Ben Buchanan
speaker
133 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Ben Buchanan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
you you
I met with him once. I don't know exactly, but I met with him once. Would that characterize the conversation he had with you? He talked about concerns related to startups and competitiveness and the like. I think my view on this is you look at our record on competitiveness, it's pretty clear that we want a dynamic ecosystem.
So the AI executive order, which President Trump just repealed, had a pretty lengthy section on competitiveness. The Office of Management and Budget Management Memo, which governs how the U.S. government buys AI, had a whole carve-out in it or a call-out in it saying we want to buy from a wide variety of vendors. The Chips and Science Act has a bunch of things in there about competition.
So I think our view on competition is pretty clear. Now, I do think there are structural dynamics related to scaling laws and the like that will force things towards big companies that I think in any respects we were pushing against. I think the track record is pretty clear of us in competition.
Yeah, so in the president's executive order, we actually tried to wrestle with this question, and we didn't have an answer when that order was signed in October of 23. And what we did on the open source question in particular, and I think we should just be precise here at the risk of being academic again, what we're talking about are open weight systems.
Can you just say what weights are in this context and then what open weights are? Yeah, so when you have the training process for an AI system, you run this algorithm through this huge amount of computational power that processes the data.
the output at the end of that training process, loosely speaking, and I stress this as the loosest possible analogy, they are roughly akin to the strength of connections between the neurons in your brain. And in some sense, you could think of this as the raw AI system.
And when you have these weights, one thing that some companies like Meta and DeepSeek choose to do is they publish them out on the internet, which makes them, we call them open weight systems. And the crucial thing about an open weight system on the good side is that It's much easier to innovate with that system, to use it as a basis for future systems because you've got access to the raw thing.
On maybe the riskier side is any safeguards that were built into that system. Refuse when a user asks you to help develop a biological weapon are pretty easy to remove. I'm a huge believer in the open source ecosystem. Many of the companies that publish the ways for their system do not make them open source. They don't publish the code and the like.
So I don't think they should get the credit of being called open source systems at the risk of failure. Being pedantic. But open weight systems is something we thought a lot about in 23 and 24. And we sent out a pretty wide ranging request for comment for a lot of folks. We got a lot of comments back.
And what we came to in the report that was published in July or so of 24 was basically there was not evidence yet to constrain the open weight ecosystem, that the open weight ecosystem does a lot for innovation and the like, which I think is manifestly true, but that we should continue to monitor this as the technology gets better, basically exactly the way that you described.
I think I mentioned before this core intellectual insight of this technology for the first time maybe in a long time is a revolutionary one not funded by the government and its early incubator days. That was the theme from the labs, which is sort of like, don't you know we're inventing something very, very powerful?
Ultimately, it's going to have implications for the kind of work you do in national security, the way we organize our society. And more than any kind of individual policy request, They were basically saying, get ready for this.
The one thing that we did that could be the closest thing we did to any kind of regulation is one action, which was after the labs made voluntary commitments to do safety testing. We said, you have to share the safety test results with us and you have to help us understand where the technology is going. And that only applied really to the top couple labs. The labs never knew that was coming.
Weren't all thrilled about it when it came out. So the notion of this was kind of a regulatory capture that we were asked to do this is simply not true. But I, in my experience, never got discrete individual policy lobbying from the labs. I got much more, this is coming, it's coming much sooner than you think. Make sure you're ready.
To the degree that they were asking for something in particular, it was maybe a corollary of that, of we're going to need a lot of energy. And we want to do that here in the United States. And it's really hard to get the power here in the United States.
Yeah. And this is actually, I think, an area of bipartisan agreement, which we can get to. But this is something that we really started to pay a lot of attention to in later part of 23 and most of 24 when it was clear this was going to be a bottleneck.
And in the last week or so in office, President Biden signed an AI infrastructure executive order, which has not been repealed, which basically tries to accelerate the power development and the permitting of power and data centers here in the United States, basically for the reason that you mentioned.
Now, as someone who truly believes in climate change and environmentalism and clean power, I thought there was a double benefit to this, which is that if we did it here in the United States, it could catalyze the clean energy transition and the like. And these companies, for a variety of reasons, in general, are willing to pay more for clean energy.
And on things like geothermal and the like, our hope was we could catalyze that development and bend the cost curve and have these companies be the early adopters of that technology so we'd see a win on the climate side as well.
Showing 61–80 of 133 · page 4 of 7
← Previous
Next →