ModelTalk: Pacing the Frontier

Jordan Schneider (0:00)

The only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart, high IQ president, and the USA has that in spades. The Trump administration has stopped AI people from doing bad or potentially bad things, like Dario, Anthropic, who is now pretending to be a perfect little angel, and we will continue to do so. We already have tremendous criminal and regulatory power over these companies. There is a sick conspiracy going on against AI and data centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. Whoever wins AI wins. We are leading China and all others and will continue to do so. Conspiracy theorists, treasonists, traitors, and leakers, beware.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. Ladies and gentlemen, ModelTalk is back. Nathan is married in the depths of Maine.

I am wearing a Blueberries for Sal t-shirt. Shout out to Maine. Where do we start this timeline?

Nathan Lambert (1:08)

Hugging Face, Open AI.

Jasmine Sun (1:09)

I mean, I think the biggest, there's like the pacing letter in early August, and then there's Hugging Face like shortly after that. And I think that it's been that sort of those two things, everything's been escalating since. And then obviously, like, the new reports about, oh yeah, Hugging Face was so much worse than we thought. And the Jacob Cox entry is interesting, obviously, because it broke containment, and like Cheryl Crowe and Maggie Rogers are posting about it, and he's like hanging out with Bernie or whatever.

I don't know. I mean, I think like what's most interesting to me is like, I had done this data center thing, and then mid-August was the Hugging Face incident had showed up on people's radar, but it wasn't like huge yet. At the time, people were freaked out about data centers in a really big way, and so all the politicians were talking about that. I feel like some of the general diffuse populist anti-AI sentiment has then collided with like, oh yeah, also the safety shit is super real now. We are really worried about these agent swarms that are really misaligned, and actually now the AI safety folks and the broader public that was already souring on AI, souring on data center, and souring on the companies have like, collided into a mega moment for AI safety and regulation. So that's sort of like how I've been tracking it, is since like early August probably.

Jordan Schneider (2:34)

What do you guys think? Do the sign waves all kind of hitting to now we have, you know, Daniel on Joe Rogan?

Jasmine Sun (2:44)

Amazing. Naysaura's on Tucker?

Nathan Lambert (2:48)

Naysaura's on Tucker is way more crazy.

Jordan Schneider (2:53)

Was this inevitable? Was this like just a happenstance of events? Is there a grand EA media comms conspiracy to make this all happen? Like how contingent is the past week that we've just seen? Do you think, Jasmine?

Jasmine Sun (3:10)

I guess like I was wondering for a long time whether these two sides would collide. Because I think there are internal debates, for example, within the EA community, whether the frontier safety people should engage with people like Tucker Carlson, who are seen as not aligned with them on a bunch of other issues, like maybe a not epistemically rigorous truth-seeking guy.

In general, I think that there is a lot of hesitation from the more technocratic wings of AI safety about whether to talk to Bernie, whether to talk to Tucker, whether to try to make this like a gigantic mass movement or if that would be destructive. I wasn't sure whether it was going to happen, honestly, because for a long time also the left and people who didn't trust AI people also didn't trust the safety people because they were seen as like part of the same Silicon Valley tribe of, you know, SF and Berkeley weirdos. And so I think it is surprising but not out of, you know, not out of the imagination to see that in fact that coalition did emerge. I think it was sort of like the left got over its distrust of AI safety and its belief that maybe AI was fake. I think Bernie probably did more than anybody to wake up like the broad populace and the left to think that like, oh shoot, like AI is real, AI risk is real. This isn't just like a fake marketing tactic made up by the companies. And so we've seen kind of a phase shift there. And then I guess like the public got so riled up about data centers plus like a bunch of other simmering anti-AI stuff that when Hugging Face hit, it like broke through just enough that they decided to care about actual AI safety and frontier safety stuff. And at that point, if you are working on frontier safety, like why not build that coalition, I think. So I don't know.