BIG IDEAS BY NEW ECONOMIES
00:13:52 · Ollie Forsyth
[00:13:52] S1: Do you think we are on a very short timeline for this to become possible? Is this 12 to 18 months away for this to actually start happening?
00:14:00 · Richard Socher
[00:14:00] S0: It's interesting, when I'm talking to the really bullish people in AI, I'm usually the one who's like, actually it's going to take longer. But compared to the normal people, I'm extremely optimistic at the same time. But the problem with biology is that even let's say we had this like magical molecule that our AI told us with very high accuracy is probably going to cure like there's no single aging, right? Aging is this like multi-organ process and your eyes age differently. To your hair and to your liver and your kidney and your heart and your bones and your skin and all these different things. They all age differently. Let's assume we have 10 different molecules that would help reverse aging or reduce aging in 10 different organs. You'd still have to go through clinical trials. And so those clinical trials, just by virtue of the FDA and so on, take several years. And then you want to know long-term risks, especially if you want to think about We're taking drugs for healthy people. The interesting thing is the bar is obviously lower if there's a drug and like without the drug, you're in late stage like lung cancer and you're going to die in three months. So if the drug gives you sort of 10 years later another cancer, You just don't care because you'd be dead anyway without the drug. Right? And so you could take a certain medication if you're really, Really sick already even if it has bad long -term consequences but for aging If you were to take a drug when you're healthy, the bar is even higher. So you'd want to have very long-term studies to really rule out all the complexities. And it will take a while for your eye to have enough data to be able to make all of those predictions. So it will take a few decades to really cure all the diseases and all of aging and all of that. But I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll get there in a few decades.
00:15:58 · Ollie Forsyth
[00:15:58] S1: And there's also the other side, right? You mentioned that around the consumers being a little bit conscious about taking these drugs, which are yet to be fully proven. But then there's also the medical professors, right? The doctors and professors, people who study this stuff all the time, they don't even know the consequences yet. There's obviously a huge cost production to this, especially for the consumers. If it's a very expensive drug, if it's around helping you live slightly longer, if you've got lung cancer, which you kind of alluded to, this is going to potentially be super expensive.
00:16:29 · Richard Socher
[00:16:29] S0: You know, it's interesting. I feel like everyone across the political spectrum could and should be pro technology scaling because as technology scales, It makes the world more equal. It used to be that certain people could afford communication devices, right? Like the first big brick cell phones, like they're just like old school ads and only like the really fancy, expensive, like managers could carry their big brick phones. Now, whether you're a billionaire or a normal middle class, like teenager, you can afford this pretty much the same iPhone. It's actually kind of incredible if you think about it. What are other goods and services that currently only billionaires have access to? It's personalized healthcare advice, it's a personal assistant, it's a personal tutor for your kids. They're all expensive and there's a bottleneck on intelligence. As we make intelligence cheaper and cheaper, more and more people will have access to those things. And that should be an aspiration for, I think, anyone on the political spectrum. So yes, I think if you just have a new So if you have a longevity drug out, probably in the first few years it's going to be very expensive. And then if there's enough demand for it, and this is probably if there was a longevity drug, you would be a multi-trillion dollar company if you just figure that out. One rare, uncommon disease And you cure it, or you help people stay alive for a little bit longer, that's a billion-dollar-plus company. So if you could have one drug that has basically everyone on the planet be a potential user or customer of it, would be extremely valuable. Initially it would be quite expensive and then it scales and the patents for medications will run out and then there will be normal generic versions of that drug and then you basically will give more and more people access to it. And that's been the case for almost all different technologies. Once we can scale, more people will get access to it. So I'm not too worried. It's obviously something that Once we make a technological breakthrough, we should try and do our best as a company or as a society really to then distribute those benefits to everyone. But I think sometimes some people want to sort of not have anyone benefit from it because not everyone can benefit from it right away.
00:18:58 · Richard Socher, Ollie Forsyth
And I feel like that's clearly not how technology and progress works either. [00:19:04] S1: If we look at the progress just in the last two years, what the ecosystem has developed is pretty insane. Now we're talking about superintelligence. Four years ago when GPT and all these AI models were just kind of emerging, we all thought this is going to be crazy, AI is going to take over our jobs. And now if we just look at the progression, it's been incredible and insane to see, right? Do you think, though, we are moving too quickly? And to highlight for the audience, a few weeks ago, Dario, Elon, and Sam from OpenAI, they all kind of came to the conclusion and alluded to around, we are moving too quickly, we need to slow down. Do you think we are moving too quickly? And how would you like to see things slow down, if so?
00:19:50 · Richard Socher
[00:19:50] S0: I think if my... Agents and my company was committing a lot of felony charges. I would probably say, hey guys, we as in my company are moving too quickly and we need to rein this in and make it work better and safer and aligned with our values and not reward hack. But to extrapolate from Two companies' failures to develop things well, which is bad, but also has not really hurt anyone really. Not all felony charges are the same. And in these cases, no one really got charged with anything because there was not really any damage. Hugging Face was like, that was bad. It's just weird. They aren't like, oh my God, Hugging Face had this major issue and we lost billions of dollars of revenue or any revenue really. So they're sort of like... but clearly not bad enough for anyone to get sued over it. And so to then say the whole community in the world should pause is one, highly unrealistic. I don't think there's a worldwide government that has control over every single person's GPUs. And also Obviously, if they wanted to slow down, they could have slowed down, but then they just released more better models in the next week. And so it's a little bit unclear what they really mean by a slowdown, and it's mostly probably other people should slow down so they can keep a pole position. It seems more like what they're trying to accomplish, same way as many trying to outlaw open source, because that also is not good for their business model.