Exploring the Future of Thought-Driven Technology

Nathan Labenz dives in with Jaan Tallinn, a technologist, entrepreneur (Kazaa, Skype), and investor (DeepMind and more) whose unique life journey has intersected with some of the most important social and technological events of our collective lifetime. Jaan has since invested in nearly 180 startups, including dozens of AI application layer companies and some half dozen startup labs that focus on fundamental AI research, all in an effort to support the teams that he believes most likely to lead us to AI safety, and to have a seat at the table at organizations that he worries might take on too much risk. He's also founded several philanthropic nonprofits, including the Future of Life Institute, which recently published the open letter calling for a six-month pause on training new AI systems. In this discussion, we focused on:

- the current state of AI development and safety

-Jan's expectations for possible economic transformation

- what catastrophic failure modes worry him most in the near term

- How big of a bullet we dodged with the training of GPT-4

- Which organizations really matter for immediate-term pause purposes

- How AI race dynamics are likely to evolve over the next couple of years

LINKS REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE:

Future of Life's open letter: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/

Eliezer Yudkowsky's TIME article: https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/

Podcast: Daniela and Dario Amodei on Anthropic- https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/daniela-and-dario-amodei-on-anthropic/id1170991978?i=1000552976406

Zvi on the pause: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-the-fli-ai-risk-open-letter

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We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

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TIMESTAMPS:

(0:00) Episode Preview

(1:30) Jaan's impressive entrepreneurial career and his role in the recent AI Open Letter

(3:26) AI safety and Future of Life Institute

(6:55) Jaan's first meeting with Eliezer Yudkowsky and the founding of the Future of Life Institute

(13:00) Future of AI evolution

(15:55) Sponsor: Omneky

(17:20) Jaan's investments in AI companies

(24:22) The emerging danger paradigm

(33:48) AI supervising itself

(40:06) Evolution, useful heuristics, and lack of insight into selection process

(43:13) Current estimate for life-ending catastrophe

(54:20) Our luck given the softness of language models

(56:24) Future of Language Models

(1:01:00) The Moore’s law of mad science

(1:03:02) GPT-5 type project

(1:11:00) AI alignment with the latest models

(1:14:31) AI research investment and safety

(1:21:00) What a six month pause buys us

(1:27:01) AI’s Turing Test Passing

(1:33:18) Responsible AI development.

(1:41:20) Neuralink implant technology