AI Panic: Dario’s Warning, Trump’s Dismissal, and OpenAI’s IPO Delay

Pivot

Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway dissect the growing AI panic, featuring Dario Amodei's call for a slowdown, Trump's dismissal of concerns, a

Key takeaways

• Dario Amodei warns AI development must slow due to existential risks.
• Trump downplays AI dangers, reflecting broader political dismissal of tech threats.

Main topics

• AI safety and regulation
• Political responses to technological disruption

Notable quotes

"I saw hundreds of homeless. And of course, it got clipped. San Francisco still sucks." – Scott Galloway

Conclusion

The episode concludes with a stark warning: while AI risks are real, t

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) Support for the show comes from CoreWeave. Everywhere you look, AI is expanding what we thought was possible. And at the center of it all is CoreWeave. Medical research and diagnosis, education, complex visual effects for movies, science and technology breakthroughs. CoreWeave powers AI pioneers around the world with purpose-built tech, building what's never been built before. CoreWeave is the essential cloud for AI. Ready for anything, ready for AI. To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to coreweave.com slash ready for anything. Speaker 4 (0:33) Do you hear that? That sound, right? That means that summer's officially here. It means that grown adults just sprint into the street for a frozen dessert shaped like a cartoon. But this summer, Mint Mobile has a better treat. Every plan, including Unlimited, is $15 a month. And unlike ice cream, it won't drip down your wrist or look nothing like the picture. Does anyone have any cash? Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. May slow when network is busy. See terms. Speaker 8 (1:04) I'm Ina Garten. I have a new podcast called Happy Hour with Ina. Each week, I'm inviting a really interesting guest to join me for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. I'll be getting personal with actors, chefs, comedians, musicians, and writers I admire. So grab a snack, pull up a chair, and join us. You can watch by searching for Happy Hour with Ina on YouTube, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Don't we all need to have more fun? Speaker 6 (1:41) You have this weird shadow on your face. Speaker 1 (1:43) Oh, I know, because I'm waiting for it. I'm just getting something. I'm scared. Speaker 6 (1:50) We don't need shadows for that. Speaker 1 (1:54) Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And Speaker 6 (2:00) I'm Scott Galloway. Speaker 1 (2:01) Scott, I just did an interview with Jess Tarloff, your side piece. Or you're the hair side piece, really, I think. I think that's how I'm going to characterize it now. Speaker 7 (2:08) Tell us about it. You're interviewing her about her name? For her Speaker 1 (2:09) book. Speaker 3 (2:10) For her book. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's called I Disagree, and it's about getting along better even in disagreement, which Speaker 7 (2:15) we do Speaker 3 (2:15) often, actually. Speaker 7 (2:17) Our book would so be called And I Was Right by Kara Swisher. Speaker 1 (2:22) No, no. Speaker 7 (2:23) You mean, let's rake Scott over the coals Speaker 6 (2:25) for something stupid he said off mic that my friends are giving me a hard time on? Speaker 1 (2:28) Well, why do you keep saying stupid things off mic, on mic? Speaker 7 (2:32) Stupid is, stupid does, whatever Forrest Gump used to say. Speaker 1 (2:36) But Scott, seriously, here's how my day went this week. I think I was at a kid thing. Phone rings. Mayor of San Francisco. Speaker 7 (2:44) Uh-oh. Hey. Sorry. Let me just apologize up front. Speaker 1 (2:48) Girl. What the fuck? Essentially, he doesn't talk like that because Daniel Lurie is the nicest person on the planet. Speaker 7 (2:54) And Speaker 1 (2:54) he's like, hey, Scott said something. I said, I fucking saw it. He took one block. He took a he went on the worst block of San Francisco and then decided all of San Francisco is like that. And I said, I heard that fucker. And he goes, no, no, I see. He has a point of view, but we've been working. He was infinitely Speaker 6 (3:11) reasonable. And Speaker 1 (3:12) I was like, don't be reasonable for that asshole. But then I gave him your phone number. And he did. He called you. He called you. Speaker 7 (3:19) So just some context for the listeners. I was in San Francisco for our Odu, whatever it was we were doing. And I Speaker 6 (3:29) love the Austin proper in Austin. And so I stayed at the San Francisco proper, which I would describe as dark and dingy, but expensive. And I love San Francisco. I have huge affection for it. I think physically it's the most beautiful city in the union. And my sister and I. I said, let's walk to Cafe Zuni. I haven't been there in 25 years. I love that restaurant. We walked, I guess it was about a mile. I looked it up on maps. I said, it'll be nice to walk. And Speaker 2 (3:55) quite frankly, it just felt very, very ugly and very dystopian in terms of the number of homeless, number of people struggling. Speaker 6 (4:02) And I went on the next day on the podcast and I said, look, I said, San Francisco still has real problems. And I said, I saw hundreds of homeless. And of course, it got clipped. San Francisco still sucks. And my sister, to her credit, who is more center right than I am center left, said, it's gotten better. And she said, Speaker 2 (4:22) we're in a really bad part of town right now. Anyways, I said this. The clip goes viral because people. understandably got offended and pushed back on, you know, douchebag from New York and London shitposting San Francisco with a misrepresentative