The REAL Reason They Suddenly Want to Pause AI (Not What You Think!) | Truth Block

Hurley (0:00)

Over the weekend, every powerful man in AI started begging for a slowdown and for the government to regulate them before it's too late. Dario Amodei wrote the essay, Elon Musk and Sam Altman jumped on board, and Bernie Sanders was calling for an outright ban on superintelligence by three in the afternoon. Then President Trump told them all no and called it a sick conspiracy against America. Today, we're gonna look at what they're actually asking for. Who already had the bill written before any of us heard about it? And while I think this all ends with a morning where you log into your bank account and the balance says zero. About a year ago, Peter Thiel prophesied it all in a conversation with the New York Times.

Peter Thiel (0:33)

The way the antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop and this is what you need to regulate.

Hurley (0:43)

So who ends up holding the switch when we all agree to be saved? And is there any money left that doesn't have one? This is Truth Block. I'm Hurley.

Let's mine truth.

It all started on Tuesday night with a resignation letter. 27-year-old Jacob Coxson, who had three years of penetrating research at OpenAI and then Anthropic. He posted a thread saying that these companies are racing straight into self-improving super intelligence and that they're gambling with our lives. He wrote that the people building this earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. The thread got 152 million views within the first day. This from an account with no posting history, which even Elon said he'd never seen before. And one of Cox's former colleagues, an alignment researcher still at Anthropic named Evan Hubinger, backed him publicly and said he personally puts the odds of AI killing every human being at greater than 10% within the decade. By Wednesday, Cox was on CNN, on Fox, and in a Wall Street Journal exclusive that according to Parker Thayer's timeline, went live about 18 minutes before the public posted. The first three accounts to quote tweet it did so inside of 15 minutes.

And all three of them run AI restriction policy shops funded through the same foundation, which advised an anthropic investor and board member to write those checks. And Bernie Sanders already had the super intelligence ban drafted. Then Cox went on national television with Anderson Cooper and described how the threat actually happened.

David Sachs (2:07)

Well, I initially just decided to leave.

Dario Amodei (2:09)

I thought I can't be part of this anymore.

Jacob Coxson (2:11)

But then I realized I could probably make some use of it.

Dario Amodei (2:15)

I did not expect it to go this viral.

Hurley (2:16)

So what I did is I wrote a Twitter thread out.

Dario Amodei (2:18)

I wrote it in a Google dog. I drafted it with a friend.

Jacob Coxson (2:20)

We collaborated.

Hurley (2:21)

Yeah, I had a few...

Jacob Coxson (2:22)

There were a few friends I discussed the best way of expressing myself with after I decided to leave.

Dario Amodei (2:29)

And then I also got some friends to retweet the thing.

Jacob Coxson (2:31)

I was like, let's try to make this a bit viral.

Dario Amodei (2:33)

But clearly there was latent demand for this thing to absolutely explode.

Hurley (2:37)

Whether he meant every word isn't really the question.

The question is who was already standing there with a press list and a finished bill, waiting for somebody exactly like him. Proverbs 18, 17 says, The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.

So let's examine it. If you're watching this show for any length of time, you know the one rule I care about most. And that's don't sell your Bitcoin.

But life happens. And sometimes you need dollars. And that's why this show is sponsored by Ledin.

Ledin lets you borrow dollars against your Bitcoin instead of selling. So you keep every satoshi and everything that comes with it. With Ledin, your Bitcoin stays in secure custody and is never lent out. Which is the part most people don't check until it's too late. Ledin has originated over 11 billion dollars in loans since 2018 without ever losing a single satoshi of client funds. So head to learn.ledin.io/simply to learn more. On Saturday morning, the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, published the essay, We Must Pace the Frontier. His argument is that AI is now improving itself faster than anyone can keep up with. So the industry has to deliberately slow down while third-party evaluations verify everybody's work. Elon Musk, quote, tweeted it and said Dario is right. Sam Altman agreed 90 minutes later and said open AI would do the same. And within hours, a lot of serious people read the timing completely differently. Michael Burry posted that competition is coming up fast, so slowing down benefits the incumbents. And that we are so awesome it could become dangerous is hype and puffery for an IPO. Devin Erickson wrote that they don't fear the machine, they fear the second implementer. Open source models don't have to beat you. They only have to get good enough, because nobody pays a data center by the GPU cycle for something their laptop can already do. And if you've hit the point of diminishing returns, you can't widen that gap by speeding up. The only move left is to slow everybody else down. And the money lines up with it. Altman said Saturday that going public right now would be ill-advised, which takes OpenAI off the board until at least 2027, while Anthropic is heading into the NASDAQ as soon as next month at a valuation of nearly $2 trillion.