Tristan Harris

So we were in San Francisco.

We know people work at all the tech companies we have for the last decade.

And suddenly in January of 2023, this is 10 years later now,

I got calls from people inside the major AI labs saying that the arms race dynamic was out of control and that huge leaps in capabilities.

This is basically speaking about GPT-4 before it came out.

And GPT-4, you know, could pass the bar exam, you know, get very high results on the MCAT, was producing incredibly powerful, like past the SATs, like very powerful AI that suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

And this people who reached out to us basically said, this is really dangerous.

Will you use your connections, use your connections in DC, you know, go wake up the world, wake up the institutions, let them know that this is coming because it's not safe what's about to happen.

Well, let's get to that.

So I think the thing that is most difficult for people to get is up until now, technology progressed in a very, like, we're kind of adding layers to a stack kind of way.

Like we build the networking stack, we build the user interface stack.

And as you develop the stack, you're kind of just adding layers and layers and layers.

And the technology that we live in was coded manually, like line by line, like

When the computer sees this, do this.

When the computer sees this, do this.

And then people contribute all this code over 30, 40, 50 years on GitHub and in operating systems, and then you land in this technological world in which everything that happens in a computer is happening through logic and through human choice.

What makes AI different is that you're designing and you're not really coding it like I wanted to do this.

You're more like growing this digital brain that's trained on the entire Internet.

And when you grow the digital brain, you don't know what it's capable of or what it's going to do.

So think about it this way.