sample. And I get a 415 call, which I never answer if Speaker 6 (4:42) it's unidentified, but for some reason I pick it up and I hear, Scott, it's Mayor Lurie. I'm like, oh, fuck. Speaker 1 (4:47) I gave him your number. I totally did. I thought for a second, I thought, no, I'll give it to him. Sure, Mayor Lurie. Speaker 2 (4:53) Anyways, he was, the guy couldn't have been more thoughtful. He's like, He wasn't defensive or contradicting me. He said he wanted to know exactly where I walked, exactly what I saw. And we had a very thoughtful conversation around the homeless issue, which every city official will tell you is the most intractable, difficult issue to face. And I asked him to just send me some stats on San Francisco because he said it is getting better. But just some stats. Car break-ins, 22-year lows, down 83 % between 2017 and 2025. Unsheltered homelessness at lowest level in 15 years, with the fewest encampments on our streets since the city started counting in 2019. The Reset Speaker 6 (5:40) Center, where law enforcement can bring individuals who are using drugs in public, is referring 39 % of admitted individuals to some form of services. for example, treatment recovery shelter Speaker 2 (5:50) and getting cops back on the street in under five minutes. I think of this as, I mean, first of all, this guy is impossible not to like. But I think this is an example of good governance at a state and local level. And what's plagued us is all of these guys and gals see themselves as the next president and start talking about Israel or start talking about Trump. No, just do what Mayor Lurie does and says. The biggest problem right now is crime and homelessness, and I'm going to attack that, and I'm not going to offend the other half by being an ideologue. I'm just going to focus on operations and being the executive I was elected to be. Speaker 3 (6:27) Yeah. For those who don't know, he had a background with a foundation that's very similar to the Robin Hood Foundation in San Francisco, that he was working on these issues. So he's very familiar with them. The other thing, he's been helped in the way other mayors weren't by a Supreme Court ruling that allowed people to... stop the encampments. That was blocked for many, many years, so you couldn't do anything. You got sucked up into all these sort of homeless legal industrial complex that stopped you from doing that. He's improved it a lot, and it's because of a wide range of things. But he really is an ideal mayor for the moment in terms of solving things. And he has a very even-handed, you know, there'll be controversy around him. Is he pushing this? Is he doing that? And everything else, because it's a very difficult city to govern. But I appreciate that you talked to him. That was very fun. Speaker 6 (7:10) Well, I want to be clear. It's not fair of me to take 24 hours in an isolated area and make a generalization about San Francisco. And you live there. And so your senses, and I think you just answered my question, your senses things are distinctly better. Speaker 3 (7:27) Yes, distinctly. So anyway, I appreciate it. I'm glad that you do. Next time you stay at my house, which is beautiful, and Louie will make you pancakes. Speaker 6 (7:34) I want to be able to call someone and yell at them about room service, and I want to walk around. I'm just not, I'm not a good house guest. Speaker 3 (7:40) You can yell at Louie. Louie will pretend that it's a hotel. It's a beautiful house. I have in a beautiful section where there are not homeless people. Speaker 6 (7:47) I've been to your house. You have a beautiful home. Speaker 1 (7:49) Anyway, thank you for talking to him. I keep Speaker 6 (7:51) thinking I'm going to like run into Tracy Chapman in the hallway. Speaker 1 (7:54) She's there. She's nearby. I Speaker 6 (7:56) don't know why. I imagine Speaker 7 (7:57) you being very good friends with her. Speaker 1 (7:58) I know her. I know her. I don't know her well. I think she's still in San Francisco. Speaker 7 (8:02) Yeah, she lives around the corner. Speaker 1 (8:04) Yeah, she lives really close to me. Anyway, let's go on for what we're doing. First, Donald Speaker 3 (8:09) Trump is dismissing AI concerns. This is the story, Scott. We really have to talk about this. Saying any efforts to limit the technology are part of a sick conspiracy against AI and data centers. We're part of a sick conspiracy, Scott. According to Trump, the only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart, high IQ president. And the USA has that in spades. This comes after anthropic CEO Darrell. Dario Amodi published an essay over the weekend calling on the AI industry to slow the pace of development. He wants independent evaluators to review companies' safety practices and urging global effort, including China, to create standards and limits. In a rare and convenient show of unity, both Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of Grok are backing Dario's call for a slowdown. Dario also spoke out on Face the Nation about wanting the government to be involved in all of this. Let's listen. Speaker 4 (8:56) Anthropic. And I would hope other companies have done everything we can to try to have legitimate oversight mechanisms. I think the government and the public needs to have a stake. And this is why we've supported regulation of the technology. Regulation constrains the private companies. Regulation allows the public and its elected representatives to have a say and limits what the private companies can do. Speaker 3 (9:30) So will the government get involved? Let's listen to what Speaker Mike Johnson said on Meet the Press. I Speaker 4 (9:35) think we've got to have meaningful regulation that does not smother American innovation. Now, how to solve that