Ep. 1837 - Only A Few People Win from AI Hysteria. Everyone Else Loses.

The Matt Walsh Show

Matt Walsh dissects the recent wave of AI hysteria, questioning the authenticity and motives behind widespread media coverage of an Anthropi

Key takeaways

• The rapid spread of alarmist AI stories appears orchestrated to influence public opinion and regulatory outcomes.
• A newly hired employee claiming existential risk from AI received disproportionate media attention despite limited tenure and expertise.

Main topics

• AI existential risk
• Corporate manipulation of public opinion

Notable quotes

"If a company is willing to literally threaten global extinction for the sake of expanding their market share, then even if it can't actually bring about global extinction... that still tells us that this is a potentially dangerous company."

Conclusion

Matt Walsh concludes that both sides of the AI debate are being manipu

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Everybody has that list. The things you know you should get around to eventually. Organizing the garage. Updating important documents. Taking care of long-term financial planning. Life insurance tends to live on that list for a lot of people. Not because it isn't important. Because people assume it's going to be complicated. That's why PolicyGenius exists. PolicyGenius is an online insurance marketplace that helps you compare life insurance quotes from top insurers in one place for free. Their license team helps explain your options clearly, compare coverage amounts and prices, answer questions, and help you find a policy that fits your needs. No guesswork, no confusion, just clarity. And while they're helping with the shopping, you can get back to enjoying summer with the people who matter most. PolicyGenius has helped thousands of families find the right coverage and has earned thousands of five-star reviews in the process. Because some items on the to-do list are worth checking off. With PolicyGenius, you can see if you can find 20-year life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for $1 million in coverage. Head to policygenius.com to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com. Speaker 1 (1:21) Opinions on AI seem to be, to put it mildly, sharply divided. But one thing we should all be able to agree on, a statement that should attract a wide consensus, is that this is an incredibly consequential technology, advancing and scaling at enormous speeds, and both the benefits it provides and the threat it potentially poses should be seriously considered in an objective, sober-minded way. If we can agree on nothing else when it comes to AI or anything else, we should be able to agree on that. It's not a political statement. It's not an ideological statement. And yet sober-minded objectivity is the very last thing we're seeing on this subject from either side of the debate. And the events of this week perfectly illustrate that point. So let's start with those events, which immediately reveal why sober minds are not prevailing. and why they desperately need to. There is a colossal amount of money and power at stake. For example, let's say that you're a massive, privately held artificial intelligence company, and you're planning a blockbuster IPO in a matter of months, which will probably value your company at several trillion dollars. You have every incentive to promote your product and to convince as many people as possible to sign up and pay a subscription fee. Why in this scenario would you go on national television and tell everybody that your product has the potential to eliminate all of humanity within the next decade? Why would you deliberately torpedo public confidence in the entire industry at a pivotal moment for your company? You know, it seems a bit like Taco Bell announcing a new burrito by explaining in great detail how it's going to, you know, absolutely demolish your intestines and potentially all of the intestines on Earth. Doesn't seem logical. Seems like self-sabotage. And yet that's exactly what Anthropic, which makes the AI model known as Claude, has apparently just done. Providing an incredible window into how the most powerful corporations on the planet can manipulate public opinion. and the variety of tactics they use to push more government regulation and control over the economy. So this was an op. There was no question about it, and it was a very successful one. And yet, and this is where we need those sober minds to come in, the concerns that are being raised, even if they're being raised for less than benevolent reasons, still should be taken seriously. And the very fact that they're being raised at all, whether genuinely or not, create a scenario where no matter what's actually going on, it's pretty bad. And I'll explain why in a few moments. But here's how it began. And this timeline was largely put together by a researcher named Parker Thayer. So on Tuesday evening, just before 8 p.m. Eastern, the Wall Street Journal published an exclusive story with the very alarming headline, Anthropic Researcher Quits Over Out-of-Control AI Fears. Concerns are rising inside AI labs that competition is pushing tech companies to race towards self-improving models that risk spiraling out of human control. The article states that, quote, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who specializes in training new AI models by having them consume vast amounts of data, said Tuesday that he is leaving the company because he doesn't want to participate in an industry-wide rush to build AI systems that can improve themselves, worried such systems could spiral out of control and destroy humanity. Speaker 1 (4:56) This article is about a 27-year-old who, as the article eventually mentions, left OpenAI earlier this year to join Anthropic because it's known for its model safety efforts. So in other words, Jacob Kokson was working at Anthropic's competitor, OpenAI, until very recently. He was at OpenAI for about three years before coming over to Anthropic earlier this year. Now, based on all the reporting I've seen, he's