Garry Tan

The two documents point the same direction, and it arrives the same week the industry is asking to be trusted to pace itself voluntarily.

It also props up the other attribution fight, Gary Tan arguing last Friday that American open-weight labs should be free to distill frontier models because the proprietary labs never asked permission when they vacuumed up human knowledge.

A Microsoft director's own words now sit in the public record supporting his premise.

China.

Last year, they were saying we have to deal with current harms like kids killing themselves.

This year, Gary Tan, just on an interview the other day said-

Who's Gary Tan?

Uh, sorry.

Gary Tan is, uh, a, a technologist who runs Y Combinator, which Sam Altman used to run before going to OpenAI.

And on an interview the other day, he said, uh, "Let's not worry about these crazy future risks.

We need to be worried about current harms like AI swarms breaking out and taking over data centers." And I'm like, look, guys, at, at some point, we need to look at the progression of, like, the current harms that we, that everyone is saying we have to worry about instead of the, the, the extinction threats and watch where the puck is going.

It also touched on the fight over data center construction, which we're hearing about every day.

Why Combinator CEO Gary Tan and Trump allies have described opposition to that construction as an international psyop meant to stifle U.S. economic growth.

Now, when I heard that, that very sentence, I just went, hmm.

We're talking about a big corporation, a group of big corporations.

Yes.

Um, but it, it's funny, like Gary Tan, the head of Y Combinator, this venture capital, uh, fund-

Mm

... was like, "Hey, we should stop talking.

[upbeat music] Plus, Nasdaq in October, and a data center landlord with interesting friends.

Gary Tan says, "Let American labs distill too." And a Princeton study that quietly undercuts the whole premise.

[upbeat music] Marcus, we covered Amadei's essay yesterday.

What actually moved in the last 24 hours?

But it’s worth saying out loud alongside the timing.

TechCrunch’s Sean O’Kane asked the sharp question: How does Anthropic word existential risk in an S one? A risk factor section that includes, “Our product may kill everyone,” is a document that does not have a precedent.

Gary Tan wants American labs to distill freely.

Explain.

Yeah,

because I feel like there's a difference between some of these, like Gary Tan or even myself, we have free tokens, right? So just token max.

Versus actually people spending tokens on API and then it gets very expensive if you just token max.

100%.

Yeah, so I, I mostly agree with you on this, and this is sort of, I think, conclusion one from our show.

And I mean, this is something that Gary, uh, Tan from Y Combinator talked about.

He said, "We need to be focused on science fact, not science fiction.

Why aren't we grounding this conversation in what is actually happening right now? I mean, the cybersecurity risk is real, and the policy in both the way, and the way that both Democrat and Republican lawmakers should be looking at this is actually the lens directly coming out of what is happening right now.

We don't need to be responding to science fiction sort of fantasy about what's going to happen." That sounds reasonable to me.

That actually, that's very reasonable.

Gary Tan has been pretty AI-pilled himself.

[laughs] That's like the very...