equation, no one knows yet. We're not going to rush in and pass a piece of legislation that would do harm to the country and put China as an edge. And so we've got to do this carefully. Of course, we'd vote on that tomorrow if we had the solution. And I'll call everybody into session any day. But we have to make sure we're doing it the right way. I think the first step is to have a meeting of all the platform providers. I've talked to the president about this and others. I believe that's the next step. I think we need to do it quickly. Of Speaker 3 (10:09) course, they've been meeting with them for months. They were all at the inaugural. Mike, anyway, and they've been meeting tons. A lot of people are wondering what's called for this slowdown now. Did they see something or is it just money? David Sachs, who is Trump's guru, who's been pushing just sort of Wild West kind of policies posted, stop pretending the motivation is to slow down is purely altruistic, noting they want to slow down open source. In this case, I agree with David Sachs, although I think he's been a menace because he's not allowed any reasonable legislation to go through. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang responded to AFP. last week saying, what better way to create a demand than to create a problem? We'll get to OpenA and not going public until next year, which we have said many times. But talk a little bit about this, because there's a lot happening here and suddenly all at once, you know, spurred by that anthropic researcher who said, it's going to kill us, which I think got everybody's attention. Speaker 7 (11:00) Well, Speaker Johnson's response to this, what feels like existential issue, was basically to send out a save the date, to say that we should meet about it, and to say that if there was anything that reasonably cut the very fine Speaker 6 (11:14) or thread the very fine needle of not wanting to get in the way of innovation and create shareholder value and economic growth, which is key to an economy at the same time recognizing the externalities, which is, by the way, is a tension we have dealt with for centuries with respect to economic progress versus not capturing too many. too many games for shareholders and outsourcing all the problems to the public. That at the end of the day, other than keeping the nation safe is what governments do through thoughtful legislation and local officials. Do they make that gavel for a man or a leader? Speaker 2 (11:48) Governor Newsom has passed 12 laws attempting to regulate AI. In China, they have laws that say no bot can pretend to be a person for longer than a certain amount of time because they realized in their nation and other nations, adults and kids were falling in love with Cersei Lannister. They have certain hours that kids cannot use AI. They have all sorts of limits around how AI can be used for information. Now, granted, they're using it for control. Right. But they have a lot of regulation. No, they Speaker 3 (12:23) understand the dangers. They understand Speaker 2 (12:26) the threat. And what do you know? 75 % of the Chinese populace is optimistic about AI. Speaker 3 (12:31) And Speaker 2 (12:31) we haven't done anything. Right now, America is engaging in an Speaker 6 (12:34) experiment. It's the following. We have never in the history. of the modern economy Speaker 2 (12:39) had a trillion-dollar industry that is totally unregulated. Totally unregulated. Speaker 1 (12:46) And, like, he's like, we'll get to it, but it's like, it's been 20 years, Mike. Speaker 3 (12:50) in case you're interested in, we've seen the damage done. Let me just posit something. One of the things I wrote to a pretty prominent technologist in this area, and they said, I was trying to compare it to nuclear proliferation, right? This is a very similar kind of thing. It should be global. I've been pushing for global standards for years and years with both Democrats and Republicans. And he said, if this was back then, Truman would have nationalized AI at this point. Speaker 7 (13:14) That's an interesting point. Speaker 3 (13:15) I know. And this was someone who does not. believe in a lot of government thing. He goes, we're at the, it needs to be nationalized. Now, Donald Trump saying any efforts are part of a sick conspiracy, data centers, like do nothing, is politically, this is like not a good idea, I think. And especially since he's utterly incompetent, he is not the person who is high IQ that can handle this. He is someone that gets bought and paid for by the technology industry. Talk a little bit about the feeling. also, on the flip side, that it's all these companies trying to zone out open source by solidifying, because they can, if the government passes regulations, they can pay for them, as opposed to small startups and things like that. Speaker 6 (13:58) There's just so much here. The first is... I'm going to bring up a name here. Diane Whipple. Do you remember that name? Speaker 1 (14:07) I don't, but go for it. Speaker 6 (14:09) 33, a former All-American lacrosse player. Speaker 1 (14:12) And Speaker 6 (14:13) in January 2001, about 25 years ago, she was mauled to death Speaker 2 (14:17) in the hallway of her Pacific Heights building by two Presa Canario dogs. Do you remember this? Speaker 3 (14:23) Yes, I lived there then. It was terrifying. Yep. Speaker 2 (14:25) Crazy Speaker 3 (14:26) neighbors with a crazy dog. Yeah. Speaker 2 (14:29) And... The neighbors were prosecuted. One is still in jail, one died in jail, because the law decided if you have these agents, i.e., vicious dogs, and you know they're capable of this, and they're off-leash, and they run into a hallway, and they maul someone and kill that person, you are... on the hook for this. And now we're