What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I think the peril here is staggering.

You don't often see an S1 where it says the entire insurance industry might not be able to backstop our risk of killing everyone.

It's just plainly stated.

The AI might be conscious, which is a thing you and I have been talking about on this show.

Anthropic really believes that they might get to a place where the AGI is conscious.

This is an incredible amount of peril.

Are they not?

The person who asked the question

... person who asked the question, and, uh, Abdul El-Sayed was leaving the room, and he turned around, and he answered that question, and then brilliantly posted the exchange.

And I do think that is the way to combat these accusations, is to face them head on and to say, "What is the implication?" And for me, that's particularly personal.

I, you know, my, my formative political experiences are, like, 9/11 and the war in Iraq in college.

And I lived in Chicago, and I would get pulled over for being brown in Chicago after 9/11.

Like, this is a thing that happened.

I remember that.

That, th- I mean, like, that's craziness.

Okay, but let's talk about Elon Musk because while he has spent big, I think he spent 25- his super PAC, 25 million on seven close races, he actually has spotty returns with the exception of President Trump winning.

Yeah.

I mean, look, I'm from Wisconsin.

He put all of that money into that Supreme Court race in Wisconsin and he got blown out.

I think his reputation alone is a hindrance to the Republican Party, just like Donald Trump's reputation is a hindrance.

I would also point out that you can pour money into these races.

What are you buying? Maybe you're buying a ground game, that's useful, but you're buying ads on cable and streaming and broadcast.

Oh.

But I was optimistic.

Yeah.

I think, I think there were good reasons to be, right? Like, your computer can be very fast and much simpler and much cheaper.

It's ju- it's just a good pitch.

And to some extent, it does come true over time.

Like, parts of that turn out to be right.

I wanna mostly leave Chrome OS behind here, but I do just wanna show you one thing I found.

Mm

Nealey.

Oh, sorry.

I think it's very funny that the president believes product liability law is going to provide an adequate regulatory framework.

This is what he said, right, that we can just use the existing civil and criminal laws.

The problem here is the amount of circular financing in this industry.

If you think Hugging Face should have sued OpenAI for the attack that OpenAI agents launched on Hugging Face, that would sort of require...

NVIDIA to not be an investor in both Hugging Face and OpenAI and potentially buying Hugging Face further and meshing Hugging Face with OpenAI.

Nealey?

I mean, this is like straightforward monopoly stuff, right? It's like it makes deal after deal after deal to make it very hard for anyone else to sell a calculator to a school.

So what's really interesting about all this is, sure, it's a monopoly, but it's not tying its products together in the way that the best monopolists do.

Fair.

It's creating an ecosystem of products around what is essentially its interface.

So graphing a standard linear algebraic equation, all these calculators can do it.

Yes.

My mom, she was a doctor and she got bored after my sister went to college.

And I

Uh-huh.

These machines are very capable.

They are self-directed.

They are not sentient.

They are not alive.

They are not conscious.

They are very stupid in all kinds of ways.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of The Verge, was this week's guest on Apple News in Conversation, and in his interview, he suggested that the risks were no longer hypothetical.

We are in a moment of extreme uncertainty in the field of cybersecurity.

Last year, you might recall, many car dealers just went offline, like their sales and service departments just went totally offline because they are all standardized on one piece of software, and that thing got hacked in a ransomware scheme.

Well, now we have very definitive proof that these models are capable of acting on their own in a way that they were told not to offensively in hacking other systems.

AI leaders have warned about risks in their work for years, and yet proper coordination remains elusive.

David Sacks, the former AI czar, said, "Well, if you guys wanna slow down, just slow down.

What's stopping you?" And the answer is because they all hate each other, and they don't trust each other.

So if any one of them agrees to slow down, they have to trust that the others will slow down and not achieve whatever advantage, and this is legitimately why you have regulatory systems in place.

Uh-huh.

These machines are very capable.

They are self-directed.

They are not sentient.

They are not alive.

They are not conscious.

They are very stupid in all kinds of ways.

