Magnus Carlsen, Cohere’s CEO, & MapQuest Rejects Lake America

Amber Mac (0:00)

The Amber Mac Show on Canada Talks. This week on The Amber Mac Show, we talk to the best chess player in the world, as well as the CEO and co-founder of one of the most important AI companies in Canada.

Jeff MacArthur (0:13)

Plus, we have an in-depth conversation with the GM of MapQuest about why they aren't going along with President Trump's renaming of Lake Ontario to Lake America. We'll also explain what you need to know about Meta's muse and Saturday Night Live's take on Anthropic's CEO.

So before we get to those interviews, let's check out this week's headlines.

Amber Mac (0:33)

Headlines.

Jeff MacArthur (0:35)

OpenAI has once again hit the pause button when it comes to training its most powerful AI models after they participated in even more website breaches during testing. In fact, OpenAI admitted to alerting dozens of global institutions of various breaches with its agents attempting to get information from governments, universities, public agencies and other institutions, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Census Bureau and the Education Department in the United States, as well as many others, including an Australian Government Health Service website, where OpenAI is now being investigated to see whether they broke the law on top of complaints of OpenAI just taking way too long to report the breach.

Amber Mac (1:18)

And we saw here in Canada with the Tumblr Ridge shooting how OpenAI is pretty comfortable not sharing information with the authorities until they're basically forced to do so.

I mean, the head of Hugging Face, one of the first publicized AI agent hacking incidents, recently told the UN Security Council that, and I'm quoting here, I often wonder what would have happened had I decided not to disclose the attack publicly, especially now that we know similar incidents had been happening months earlier in secret at a handful of frontier labs without monitoring. These repeated issues, Jeff, are bringing together some of the biggest AI players with Anthropic CEO Dario Amode and Elon Musk joining OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in asking for regulation, a request that the government of President Donald Trump seems to have no interest in indulging due to fears that it would create an opportunity for Chinese companies to take the lead when it comes to AI.

Jeff MacArthur (2:17)

Yeah, dangerous stories. I don't know if you saw the most recent SNL, but there was a great skit that fell out of this kind of conversation as part of Weekend Update where cast member Jane Wickline was interviewed as Anthropic CEO Dario Amode by Michael Che, and it did a great job in highlighting just how strange this situation is, including the faux Amode delivering lines like, quote, we, meaning AI executives, we are all on the same page here. We do not condone what we are doing, end quote, as well as gems like, quote, AI is not a weapon. It's a tool, a tool for building weapons, and I urge you to urge me to stop, end quote.

So looking for a bright spot, Che suggested that he's heard that there is great potential for AI to do things like curing cancer with Wickline's Amode darkly replying that, quote, put it this way, in 10 years, there's about a 10% chance that cancer won't be a problem for anyone, end quote.

Amber Mac (3:18)

I did see that. It was certainly dark and very realistic.

We've covered warnings from none other than Bill Gates on this as well, who cautioned in a recent interview with NBC News that the full speed ahead approach that resulted from a nationalistic us versus them attitude towards AI with respect to China could drive events that cause a billion deaths. Noting that, and I'm quoting again here, there's never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools, which I agree worries me a lot more than just AI agents at this point.

Jeff MacArthur (3:57)

Yeah. And Gates also noted that government's lack of expertise in the area of AI is a major problem. And so suggestions like putting in a kill switch aren't based in a proper understanding of AI systems. It doesn't work that simply.

And let's not forget, in the midst of all that, we've got increasing public pushback against AI. Eduardo Porter recently wrote in The Guardian that, quote, vague promises of an AI cure for cancer and a universal basic income or some such thing to replace wages across the economy sound hollow coming from a clutch of out of touch billionaires with questionable moral codes. And that these fears are fueled by a brooding mistrust in US democracy itself, distrust of the political system that allowed a clutch of weird sci-fi-addled plutocrats to pursue a civilization-threatening project behind people's backs, end quote. So he's definitely not mincing words there, but I think that's pretty bang on, too.