Episode 592: AI and Relationships: The Future of Connection, Dating, and Loneliness

Habits and Hustle

Host Jennifer Cohen interviews AI expert Hamet Watt to discuss the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence and its societal impact. Th

Key takeaways

• OpenAI's new Astra model achieved a score of 100 on an intelligence benchmark, signaling progress toward AGI.
• Former Anthropic employees have raised alarms regarding the existential risks posed by rapidly advancing AI.

Main topics

• OpenAI Astra and AGI benchmarks
• AI safety and existential risk

Notable quotes

We are approaching a place where the AIs are significantly smarter than the humans that have created them.

Conclusion

While AI offers unprecedented opportunities for scientific advancement

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it! Speaker 1 (0:06) Welcome to another solo episode with me, Jennifer Cohen, on Habits & Hustle. And we have a treat. We have a treat because you guys have not met my friend Hamei Watt, but you're going to meet him now. So just some background, you know, Shani used to do a lot of these foils with me. She was my foiler, and I would do some solos, and she would kind of like banter with me. Speaker 2 (0:31) What's a foiler again? You. Okay. Speaker 1 (0:34) Basically someone who I can like shoot the shit with basically and like kind of like go back and forth with. And I really liked Shani because she was, A, she's super smart and she has like interesting perspectives and she can challenge me. And she's just, I like her. She's like a friend of mine. Got it. But she's now gone to Israel for, I think, an unknown, like an amount of time that is just not. Forever, basically. Basically forever. We don't know yet. It's indefinite. How about that? Indefinite. Got it. So anyway, I'm actually introducing you as you're talking to me. So now I found another potential FOILer who I get along with swimmingly. And his name is Hamei Speaker 2 (1:19) Watts. Speaker 1 (1:19) Did Speaker 2 (1:19) you Speaker 1 (1:19) say Speaker 2 (1:19) swimmingly? Speaker 1 (1:20) Yeah, swimmingly. I Speaker 2 (1:20) never heard that expression. You Speaker 1 (1:21) haven't? Speaker 2 (1:22) No. So we get along swimmingly? Like we Speaker 1 (1:24) get along well, like we like interact well. We've got a good like dynamic kind of thing. Speaker 2 (1:29) I've Speaker 1 (1:29) known Hame for 10 years. Speaker 2 (1:31) About that, yeah. Speaker 1 (1:32) 10 years, okay. And I think we've always kind of, we always clicked from day one. We always like had a nice little banter. Hame is a great guy. You're going to see very quickly why I like him so much. He's got a very good sense of humor. He's very smart and sharp. And he, like he brings a really good perspective. He's a founder and he's an investor. He's had a lot of success in his professional and personal life. He used to run a fund called Upfront Venture. Well, I was a partner at Upfront. A partner. Excuse me. I didn't run Speaker 2 (2:03) it. I didn't run it. What's the Speaker 1 (2:04) difference? Tell us. Speaker 2 (2:05) There's plenty of people that run the firm. I was just one of the folks that was investing and working on companies. That's it. Speaker 1 (2:09) Okay. Speaker 2 (2:10) Nothing too special. Speaker 1 (2:11) Well, what do you mean? Like, okay, if you're a partner, weren't you one of the people who ran the fund? Speaker 2 (2:16) Well, actually, in most venture funds, there's managing partners that typically run the fund and their partners that might do investments. Speaker 1 (2:22) Oh, so you were Speaker 2 (2:22) below the managing partner. Okay. But Speaker 1 (2:25) now, that was like back when. Now, Hame has his own fund. Can I say who's backing it? Yeah. I could. Okay. So Hame is like a superstar. Really, he is. He's got a great eye for like innovation. He runs a human performance lab and is a part of creating some of the... coolest brand and products right now on the market. No, it's true. And he's very, he's like an expert in AI and human performance. And he's so good that Amazon and Google are backing his fund, which is pretty impressive. Yeah, it's Speaker 2 (3:02) exciting. Speaker 1 (3:03) It's exciting and super impressive. Speaker 2 (3:05) Yeah. Enough about me. Let's get into this stuff. What do you Speaker 1 (3:08) think of me? Like, enough about me. What