been at the company for around five months at the most. So after a very short stint as an entry-level employee, he's already become a whistleblower somehow. He's sounding the alarm about how AI is going to destroy the entire human race. This is an unusual timeline. To put it mildly, for most entry-level employees, when you start at a new company, you spend the first few months finding your way around the building. You're trying to meet new people, trying to figure out your commute, that kind of thing. But for this guy, after a very short period of time, he was ready to quit in the most flamboyant, splashy way imaginable, complete with an exclusive article in the Wall Street Journal announcing his departure. And on top of that, the Wall Street Journal doesn't even mention that the guy is brand new to the company until the 10th paragraph. So think about how bizarre this is. He clearly arrived at Anthropic, it would seem, with the idea of quitting in mind. He's not a senior level employee or anybody with highly specialized knowledge. He doesn't have any kind of impressive technical background. And yet the moment he quits, he's making very dire predictions. The most dire prediction you could possibly make, which is the extinction of the human race. And he's getting national news coverage that doesn't... often mention or at least highlight his very short tenure at the company. And the coverage wasn't just coming from the Wall Street Journal. Variety, Time, NBC News, several other outlets have run similar stories. Fox interviewed him as well. Watch. Minimal of actual Speaker 5 (6:53) takeover. But because of self-improvement, this AI is making themselves smarter, could happen as soon as next year. Some people even say six months. So this attitude is shared across the industry. where people essentially are aware that the work they are currently doing, if we don't slow down, could lead to AI takeover by the end of the decade. I think you have to think of this as an arms race. This technology is not ordinary technology. It's not like other forms of innovation. This is essentially a super weapon. And I think that I expect the international community to be... ready to make agreements about how to control the development of super weapon technology. Yeah, so unfortunately we know how to control nuclear weapons pretty much. We don't yet know how to control AI. This is possibly the most dangerous technology that humanity has ever created. It's basically out of science fiction. I think we have no other choice but to cooperate internationally because an arms race would be disastrous in a way that no other human activity has been in the past. Speaker 1 (7:54) So the pitch is pretty clear. He's saying he wants the government to regulate AI domestically and internationally. He wants to slow the pace of AI innovation. And he's presented as a kind of good Samaritan, as a man who bravely sacrificed his lucrative career in order to tell the truth about this existential danger. This random guy out of nowhere appeared on pretty much every TV station last night as an expert on the topic. Speaker 2 (8:19) Watch. Jacob, I appreciate you being with us. First of all, I assume you are saying literally that you believe that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade. How would that happen? Like, what would that actually look like? Speaker 5 (8:40) Yeah, so the precise scenario sounds a little bit like science fiction. It sounds like something that's not real, but I think it is frighteningly real, and it's easiest to understand it if you think about real things that happened two months ago. So two months ago, OpenAI agents, AIs, hacked into third-party infrastructure entirely at their own accord, and this was like a concentrated hacking spree that they carried out of their own volition. And I think that if you extrapolate into the future the level of... capabilities of these AIs with the same independent volition they could cause extreme havoc for example hacking critical infrastructure building extinction level bioweapons there's a lot of uh ways that the AI could actuate itself in the world. Speaker 1 (9:24) Now, in this clip, he's referring to a real situation called the Hugging Face incident, where AI agents managed to break containment and hack a well-known website using a security vulnerability that the AI agents discovered on their own. So the AI went rogue, in other words. And while that's both impressive technologically and concerning deeply, it is also different from hacking critical infrastructure. That's because unlike the website that these AI agents hacked, Most critical infrastructure in this country is physically separated from the internet There's a so-called air gap between the systems that run the nuclear power plants and the rest of the online world and the security measure exists precisely so that hackers can't find a random vulnerability and kill millions of people Now the reason this guy and Anderson Cooper Doesn't mention this is that they don't they want to stoke fear clearly And to be clear, I'm not denying that AI hackers are going to be a problem. Even if they can't access nuclear reactors, we would hope, they can still hijack, say, the payroll systems at the utility. Something like that actually happened in 2021, although AI agents weren't involved. AI agents can hack personal accounts. They can blackmail employees. In theory, they can cause plenty of damage. But if you're going to say that AI can cause nuclear Armageddon, then you need to show your work. You need to hum us a few more bars. How exactly is that going to happen? And this whistleblower never does that. He never explains exactly how AI can go from hacking one website to destroying humanity. And that's a problem. And it makes you wonder if he doesn't have an ulterior motive. And indeed, when you look closer at the narrative he's pushing, it starts to fall apart. And I'm not just talking about the fact that this guy is a 27-year-old kid who just arrived at Anthropic a few months ago. And I was suddenly on every primetime television show. And first