Pick Your Poison: Zvi Mowshowitz on the Unipolar/Multipolar AGI Dilemma, OpenFace & Pacing the ...

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to have Zvi Mowshowitz back for another wide-ranging rundown of what has obviously been a wild time in the AI world. We begin with a mundane utility check, with Zvi describing how Fable is now serving as his editor, and a discussion of how up-to-date, or should I say, situationally aware, we want our AI assistants to be.
From there, it's on to the headlines. We get Zvi's take on everything, starting with the OpenFace incident, what it implies about the level of execution competence we can expect from frontier companies, and why moderate prudence won't be enough to deliver a good outcome. We also discuss the fact that Claude, despite greater emphasis on constitutional training, has similarly misbehaved. Wise Zvi believes that recent AI history, including the public response to both 4 and O3, suggests that market incentives won't be enough to bring about robust alignment. The potentially tricky spot that Meter and Redwood are now in as investigators, and what could be done to strengthen their position. The recent pacing the frontier letter, what sort of pacing deals we might see, and how they might be formed. How we should interpret recent advances in interpretability and AI consciousness research, and where we should and shouldn't attempt to shape AI's sense of self. How we can encourage greater breadth in AI research and diversity of AI minds. How I should vote in this week's hotly contested Michigan Senate primary in light of AI issues. And how Zvi thinks about making time for exercise, rest, and recovery amidst so much AI acceleration. At one point, Zvi describes the current situation as both a total less wrong victory and a total less wrong defeat. It's clear at this point that the AI safety community was right to worry about AI's taking extreme actions in pursuit of arbitrary, even silly, goals. And yet, here we are at what sure seems to be the beginning of recursive self-improvement, still seeking good answers to such fundamental questions as how can we avoid catastrophic misuse without dangerously concentrating power?
The reality today, Zvi says, is that there is no truly low-risk path available. The best we can do, at least until the next major warning shot and vibe shift, is to moderate race dynamics so that alignment and interpretability research have more time to mature. And simultaneously, we can execute defense-in-depth strategies to the very best of our ability. And even then, to some extent, we will probably have no choice but to pick our poison from a menu of genuinely scary risks.
With that, I hope you enjoy this sobering but often funny overview of the AI landscape with the one and only Zvi Mowshowitz.
Zvi Mowshowitz, welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Zvi Mowshowitz** (2:53)
Yeah, it's good to be here again. It's been a while.

**Nathan Labenz** (2:55)
It's been a while, and boy has a lot happened. Unbelievable. It's just crazy, and I know you're living it, and you're in the thick of it as much as just about anyone.
First, for starters today, with the incredible amount of information and activity in mind, I wanted to do a mundane utility check. How are you using AI to help keep up? Has it started to change your workflow beyond the Chrome extension that we talked about last time that automates very local operation type things, or are you still raw dogging it with your wetware in the skull?

**Zvi Mowshowitz** (3:31)
Fable has supercharged the extension to the extent that whenever there's anything, it does anything, I just tell it exactly what went wrong and what I want it to do instead, and then that one command reliably just works. I presume so, but also be good enough for this. I'm now doing it. The biggest other change is that AI editing is here. I used to not do an editing pass with the AI. It wasn't good enough to be worth it. Now, I have Fable and sometimes Opus, depending on how much I'm talking about cybersecurity in other related topics, and on one occasion, Opus 4.8, instead of 5, go through the post and give me a list of here's all the typos, here's all of the conceptual errors, here's all of the facts I need to check, here's the things that are missing or that could be strengthened, here's the things where it disagrees, and I found this to be very useful and it makes the post better. It does make the post a little bit slower because it is actually just an extra step. I do everything I would have done until that point and then I do this. But one reader messaged me, it's weird reading your post now that they don't have typos in them. They're taking a bit of getting used to. They are still the same post. Yes, that's exactly what I had in mind. I experimented with also using Sol, but Sol failed what I call Editor Bench, in the sense that Sol will say 99% confidence that you have this error here, and then at least half the time it's wrong.