and maybe they're going to be a little bit more afraid of climate change, end of the world, professors, brainwashing them, and oh my god, you guys be careful with these capitalists. They're going to be such technocrats and technocracy, and you know, oh my, these, these trillionaires, Elon Musk is going to take over and do this. Don't you think they may have a little bit more fear, anxiety of the end of the world is coming because they just got out of college?

Jacob Coxon (2:46)

Yeah, maybe. I can say a few things here.

Patrick Bet-David (2:48)

Please.

Jacob Coxon (2:49)

One is, I think it's important that Elon Musk himself is scared about this. Like that he doesn't get scared of many things, right? He's a, you know, a titan. Like the guy's an absolute, like he just goes for stuff. He's been scared of AI for a long time. He only made XAI because he saw the other companies doing it and was like, well, I guess if we're doing this, I have to join in because he's Elon Musk. He's not going to let these guys, you know, he's not going to sit on the sidelines.

So it's, you know, big guys are scared too. And then in terms of junior employees, I mean, I can speak for myself. I like, I've never, you know, global warming has never been a big deal for me. It's like, I wanted to learn math. I wanted to work on technology.

I wanted more nuclear power. I want like build out of energy infrastructure. I'm like pro, you know, I'm pro-capitalism, libertarian almost.

SPEAKER_3 (3:37)

So you're more libertarian. Definitely.

Patrick Bet-David (3:38)

I think that's very important for you to qualify there because a lot of people were putting you as a climate change guy.

Jacob Coxon (3:42)

It's because everyone agreed with me was a Democrat. I made a post, I didn't ask these Democrats, like Democrat politicians to agree with my post, right? I didn't tell them to tweet that. So I think I've been pegged as this NGO kind of dude. Really, the one thing I'm scared about is AI. I'm like, if we could slow down AI and speed up everything else, like deregulate drugs, deregulate biology research, deregulate human self-experimentation. I think a lot of stuff, I'm pro-libertarian. It's just AI in particular that's the thing that's scary.