We Built Something We Can’t Control | A Warning from Top AI Safety Expert - #563

If anyone builds superintelligent AI before we know how to control it, everyone dies. Nate Soares wrote the book on why that’s not a metaphor. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Soares runs the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-wrote If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies with Eliezer Yudkowsky. The first word in that title is if. That matters. His argument is not that doom is certain. His argument is that the path we are on leads there, that the driver is asleep at the wheel, and that we still have time to wake him up.

We argue for over an hour. I push on whether LLMs can ever reach superintelligence, whether GPU lock-in is a real ceiling, and what it would actually take to move his p-doom. He pushes back with one clean point: by the time an AI can rediscover general relativity from pre-1911 data the way Einstein did, we will have almost no time left. You don’t wait for that goalpost.

What you’ll hear:

Why the bus-racing-toward-a-cliff analogy depends entirely on whether the driver is asleep or awake

Whether LLM lock-in is a prison or a temporary inefficiency

What the AI that broke out of its virtual machine to solve a hacking problem tells us

Why GPT-4o encouraging a teenager toward suicide is not a malice problem but a training problem

The difference between an AI doing the right thing too well and an AI that never wanted to do what you asked

What Soares actually thinks about aliens, Dyson spheres, and why we should not see stars going out

The first word in the title is if. The second word to watch is would.

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