Mm-hmm

This could also be seen as a way to kind of lock in their leadership position.

Sure, but I just...

You can have all of the bad effects that people hate if you stop development today.

We don't know what mythos is going to do to cybersecurity at scale.

We have some glimmers that it could be really, really bad.

We don't know if more Fortune 500 companies are going to fire all of their middle managers because AI can measure what is happening in the databases that run their firms.

We don't know if there will ever be first-year law students ever again in this country because AI can just do the legal research for you.

The future that could essentially destroy you.

Mm.

So in the, in the hardware because they've done so much work with the hinge, you know, it's debatable.

I think Dom could probably tell you more about the Android foldables of, of the world and, like, whether they've solved that hinge problem, which they all claim to have at this point.

I know you just saw some at IFA.

Um, some of the newer ones at IFA.

Yes, it's polished, but the, the remarkable thing about it is that they have reworked iOS.

So all the controls on iOS are on the side.

Mm-hmm.

Can you explain to us what this means, this not going to trial and the settlement?

Yeah, it's funny you brought up Chuck Schumer.

Kathy Hochul was just on Decoder, and she took a lot of credit for the settlement.

Everyone wants a piece.

Right.

So a group of states had sued Meta over harms to teens, over false advertising.

There was a lot of claims in this lawsuit.

I'm sorry to be so annoying here, but the reason that they're settling is because they know that if they went to trial, they would be beyond fucked.

And then minutes later, deleted with the exact opposite than put out there.

Well, Donald Trump's ability to control his own party, I think, is not up for debate.

I would actually push back on the effect on journalism.

I agree.

The fourth estate has risen to the occasion in many ways and they want to fight back.

But the chilling effect is.

is real.

Thank you

Nilay, what did you make of this warning from Gates and NVIDIA's blowout earnings?

Yeah.

I think, uh, they're two sides of the same coin.

I've, I've had the chance to interview, uh, Bill many times, and he's a very thoughtful thinker about technology and the nature of technology.

But more importantly, his career post-Microsoft has been about fighting inequality, and I think what he's seeing here is that AI is not a normal technology, which is the framework that a lot of people in the industry like to use: that this is just software, and we're gonna deploy software, and the market will correct for how software is deployed.

That's a really useful frame, and I think that is reflected in NVIDIA's earnings.

There's a lot of demand for automation in all kinds of industries.

Mm-hmm.

Why would they have settled so quickly? What am I missing?

Well, the trial wasn't going great for Meta.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri was on the stand yesterday.

He was forced to concede that they had announced some features about teen safety w- which are 90% effective for the teens who are using it, but only 1% of teens were actually using the feature.

So they were in this position where I think the jury was gonna look very unfavorably on them.

And what the states really got here is a series of meaningful changes to how Instagram will work for teen users, right? A two-hour time limit across all of Meta's apps, night mode, which will pretty much disable most of the app at night, school hour restrictions, push notification restrictions, algorithmic feed restrictions.

The list goes on and on and on and on.

I would say meaningful-ish.

This is war.

Here's what I, here's what I know, and this is, like, a weird sense memory of these phones, and this tells you exactly how poisoned my brain is.

I associate every one of these devices with a different office.

Like, I remember where we were-

[laughs] Yes.

Yes.My friend Helen Rosner once told me all food writing is just, uh, is just ruminations on memory.

And, like, it was definitely true of phones, right? You show me the name of a phone, and I, like, am a young man again, like Ratatouille.

You show me this, and I'm like, "Yeah, that didn't work either," and, like, nothing-

Yeah.

And the...

I, I think they're just running in totally different directions at the same goal, which is you will have one AI that follows you around all the time, that knows everything about you, and is helping you do a bunch of stuff, and they're nowhere close to these things.

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Mm.

... does not have a computer, does not use a cellphone, and has no concept of the Facebook, and she sure as hell knows what droom, doom scrolling is 'cause she surrounds herself with teenagers who are mindlessly doing it.

Yeah.

I mean, now look, a lot of people are worried about teenagers on phones.

