Paul Christiano — Preventing an AI takeover

Dario Amodei thinks we are just a few years away from AGI — or as he puts it, from having “a country of geniuses in a data center”. In this episode, we discuss what to make of the scaling hypothesis in the current RL regime, why task-specific RL might lead to generalization, and ...  Show more

In this episode, John and I got to do a real deep-dive with Elon. We discuss the economics of orbital data centers, the difficulties of scaling power on Earth, what it would take to manufacture humanoids at high-volume in America, xAI’s business and alignment plans, DOGE, and muc ...  Show more

Paul Adams is the longtime chief product officer at Intercom, where he leads the product management, product design, data science, and research teams. Before Intercom, Paul was the global head of brand design at Facebook, a senior user researcher at Google, an ...

Judea Pearl is a professor at UCLA and a winner of the Turing Award, that’s generally recognized as the Nobel Prize of computing. He is one of the seminal figures in the field of artificial intelligence, computer science, and statistics. He has developed and championed probabilis ...  Show more

AGI can beat top players in chess, poker, and, now, Diplomacy. In November 2022, a bot named Cicero demonstrated mastery in this game, which requires natural language negotiation and cooperation with humans. In short, Cicero can lie, scheme, build trust, pass as human, and ally w ...  Show more

One of the simmering concerns surrounding the current AI revolution is the fear that we might accidentally create an “alien mind” smarter than we expected. In this episode, Cal puts on his Computer Scientist hat and directly addresses this potential by sketching his emerging c ...