do you think of me? So anyway, that's who Hame is. So just now when you see him, that's who he is. So welcome, Hame, to the podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you for being here. Speaker 2 (3:20) I'm honored to be here. Oh, Speaker 1 (3:21) the honor is all mine. So thank you. So since we've never done this before, I figured I would pick a topic and then you and I can just like riff on it for like 10, 15 minutes. Okay. Okay. And the topic, the first one I want to really kind of go over with you is. I mean, since you are a special, like an expert in AI, I think we should start with something like a softball. Okay, good. Good Speaker 2 (3:45) week to be talking about AI. Speaker 1 (3:47) Why? Tell me. Speaker 2 (3:48) Well, last week there was a bunch of announcements. I'm sure you saw the OpenAI announcement. Tell Speaker 1 (3:52) us, because maybe some people have. This is exactly what I want you to do. Oh, good. Speaker 2 (3:56) Okay. So Speaker 1 (3:57) tell me, is there anything, what's new on the horizon for AI? Speaker 2 (4:01) Well, OpenAI announced a new model. They call it Astra. their sixth model, I think. Yes. And it's scored like 100 on the benchmark for AGI. So they're basically going to have to rethink the whole scale for how you measure how great these or how strong these AI models are. Speaker 1 (4:19) What do you mean it scored 100? What does that mean? Well, the average Speaker 2 (4:21) human, I think, scores around a 40 on this scale in terms of intelligence, this benchmark for intelligence. And this scored 100. So people are saying this is very close, scary close to AGI. And if you've played with it, it's insane. It's just insanely good. Speaker 1 (4:37) How is it, if this is the chat GPT, which is open AI, Speaker 2 (4:41) does Speaker 1 (4:42) that make Claude and all the other ones now less? Yes, but Speaker 2 (4:49) Anthropic... Because Speaker 1 (4:49) they're always competing, right? Yeah, they're always Speaker 2 (4:52) competing. And Anthropic is going to announce something in the next week or so. So they're going to, you know, they're going to one-up each other each time. Can they Speaker 1 (4:59) go higher than 100? Speaker 2 (5:00) That's the question. I mean, there's potentially a new scale that they have to develop to figure out what that intelligence layer, what that intelligence level should be. But right now, this most recent OpenAI model scored at 100. Speaker 1 (5:12) So, okay, so which one do you, like, of all the AI... platforms, which is your favorite? Well, Speaker 2 (5:19) we have our own harness and platform at Share. So we use all the models and it really depends on what we're building and what we're using. Okay. But personally, I had probably been defaulting more recently to Claude, although I'm now kind of spending more time with OpenAI as of a week and a half ago. Because of this new thing? Because of this new thing. And it's crazy because also, I think it was either the beginning of this week or maybe the end of last week. Two Anthropic employees left Anthropic because they said, we're getting dangerously close to AI that could wipe us out. Right? Really? We're getting dangerously close. I think they said there is almost a 10 % chance that AI could wipe us out, which I don't know what they meant by that. They're reasonably senior folks at Anthropic. They left under some sort of swarm of... controversy, but it's kind of a scary and exciting time at the same time. I tend to be an optimist, so I don't think it's going to wipe us out. Speaker 1 (6:15) How can it wipe us out? It's basically like machines are going to take over humans. This is literally what the sci-fi movies were talking about. Yes. And now the people who are the humans at the sci-fi companies or the AI companies are actually scared of what they, they're smarter than the people who built it. Speaker 2 (6:31) Yes, I think we are approaching a place where the AIs are significantly smarter than the humans that have created them. Speaker 1 (6:40) How does that happen? Speaker 2 (6:42) How much time do we have? No, Speaker 1 (6:44) no, this is actually, I think a lot of people are very, like this is, before we can do another hot take with something else, but I think it's really interesting. Like, how does that happen? How do you build something? A human being builds something that ends up