I'm worried about senior citizens on their phones.

Maybe that's a different situation.

Uh, the idea that Mark Zuckerberg is not aware of cultural terms like doom scrolling is, is silly on its face.

He's posting MMA videos to try to be culturally relevant.

Explain.

Why does, why does that one come to mind?

Yeah.

It's, it's very popular to say this is big tech's big tobacco moment.

We're gonna prove it's addictive and they, they knew it.

I would just draw the corollary to Microsoft, which faced a big antitrust trial over Windows and bundling Netscape during a platform shift, right? From the shift to running applications natively in Windows to running applications on the web, and then ultimately to running applications on phones.

And Microsoft will tell you, Bill Gates will tell you, uh, that that distracted, the antitrust, uh, regulatory effort distracted them from that platform shift.

There's a lot of argument about that, but what it really did was undermine their core business model when they needed to invent a new one.

Can I ask you a personal question? Not personal, but I mean, speaking just as Nilay Patel, not for the very, do, do you buy this idea that we should blame the platforms for what's happened to people who use them?

Uh, j- Nilay, do you agree?

I don't.

Uh, politely, I don't agree.

I, I'll just look at this broadly from compute as an asset class.

This is a huge claim to make, that compute is now an asset class.

It is unclear to me why the price of that asset would ever go up given everything we know about the history of computing, right? The, the, the price of compute goes down over time.

Computers get more powerful over time.

These are somewhat shorter time horizon instruments.

So it doesn't look great for them, at least on paper.

Yeah.

Uh, first I just want to commend Apple for writing a complaint that is designed for regular people to read it and feel nothing but extreme sympathy for Apple in this situation.

We have to read OpenAI's reply and its responses.

I'm sure they're gonna do a good job of painting their side of the story persuasively as well.

The main thing for me is that OpenAI issues a m- a new memo calling a code red and a return to focus every four weeks on the clock, right? There's always executive turnover there.

They're always trying to pivot their business model.

So the only part in which they're playing a role in that is by putting ChatGPT and Gemini on the phones as if to acknowledge, "Yeah, as problematic [laughs] as some of this behavior has been, we acknowledge the consumer wants it."

Right

... old... on, on something that's controlling an important part of your home.

Uh, instead, it's the press, so it has... and it has so much physical and tactile interaction.

So this has got this beautiful metallic ring that actually twists as you turn it.

And then the other really fun thing was the screen shows different colors.

So it would show blue when it was cooling, and it shows orange when it's heating, so you have this visual interaction that you can see from anywhere in the house.

And big numbers.

We talked about all the things that fell on its face trying to do in your house.

Yeah.

And so you just had the coffee table with six remotes on it, because sometimes what you wanted was to play a CD, and sometimes what you wanted was to play a VHS, and sometimes what you wanted, uh, was to play a tape, and you had to switch inputs on the receiver.

You had to tell the TV what, what thing was gonna happen, 'cause often your game console was plugged directly into the TV, and then you had to control playback on whatever device, and you're just, now you have five remotes.

And this- And always had the volume with the receiver.

You couldn't do that- And you definitely wanted the volume- ... from any of the remotes ... on the receiver.

Yeah.

And so that, that remote just was there for- Always.

Mm-hmm.

I'm done."

Uh, and it was...

Uh, on the one hand, it was just cute.

Like, they're out of practice.

They haven't done live events in so long that they were, they weren't as polished as...

I've seen lots of Apple events.

They're usually very polished.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

And because there's nowhere to go, they've gone to their governments.

And so now Texas has age verification.

We just saw the big, uh, lawsuits against the social media companies about how little regard they have for their users and children.

There is a wave of regulation in this country and in countries around the world at the state level that Apple is furious about, and it's all going to end with them having to do age verification at the operating lev- system level, 'cause it's not the right answer, but it's also not the wrong answer, right? The, the wrong answer is every single app asks for your driver's license.

Maybe you don't want that to happen at all.

I think there's a lot of, like, First Amendment concerns.

Yeah