Janet Egan

Thanks for having me.

The fundamental premise is that AI and its impacts will be global, regardless of who develops it.

So it does matter which jurisdiction gets the transformative capabilities first, but it doesn't matter in terms of them having global impacts.

Risk that eventuates in one country doesn't respect national borders and can easily move across and impact global equities.

And we're no longer in the Kumbaya globalist zeitgeist of the 1990s, where everyone was building up global institutions.

We've kind of moved into a different realm where there's like diminishing engagement in international rules and lower trust between different international counterparts.

So I think this means we really need to be preparing for a world where any agreements that protect collective global interests aren't just based on trust, but are based on the ability to verify that folks are following the rules.

The thing that I think makes AI a really tricky case when we're thinking about verification technologies is that the only really certain thing about AI futures is that it's very uncertain.

There's just a wide variety of futures that we might want to prepare for and a wide variety of risks that we're continuing to surface today and understand.

The one thing I'll go back to double click on, so Tim talked about the labs highlighting that there's growing demand for potentially coordinating on a slowdown.

But I think we're also seeing a policy window open between the US and China, which makes work in this area really prospective.

After the Trump-Xi summit, we heard Trump talking about that safeguard collaboration was on the table.

We also heard Vessant talk about that the two AI superpowers are going to start talking and set up a protocol in terms of how we move forward with best practices.

So it's not just the people at the forefront of AI science who are saying, oh, look, we're starting to feel a bit worried about how some of these risks might eventuate absent international coordination.

We're also seeing the signs coming from the world's two superpowers.

And so...

I think what that means is actually starting to build up the verification technology base so that we don't have to trust, so that even in low trust international environments, we can build the ecosystem where when rules are set and consensus is reached, we can rely on each other to actually follow those rules.

When we think about what parts of the AI tech stack are most governable or most observable or controllable or monitorable, compute seems to be the key target here.

And that's because when you think about the other parts of an AI model, so whether it's the data or the algorithms or the model itself at the end,

Those things are much harder to control because they're not physical.