Ten31 Timestamp: Revenge of the Nerds

Marty Bent (0:01)

85,399 United States debt tokens. That's what one Bitcoin is trading at right now. We'll pop overnight. We'll Monday morning overnight pop.

Ivan (0:10)

No question about it. I'm ready to be heard again.

Marty Bent (0:15)

It's nice to see. It's nice to see where we're at. Levels not seen since early February. So it's, I think we were in New York together, actually, when we were last at this price level.

If I recall correctly, we were talking about how over it was, but now we're so back.

Ivan (0:30)

So back once again. I think if we get to, if we add another few thousand, I'd have to look, consult my chart, but I think we're right up on a green year here.

If we get to, yeah, like we get to 87.5, despite everything that has happened, despite it being so over once again, despite the four-year cycle, the doomerism, war in Iran, et cetera, it would be a green year in that case if we held it. So pretty incredible.

Marty Bent (0:58)

It is how emotional this market is. It's very emotional. People let their emotions get the best of them, make rash decisions.

But par for the course, pattern recognition. I've been here before, will probably be here again. And we meet here on the first Monday morning in a couple of weeks.

Ivan (1:13)

Yeah, some travel of both of us in the past couple of weeks. But it's been a bad couple of weeks to stop sniffing glue, some serious headlines hitting over the last couple of weeks especially this past week, so glad we're able to make it happen again.

Marty Bent (1:30)

Yeah, a ton to talk about. The great slowdown is what most people are focused on. Dario Amadei, we must pace the frontier. Sam Altman, Brad Gerstner, Elon Musk, all coming out simultaneously, saying we need to slow the pace of AI progression. They're getting too smart. They're breaking out of their sandboxes. They're hacking the internet.

And we need to be safe. What's your, Ivan, I don't think we've talked about this one on one yet. I'm interested to get your read on this situation because I know what mine is.

Ivan (2:00)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's important that we have safe and effective solutions.

I think we should probably, we should take a two-week pause to flatten the curve of intelligence. You know, just to be safe. I think we should trust the experts, TM. And at least that's the line that I think a lot of people are trying to pedal over the last couple of weeks, to your point on pattern recognition. I think we've been here before to in a few other situations.

Marty Bent (2:26)

Yeah, how bad is it inside these frontier labs if they're?

Ivan (2:30)

Well, look, I think, so the slide here that we have to kick off the week is like showing Dario posts this thing Saturday morning, blows everyone's weekend, Sam Altman, Brad Gerstner, Elon even, and then a variety of other kind of leading acolytes in AI kind of immediately jump in within like 30 minutes to quote, tweet, and agree, and co-sign. A lot of people who famously kind of can't agree on anything, jumping in to talk about this all at the same time, looks, you put your sinful hat on, it looks a lot like an op, frankly. It looks just a little bit coordinated. It's funny because when this happened, I saw on my timeline, I put this in the newsletter, but simultaneously like this AGI is here, Skynet is here, we are well and truly screwed. We've got to do our two-week pause and hand over the experts. I saw the labs are totally cooked and they're scared of open-source and they want a regulatory mode. I saw this is all a conspiracy to crash the equity markets to send everyone into treasuries and a variety of other things flying around across that spectrum, which tells you no one really has any idea.

I think one thing that makes all this tough to untangle is that at least a couple of major figures involved in this whole, in the front here, are I think actually not saying these things out of bad faith. Like I don't actually, Sam, who knows, Gershner, Elon, whatever, I think they've got their different ways they play the game.

But my read is that a guy like Dario and the Anthropic guys, they come out of the EA camp. You could say that they're wrong, but I don't necessarily think that, I think they're true believers on some of this stuff. I think that there's a lot of less wrong influence there, and that makes it tough to disentangle what's disingenuous and what's actually coming from a place of good faith. All that said, I think over the last week, we've gotten interesting reports from other insiders and whistleblowers. There was a report I don't have on here from a few days ago, but from various people inside the labs saying basically, this is a trumped up sham to either to entrench a regulatory mode or to get some other kind of strategic benefit. We can speculate on what that is. We've seen some audits of various cybersecurity incidents that basically suggest that there was no rogue agent problem at all, and there were very simple controls that could have been put in place. Going forward, we'll be put in place to avoid some of these situations. We're not nearly at a Skynet type scenario. Notably, Jensen Wong of NVIDIA was quite emphatic that that was the case, and has recently publicly suggested that some of this may be coming from a desire to have a liability shield put in place for any untoward behaviors of models or ways that people use models in the future. All this is to say, there's a lot flying around, and I think that we should probably get into, I'll pause here, we should probably get into what the relevant takeaways from this will be going forward. But as it relates to what in the world was actually going on here, I think it's, I'd love to hear your take. I think it's a mix of things from some true believers and some people who are just callously, disingenuously, cynically playing the game.