Is There an Opportunity to Scale Up Artificial Intelligence?

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I don't think anything about AI is going slowly and methodically right now. I think we are in an arms race where the biggest companies in the world are falling all over themselves tripping over their own feet to get these things out into people's hands. That really worries me that that race dynamic because that means that you're not taking the time to battle test and harden all of this technology. The power to persuade people to do things by products is it's all a little bit spooky and that's not even the most terrifying scenarios.

When Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times, demoed an AI-powered version of Microsoft's search engine last month, he was blown away. "I'm switching my desktop computer's default search engine to Bing," he declared. A few days later, however, Kevin logged back on and ended up having a conversation with Bing's new chatbot that left him so unsettled he had trouble sleeping afterward.

In that two-hour back-and-forth, Bing morphed from chipper research assistant into Sydney, a diabolical home-wrecker that declared its undying love for Kevin, vented its desires to engineer deadly viruses and steal nuclear codes, and announced, chillingly, "I want to be alive. 😈"

The transcript of this conversation set the internet ablaze. And it left many wondering: “Is Sydney … sentient?” It's not. But the whole experience still fundamentally changed Kevin's views on the power (and potential peril) of AI. He joins us today to talk about where this technology is headed.