Robinhood's Vlad Tenev on Tokenizing Everything, OpenAI's 6 Misalignment Reports, Figure's Robot Makes Beds | EP #292

Uh, let's kick it off with one of the sharpest statements anyone in Washington, DC has said this week.

On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the House Financial Services Committee that AI labs should not get a liability exemption.

Three days after Dario's essay, here's what Bessent said.

He said, quote, "The one thing we should not do is give them a blank check on liability.

I believe the best liability or safeguard is that they will be held responsible." So the deal the labs floated, you know, pace the frontier, get antitrust and liability cover, just got half rejected by the Treasury.

You know, "Slow down if you want," he said, "but you still own what you break." Uh, let's share a quick video of Bessent, and then we'll chat about this story.

The, the one thing we should not do is give them a blank check on liability, because I, I believe that the best li- liability g- or the best safeguard is that they will be held responsible.

And they are saying that, "We would like to all slow down, but please give us a waiver on liability," which should not be done.

And I would encourage everyone in this committee and in both houses not to consider-

So I, I think that's a pretty smart move.

You know, Vlad, you run a regulat- you know, a regulated financial company.

Uh, Robinhood, you know, I don't know the facts, but, you know, gets sued when something goes wrong.

Should the AI labs live under the same rules? What are your thoughts?

I think that, um, this question rests on how big the blast radius of any potential catastrophe could be, right? And if it's like a small issue where maybe there's a cybersecurity breach that affects a company or, uh, maybe something slightly bigger than that, um- It's, it's probably fine.

I, I think the question becomes, all right, if it's, if it's a bigger blast radius, bigger impact, bigger damage, um, you can imagine it could be larger than a simple, like, legal liability can handle.

I mean, a l- a lot of people compare, uh, the risks of AI technology because it's such a powerful technology with, um, something like atomic energy, right? And I, I think we can disagree about whether, whether that's right or not, but, but let's say for, for example, that it is, and it's, it's on sort of like that tier of risk, then, then I don't think simple, like, legal and civil liability is, is sufficient, and I think you need, you need some safeguards beyond that.

So I think it's, it's, it's a question of like, all right, this hugging face incident and things like that, is that the ceiling of the type of offensive cybersecurity li- uh, uh, capability that we have, or should we plan for something that's maybe 10 times bigger or, or 100 times bigger? And, and do we have time, you know? Is it, is it one of those things where maybe we'll see a canary in the coal mine and there will be, uh, something to react to and respond, and then we can kind of like nip it in the bud, or is the first issue gonna be, gonna be catastrophic? If you, if you think about all regulations in the financial industry, you can kind of trace them back to some kind of crisis, right? The market crash of 1929 led to, uh, you know, the, the Securities Act, uh, of, of the '30s and the Securities and Exchange Act and the establishment of all of that regulation.

And it's, it's, it's typically some problem, uh, raises, raises a concern.

And, and I think my mental model is this will probably be similar in a sense.

No-nobody wants to regulate a hypothetical.

You wanna regulate things once there's demonstrated proof of, of harm.

Um, but I think w-with, with the exponential increase in the power of these models, the, the issue is you want that, that harm itself to be, to be small and contained and, uh, and, and not really big.

Um, Marc Andreessen was, uh, I remember doing a podcast a couple years ago, and he was like, "Everyone's freaking out about AI.

We are, uh, we're overthinking it.

You know, it's not gonna kill us all, and if it does, um, you know, you'll, you'll see, you'll see like a small village destroyed first, and we're not seeing any small villages, so, so we shouldn't worry." And, you know, it's maybe exaggerated, but I, I think that's likely how people are thinking about it now on a policy level.