Scouting the AI Revolution with Robert Scoble and "Ben's Bites" creator Ben Tossell

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Turpentine is a network of podcasts, newsletters, and more covering tech, business, and culture, all from the perspective of industry insiders and experts.
We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now.
At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from AI with Cognitive Revolution, to Econ 102 with Noah Smith. Our other shows drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, and investors, like Moment of Zen and my show Upstream. We're looking for industry leading hosts and shows along with sponsors. If you think that might be you or your company, email me at erikaturpentine.co. That's E-R-I-K at turpentine.co.

**Robert Scoble** (0:46)
I tried to talk Bill Gates out of $300 million one time, actually a little bit more, but he's like, I don't think so, Scoble. So I know how hard it is to get a corporation the size of a Microsoft to spend $300 million. They just spent $10 billion on chat on OpenAI. With AI, it's not where are you today, it's how fast is it improving. Even ChatGPT, if you say, I can't use it, it generates too much bullshit for my work, right? How many more updates do you need before it's perfect?
Every hour is changing.

**Ben Tossell** (1:18)
Everyone should always want less tools.
I don't need to use 10 things when one thing will do. AI will be in all of the big tools, all the big platforms, we're seeing them all move to push stuff out every single day. How much of their market share could be eaten by these smaller tools who do take an AI first approach? Because then I think the details really matter.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:40)
Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hi everyone and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, we're talking to two more prolific AI Scouts, Robert Scoble and Ben Tossel. I've used that term AI Scout a couple times recently, including to describe myself. So before diving into today's episode, I wanted to take just a minute to tell you how I think about the role of the AI Scout and how it relates to the show.
Zooming way out, as I often ask our guests to do, I really do believe that there's a good chance that we're entering a critical period in human history. While the best AIs still generally fall short of human expert performance, they do now consistently outperform the average human on a huge number of challenging and economically valuable tasks. And of course, they are only continuing to improve.
Considering that their architectures and training processes are so fundamentally different from our own, that their strengths and weaknesses are also so distinct from ours, and that their capabilities are proving difficult to predict and their behaviors sometimes hard to control, I believe that society is flying very rapidly and all too blindly into an increasingly hard to predict AI future. In other contexts, governments and large corporations routinely make major investments in intelligence and competitive research to better understand both their rivals and their market dynamics. And while I certainly hope that AI never becomes a rival to humanity, it seems only prudent at this point that society should develop specialists who develop themselves to studying AI from every angle, at every level of abstraction, using all the available information and all relevant analytical frameworks so that we can better characterize AI behavior and understand AI systems as they actually exist rather than how we might wish they were.
I call this new role the AI Scout, taking inspiration in part from Julia Galef, author of The Scout Mindset, who emphasizes the value of working toward accurate beliefs even when they may lead to uncomfortable conclusions.
To become the most effective AI Scout that I can be, I aim to spend 50% of my time just studying AI fundamentals and keeping up with the latest developments. Talking to the entrepreneurs, builders, researchers, and fellow Scouts that you've heard on this show has been a major part of that for me over the last few months. But I also spend a lot of time reading research papers, trying all sorts of AI products, using the latest models, and of course scrolling Twitter and listening to some other great podcasts.
My goal in all this is to have no major AI blind spots, and to continually deepen my understanding of the most critical questions in the space, so that I can help my teammates, the companies that I advise, you, the Cognitive Revolution audience, and perhaps even policymakers and society at large, understand AI more accurately and ultimately make better decisions about how to develop, deploy, and use it. In addition to the show, I'm also starting to publish some more polished and hopefully enduring AI analyses. Recent topics include LLM pricing trends and their economic implications, the competitive dynamics between the leading AI companies, whether GPT-4 can do science, and lots more besides. To get that content, if you don't already, I encourage you to follow me on Twitter where I am Labenz, and my DMs are open, and also to sign up for our newsletter on the website cognitiverevolution.ai.