Roman Yampolskiy vs Emad Mostaque: I Was The Only Optimist - #569

The man who open-sourced the most-used AI image model in history sat down with the man who has spent a decade proving superintelligence cannot be controlled. Brian set up a debate. What emerged was something more unsettling than any debate.

Roman Yampolskiy is the computer scientist who coined the term AI safety and author of AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. Emad Mostaque is the co-founder of Stable Diffusion and the only AI CEO who signed the pause letter. He now says he doesn’t know how a pause could work. Yampolskiy thinks that is the only option left.

The question underneath everything is simple: if you have a 50% chance of wiping out civilization and you build it anyway, what are you actually doing? We cover what AI safety researchers actually think the danger is, why nobody has published a paper, filed a patent, or shipped a prototype for controlling a superintelligence, what the Qwen weights being out means for the pause argument, and why Mostaque thinks swarm intelligence is the most dangerous and most unpredictable risk vector we have.

What you’ll hear:

-Why both guests think P(doom) tells you less than you’d hope

-What it means that no company, no lab, and no team has a patent on controlling superintelligence

-Why the models the public receives are slightly lobotomized

-The difference between an AI swarm and the ASI everyone is debating

-Why giving every psychopath access to a cutting-edge intelligence weapon is incoherent safety strategy

-What it would actually take to update Yampolskiy’s assessment

“We either do it, or we die. There is nothing for you to gain by doing it.” — Roman Yampolskiy

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