Barry Weiss
speaker
976 appearances
13 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Barry Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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But the argument that some of these startups are making, startups like – there's an AI startup called Hugging Face, which is an unbelievable name, the founder of a company called Stability AI. They're basically saying what Sam and the other big guys, the incumbents, are trying to do, OpenAI, Google, and Apple, is to kind of create –
basically asking government to kind of build a moat around you and stifle the competition through regulatory capture. What do you say to those people? And this is sort of like the argument between big tech and little tech. We can frame it in all kinds of ways.
What do you say to those people who are saying, we want to get in on the competition, the regulation that people like Sam and others at many other times are pushing for will hurt us and benefit them?
I definitely – first of all, I don't even understand what we're talking about when we talk about superintelligence. You understand what that means and the implications of it in a way that I just don't. So that's number one. And number two, if this technology is as powerful as people like you and Elon and so many others that are closer to it say that it is –
Of course, I think it should be regulated in some way. How and when is obviously like the relevant question. How and when matters a lot.
Recently, Marc Andreessen was on this show. And he talked to me about his perception of what the Biden administration was trying to do around AI technology. He came on and made the argument and told a story, really, that he experienced. He says... that the Biden administration was trying to sort of completely control AI.
And what they were aiming to do was to make it so closely regulated by the government that in his words, there would only be sort of two or three big companies that they would work with and that they were trying to ultimately protect them from competition. Is that true? Do you know what he's referencing? Was OpenAI one of those companies?
So OpenAI was not one of those companies?
You weren't like in a room with OpenAI and a number of, you weren't in a room ever with the Biden administration and other AI companies.
What was your feeling in general about the Biden administration's posture toward AI and tech more generally? You just said, like, you didn't think they'd have the competence to –
OK, that's like a perfect analogy to get us to the comparison that's often made, which is the comparison between AI and nuclear weapons. When Mark was on, I asked him to kind of steel man the Biden administration's perspective or steel man the perspective that this should be heavily regulated.
And he basically drew the analogy to the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb when the government failed. felt that it needed to make sure that this new science and innovation remained classified. First of all, do you think that that's a good analogy?
And if so, if it is as powerful as nuclear weapons, wouldn't it make sense for this to be not OpenAI and Gemini and Claude, but rather a project of the federal government?
At the beginning of the nuclear age, we had people in this country who functioned almost like chief science officers, right? I'm thinking about people like Vannevar Bush who helped launch the Manhattan Project and came up with the National Science Foundation and kind of guided American policy for those first few like very crucial years of nuclear energy. Does that person exist?
Like, if we wanted to have someone like that who sort of understood the technology, had no financial stake in it, and could talk, whether it's President Biden or Trump or whoever comes after him, sort of the pros and cons, not just of the development of AI here, but the competition with China. Like, does that person exist actually right now in America? Like, could you be that person, arguably?
Don't you feel, though, that, I mean, what do you make of not just the political vibe shift, but the cultural vibe shift that we've been experiencing since November 5th? Like, if you made that argument to me eight weeks ago, I would say, yeah, Sam's probably right. Now it feels like a different country.
I don't know science. I just think that there's a shift in the direction of growth is a good thing. Technological progress is a good thing. Nihilism feels like it's passe and falling out of favor. Like I feel that change happening in a dramatic way.
Now maybe it's because I spend a lot of time on X and like a lot of it's sort of like fomenting there and sort of leaping from the online into the real world. So, you know, if you went and like talked to the average PhD student uptown at Columbia, I don't think that they would have the same experience I do because everything is so balkanized.
Well, one of the companies that I feel excited about, perhaps it's controversial to say this, but I just think the founder is one of the most interesting people in the country, is Palmer Luckey and his company, Anderle Industries. And OpenAI recently entered into an agreement with, with Anduril to develop AI with military applications.
Now, previously, OpenAI had had a prohibition against using its technology for weaponry. Now, with the caveat, of course, that you're concentrating on defensive systems at the moment, the sorts of things that could guard us against attacks like drone swarms, perhaps like what's happening in New Jersey right now. We don't have time to talk about that.
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