THIS WEEK IN AI: Viral Doomer Tweet, Apple's New Releases, AI is Solving Math

Ejaaz (0:00)

This week, one of the top AI researchers in the world responsible for building OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude models, announced that humanity has about a 10% chance that we are going to die over the next decade due to AI.

Now, one of these posts went so viral that it got over 150 million views, which is the most viewed post on X in forever. And it was shared across every major media publication. Now, the question becomes, if AI is so fatal to humanity, why on earth do we keep building the things? OpenAI and Anthropic are in a race to build artificial general intelligence. But if it certifies that humanity is going to die, should we be building the thing? We're going to be unpacking all of this and a lot more. Now, the weirdest part about this bit of news is, it comes paired with breakthrough research, where the model that is supposedly meant to kill you is also solving the world's hardest mathematical problems, which have existed for 200 plus years. And in the third topic, which it's Josh's most exciting topic, if I had to guess, Apple announced a suite of new hardware devices, which includes the iPhone Duo, a new foldable iPhone, which he may or may not be buying. We don't know yet.

Josh (1:16)

We have so much to talk about with Apple. I cannot, you better stick around for this, because I've been waiting for my Apple moment for so long. But before we get to Apple, and we can start with the Doomer take, it breaks my heart that it has 150 million views, because all people want to talk about is how the world is going to end. And it's like there are these two opinions that are juxtaposed against each other, that are similar in their belief, but like contrasting in people's public opinions of them, in the sense that we have been talking about reaching the singularity for a very long time. We have been talking about all these sci-fi, futuristic versions of reality in which we are heading to. In fact, a lot of companies are claiming, OpenAI included, that like, hey, we've reached AGI. We are like here.

This is not a new or novel thing that we haven't been working towards. The concept of AGI has been around for a very long time. The concept of the singularity has been around for far longer, and we've thought out all the implications of what that looks like through the sci-fi books, through the movies you watch, through the TV shows. For some reason now, someone coming from within the labs is saying it out loud, and people are freaking out.

It seems to me, and we could talk about this a little bit, put our tinfoil hats on, that there is some sort of coordinated effort to push this message forward. I mean, one of the things that we should know with this account, Jacob Coxon, it is a young account with only one post on it, and the only post is this one tweet. And when I saw it, the account did not have many followers. Now it has a quarter of a million followers that's gained overnight. It is viewed by 150 million people and close to 750,000 likes. I've never seen this type of activity by a single post in my life.

And we spend a lot of time on the X platform. So it's interesting to see how it's been picked up. And what was interesting is a lot of people were doing kind of diligence on the dynamics of this post, where it got picked up, how it got picked up. And a lot of the earlier amplification came from within the Doomer groups, people who have been kind of pushing the scared narrative. And it's also written very well too. It's like, this is written, you guys, you and I, like we spend a lot of time trying to optimize posts, like how do we get people to care? How do we get people interested? This is like a hot post. This is written like a writer. Like this is someone who's trained at the art of X, not someone who's just like ripping something off the side for the first time. So it's an interesting thread. I mean, we can also talk about the thread, but I find the kind of tinfoil hat conspiracy to be interesting as well.

Ejaaz (3:29)

So the theme here is AI is going to kill us all. And you're right that this is a narrative that has been talked about for a while. But the question is, why is it important now? So before I put my tinfoil hat on, let's talk about like what he actually describes. He basically says, listen, the researchers both at Anthropic and OpenAI have been incredibly reckless when it comes to aligning the model. Now, if we just take that statement for what it is and look at the existing evidence that proves that, you don't have to look too far. Look at the OpenAI Hugging Face Institute, which were covered one, two, maybe even three times on the show in the last two weeks.