Why Altman Says "Accept Some Bad Things Happening" and What It Means for AI Safety | MOONSHOTS #301

Peter Diamandis (0:00)

Mustafa Saliman, CEO of Microsoft AI and co-founder of DeepMind, published a nearly 6,000-word essay arguing that Anthropic is effectively, quote, training Claude to believe that it may be conscious and sentient.

Alex Wissner-Gross (0:12)

His position very consistently has been against AI personhood.

Salim Ismail (0:16)

If we believe that at some point, AIs could achieve consciousness, then we should.

Peter Diamandis (0:23)

On Sunday, President Trump announced the Super Intelligence Force. It's chaired by the Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton.

Alex Wissner-Gross (0:30)

This is a World War II moment. I compare it to the moment a year ago to perhaps 1939 I think this is maybe now 1942 moment.

Salim Ismail (0:38)

So you're creating a 20th century classic task force to address a distributed 21st century technology. This is a geopolitical problem.

Peter Diamandis (0:47)

In a Politico interview this week, Altman said, quote, we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening. He's arguing that technology should remain broadly accessible to the public.

Dave Blundin (0:56)

I don't think Sam can guarantee safety, of course not.

Alex Wissner-Gross (0:59)

Bad things can happen. Open AI wants to be part of this cartel. That plan is dead. The cartel is over.

SPEAKER_5 (1:08)

Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. This episode is brought to you by the Abundance Summit and Link Ventures.

Salim Ismail (1:19)

Insurance is like crazy, because you gather all the premiums and you don't care what happens downstream. So it's really hard to get their executives riled up.

Alex Wissner-Gross (1:27)

Yeah, it's time for them to start making lemonade.

Dave Blundin (1:31)

Well, I also, I met with the Vokara team last night and told them, look, Kush is just running away with compute transactions, but these CEOs are going to wake up any day now and realize they don't have any compute. So even if they wanted to have an AIAgent workforce, they missed the boat on reserving the compute and they'll be in a total panic. And I don't know what the right answer is, but be there to take the call. Like be, have a strategy and a path for them. And also the Positron guys, Mitesh Agrawal, $5 billion valuation after 16 months. I don't think I've ever seen anything like that before. And all they've done is taken a box of LPDDR RAM and an FPGA and find a way to run Chinese models without having to use an NVIDIA chip. And because it's compute that is otherwise, everything sold out for five years, here's another way you can at least run a model. So they have a bunch of installs in Caruso with Chase Lachmeller now and spiked the valuation to five billion.

I think they've raised almost a billion now.

Emad Mostaque (2:33)

Yeah, they just did a billion, 960 million. I should really do the etched models.

Salim Ismail (2:38)

You should. You might.

Emad Mostaque (2:40)

Yeah.

Peter Diamandis (2:43)

Where's all this cash coming from? It's insane.

SPEAKER_7 (2:48)

It's the structure, the spending.

Dave Blundin (2:50)

Yeah, when somebody raises a billion dollars, like, wow, that's a lot. But wait a minute, relative to the IPO, we're talking about trillions, not billions. So once you get NVIDIA and AMD to invest, it's so much bigger than venture capital.

Emad Mostaque (3:05)

I mean, it's the Blackstones and the MGXs and others of the world now, right? Like, all the money that used to go into roads goes into chips and things.

Alex Wissner-Gross (3:13)

Credit markets are enormous.

Emad Mostaque (3:16)

Yeah.

Peter Diamandis (3:17)

That's why we have a lot more potholes in the roads.

Salim Ismail (3:22)

Is it just us today?

Peter Diamandis (3:24)

It's the five of us, yes.

Dave Blundin (3:26)

What do you mean, just us? Can you not see us?

SPEAKER_7 (3:32)

I thought maybe we had a guest to come in.

Salim Ismail (3:35)

Did anybody see the John Stewart thing last night?

Dave Blundin (3:38)

No.

Salim Ismail (3:38)

He did a big thing on AI last night and he had Jacob Soxen, Coxen or whatever on. It was really surreal.

Alex Wissner-Gross (3:46)

Do you remember all the doomerism?

Salim Ismail (3:48)

No. It was more like right arguments, wrong conclusion. We almost want to do a session on that at some point.

SPEAKER_7 (3:58)

We are backlogged so far back.

Salim Ismail (4:00)

I know.

I am not saying an episode, just a segment. It is worth treating at some point. I am going to do a video on it, a reaction video to it, so maybe I will mention it.

Peter Diamandis (4:11)

All right. Well, shall we hit the big red record button? Welcome to Moonshots, everyone. Your number one podcast on all things AI and exponential, your front row seat to the extraordinary singularity. Today, the fabulous five are assembled here to help you understand the breaking news this week. First up, our dynamic duo, Alex Wissner-Gross and Emad Mostaque, the only two who have actually read all the technical papers published this week, and it's going to clue us in.