The Case Against an AI Pause | Eddy Lazzarin

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The AI debate increasingly asks us to consider the probability of doom. Eddy Lazzarin thinks we should also be asking about the probability of abundance. In this episode, A16z crypto general partner, Eddy Lazzarin, joins Theo Jaffee on MTS to debate AI safety, the calls to slow development, and what we risk giving up when progress is delayed. They discuss why Eddy sees many of today's AI incidents as cybersecurity and control problems, rather than signs of super intelligence, and whether existing tools like liability, reputation, market incentives, and better technical controls can make increasingly capable systems safer.

They also get into independent AI evaluators, effective altruism, and what happens as debates that largely develop inside Silicon Valley collide with a much broader political conversation.

Theo Jaffee (0:50)

All right, we're back. We're live with Eddy Lazzarin, who's a general partner at A16z crypto, and one of the Internet's strongest soldiers, strongest advocates of open source, of AI accelerationism, and of techno-optimism. Eddy, welcome to MTS.

Eddy Lazzarin (1:08)

Thanks very much. It's amazing here. The energy is incredible. What a spot.

Theo Jaffee (1:13)

Yeah.

So, man, where to start? Like, the last couple of weeks have been such this, like, preference cascade flood of AI safetyism, effective altruism, and the like. And there have been only a few, like, good accounts offering, like, good counterarguments. So, like...

Eddy Lazzarin (1:33)

Counterarguments on which side?

Theo Jaffee (1:36)

Like, counterarguments against, like, the AI. Doom narrative and against, like, the...

Eddy Lazzarin (1:42)

Yeah, I think it's become very high status all of a sudden to be very concerned with safety. And I think that we've gotten to a point where, you know, it's more important to sort of tastefully share your P. Doom, so to speak, than it is to actually examine the history of how these massive technological changes develop. And I think a lot of people are leaving a lot of very interesting concepts, a lot of interesting ideas on the table. You know, a lot of people messaged me, I tweeted the other day about P. Abundance, right, P. Abundance. I think we're putting the car before the horse a little bit when we worry about safety, before we worry about what we're leaving on the table and what the costs of delay are.

And furthermore, you know, how we should conceive of accountability, conceive of safety, conceive of all the things around how to make these systems really useful. Being safe is critical, right, like any industry needs to take responsibility for making its products safe. But it's definitely the case that the conversation isn't about safety in the typical manner, right? It's about something else. It's a blend of genuine cyber security concerns, sort of philosophical, millenarian arguments about the end times.

There's a bunch of things in the mix, and they get a little bit confused. And so I think picking them apart is really useful.

Theo Jaffee (3:08)

So, where do you get off the AI doom argument? There's a pretty standard orthodox argument that's like, AI will become super intelligent, as in much more capable than humans or than all of humanity in the near future.

And if it is not sufficiently aligned with human values, and is not bound by constraints in the way that individual humans are, like law, and ultimately the ability to have that law enforced on them, then they will have no need for humanity, and then they might kill everyone.

Eddy Lazzarin (3:43)

Yeah, I mean, there's so many assumptions in that argument. That's like a stairway to heaven full of arguments.

There's the presumption that there's no control. We already have quasi-super intelligent beings in the world. Corporations, countries, none of them are aligned with each other.

All right, they don't have any built-in, guaranteed alignment. They didn't go through HR training to become a corporation, to become a country.

We don't test the alignment of any entities as a prerequisite for their existence. That's just not the way the world works. Instead, we use laws. In the case that laws, like in software, are too slow, we use cryptography. We use actual mechanisms to limit them. There's a whole array of different types of mechanisms we put in place to try to control things. I think that they can control highly, highly capable beings. Now, without getting too far into the super intelligence thing, remember, the most powerful and most enthralling form of argument that we have, the one that's making everyone crazy and very interested, is around super intelligence. But we're quite a ways away from that. I think that there's a lot of little frictions and tiny things that we will have to jump over, and many things that we'll learn on the way there. When the present reality, the things that we're talking about, like the hugging face stuff, the gym hacking incident, that was a really cool one. That was an interesting one. Those are cyber security failures. Those are definitely control failures. And they're not, in my view, they're not little glimpses of a super intelligence that's about to throw off its shackles, so to speak, and go wild on us.