All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
01:02:47 · David Friedberg, Jason Calacanis
[01:02:47] S3: prediction. Yeah. Floated. I mean, they're... That's the conversation right now. [01:02:51] S0: Okay. I'll unpack that. Who's having the conversation? What exactly is the proposal? Because that seems to me to be a little far out there. [01:02:58] S3: The farther left you go, the the more vocal politicians get on this point, which is no one sees the, quote, benefit of AI, and they don't wanna see AI being developed, being deployed, or being used. That's the general statements that are that are being made. So they wanna ban both its development, its deployment. They wanna ban data centers. They wanna ban technology companies from making models, and they wanna ban companies from using the models. And I think this sort of rhetoric leads to somewhere that's obviously more constrained than we are today. [01:03:34] S0: What are the chances something crazy like that happens? But handicap it for us here. [01:03:37] S3: 10%. California passed legislation, and Gavin Newsom vetoed it. I think it's much higher than 10%. We're seeing state based legislation. I mean, Sacks spent quite a lot of time on this, but there's a patchwork of hundreds of laws that are passing all over the country trying to regulate model development, model deployment, model utilization, what they're allowed to do, whether the local state government gets to audit and inspect how the models operate, how people are using the models, what they're outputting. [01:04:02] S0: You say, Sacks? Answer his
01:04:04 · David Friedberg
[01:04:04] S3: And fundamentally, remember a model is just a bunch of software. It's a code. It's a point about free speech. Can I actually run code on a computer? That is a restriction on, you know, someone basically reading a book is a way to think about it because Sure. At the end of the day, you're inputting and outputting digits, ones and zeros. True sovereignty. Yeah. And remember, we have laws and we have regulations about what do those ones and zeros do? So if those ones and zeros go and take money out of your bank account and put them in mine, I broke a law. I'm a felon. I'm going to get convicted of that felony. If that is used to create a weapon that is illegal, I broke the law. That is a felony. And you can go down the long list of things that people should be concerned about. So you have to ask yourself the question, if we already have laws that protect ourselves from the consequence of people using this sort of speech, this sort of software, then what are we actually doing? And I do think once again that the the primal, call it unconscious political state, is that there is something that threatens the state, that threatens government itself. And I think that that's a big part of the motivation here, and I've said for a long time there's a power play. The question is, and this is me waxing philosophical for a second, is doesn't organization like Anthropic or whomever end up in a place where they're regulatorily aligned with the state such that the state has unlimited access to that model's capabilities to development and deployment and individual citizens and companies do not. And this is almost like if you go back, the the modern, like, issue, the second amendment issue is no longer about who has the bullets and the guns. It's about who has this technology. Because if the state has the technology but the citizens and the businesses don't, then the state has supreme power. And remember, there's no such thing as a state that doesn't have central planning and command, which means you are giving a small group of people an extraordinary amount of power. And the whole point of The United States and the whole point of the Second Amendment was to always have a check on that power. Okay. So if the state ends up getting all of the AI and no one else gets the AI, you then no longer have a check on the power.
01:06:11 · Jason Calacanis, David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya
[01:06:11] S0: I think this is like you're getting into doctor Doom scenarios. I think you're completely wrong. I think there's like a 1% chance something crazy like this happens, but I like that you exist in the world, Friedberg, to present it because idiot, you are the backstop to this level of lunacy. [01:06:25] S3: Chance is By by the way, Jay Cal, let let me... Call me doctor Doom all you want, but but this this is a fundamental question about what's the intention of this country. The the intention of the country was individual liberty. Yes. [01:06:37] S0: Of course. [01:06:37] S3: The right the rights of the citizen, the rights of the individual. It is not about state power, and it is not about us. And and we have a lot of laws that protect citizens from each other. Mhmm. What we're doing now is creating a different system that extends well beyond the founding principle of The United States to give a small group of actors an incredible amount of power that they're gonna centrally command and control. Okay. And I think that that's something that we need to pay attention to. And I'm not saying this is happening and the world's over blah blah blah. [01:07:03] S0: Well, that's why I'm trying like, percentage on it. [01:07:05] S3: As as this... It's not it's not binary. As the policies develop, we have to keep in mind what we're doing. [01:07:11] S2: And we already slippery have slope. You're saying it's
01:07:11 · Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis
[01:07:11] S2: And we already slippery have slope. You're saying it's [01:07:13] S0: a slippery slope. Yes. Okay. Sacks. But I do think, you know, just like the p doom where people say ten percent of people are gonna die, I like to put a percentage on it. What are the chances of this happening, Chamath, or or Sacks? You... You're the closest to this, but, you know, haven't been the czar. Do do you think that this is in the realm of possibility what what Friedberg's describing? If so, maybe you could put a percentage likelihood of it happening. And then what is your take on data centers and the net exporter, net importer of tokens potentiality here?
01:07:42 · David Sacks
[01:07:42] S1: Okay. So it's a 100% that Democrats are gonna make a major push for AI legislation in the next congress. The question is what that looks like. Yes. And I don't think you have to speculate too much to understand where it's going. I believe that Democrats wanna create a surveillance and censorship state that's turbocharged by superintelligence. I mean, that's ultimately the end state. How do you get there? You create a department, a federal department of AI. You require that all the so called frontier models have to be reviewed and approved by that. The regulators give their notes on it. You can't get a model released unless you address their concerns. And their harms will include all the things that the government is telling us that social media companies should be concerned about, like disinformation and misinformation and dissident thought. All the things that the government was pressuring the social media companies to crack down on and censor during COVID, I mean, how quickly we forget all of this, they're gonna basically reenact that whole regime again using AI. And it's gonna be infinitely more powerful because we're talking about super intelligence here. So I I do believe that that is the regime that we're headed towards. So it may not be exactly the the version that Friedberg's talking about where Friedberg's saying that only the government can use the tools. I don't think that'll be the case.
01:09:02 · David Friedberg, David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya
[01:09:02] S3: Not not that binary Sacks. Sorry. Meant like obviously, they're they're gonna get access to models and capabilities that the public doesn't. At the end of the day, any amount of distinction between [01:09:11] S1: Oh, for sure they [01:09:12] S3: will. State. What a central state actor gets and what the general public gets is really where that distinction of power arises, and it's really what makes it difficult for the founding principles to persist. [01:09:22] S0: Which would be a quasi de facto, nationalization of the technology here, Chamath. So what what... What's your take on this? I'm gonna force everybody to... And and try to pin you guys down a little bit. You think that this nationalization of the technology, the government having the best version, everybody else, in The United States, corporations, individuals having 60, 70, 80% of that version? You think that's a possibility here? [01:09:44] S2: No. I don't think this is the priority. Again, I think people will get animated about this issue, but I don't think this matters. And I think that to the extent that people legislate an oligopoly, it'll further entrench economic power, and I think that that's counter to what these people want. So I think when they put the... They connect the dots, I don't think that that's what's going to get legislated. I don't think they have the energy for that. And I think at