Tyler Cowen

**Tyler Cowen** (0:24)
So, there's new models which we think will be released if they receive approval, and I think some of them will, at least. That will be very powerful. First of all, the cyber defense, but also with cyber hacking. And those two are two sides of the same coin. So, pre-AI is a paper I looked at recently, and it estimated the costs of cyber security for the US economy are right now a trillion dollars a year.
That's a 2018 estimate. It has nothing to do with AI as we know it. So, that's a trillion dollars if you get whacked or you invest in defense. A million dollars is a lot of money.
In the short run, that number is likely to go up. It's probably up already. But the nice thing about AI is you can run checks on your system and find out what the vulnerabilities are and patch them.
But in terms of what is that cost, most of all in terms of expertise, it does cost you some money in the form of tokens, but the number of people who can do it and attend to your problems and fix them, that's very scarce. And now all of a sudden there are these AI agents out there that can do more and better hacking. So temporarily the balance of power has shifted in favor of the hackers. This will be a big problem. 10 years from now, I think the balance of power will definitely be shifted in favor of defense. The more time passes, the more it moves in the favor of defense. But with laggards, some people, institutions are just laggards, but it's not just that. Like how many experts are there out there who can patch up your systems? It's just not nearly enough. The people aren't trained. These new AI models, Fable 5 is the most famous one, have only been out on the market for some number of weeks, so we're just not ready.

**Rick Rubin** (2:05)
Do you think it will continue evolving at the same pace, or is it going to plateau at some point?

**Tyler Cowen** (2:12)
Well, at some point, I think it will plateau at some point.
But in the meaningful sense, it seems to be accelerating for the foreseeable future. The people who work in the sector at the major labs are reporting that it's accelerating with no obvious end in sight. But yes, at some point, I think it will asymptote. But that's not the relevant decisions we face now, that there's new and much better models every month or two, and that's because we're using the AI to improve the AI and do the programming. That pace seems to be accelerating. So whatever problems we have, at least for a while, they're going to multiply at a faster rate. Again, we're simply not ready. Governments aren't ready for this. You can say, oh, we're not going to let these models be released. But again, there's models from all over. Most of all, China is the relevant alternative. If you don't build out your models, they'll use the other models to hack you. Those other models might be 15 percent worse than what you've got, but they're still good enough to hack you probably. So it's a kind of race where you've got to stay ahead of the bad guys.
We're playing this race. I think we should be playing this race. We've got to win, but it's nerve-racking. And here we are in the middle of a race that we didn't really plan for.

**Rick Rubin** (3:27)
If you were to guess when the plateau would be, do you imagine it being in five years, ten years, twenty years? How long?

**Tyler Cowen** (3:35)
I think it depends really on the area.
So if you ask an AI, what is the meaning of life? You'll get an answer slightly better than what you would get from a very smart human. But it's not that good an answer. It's just not a very well defined question. And I think 30 years from now, you ask the much better AIs, what's the meaning of life? The answer won't really be any better yet. So on what's the meaning of life, we've already plateaued. It's not a very legible sort of answer that can be spelt out in words.
But if it's proving math theorems, or trying to cure cancer, or coming up with new ideas in chemistry or material science, the plateau does not seem at all close. I would think more than 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. I don't know. I don't feel that I'm qualified to have an opinion, and I'm not sure anyone is, because it's also new.