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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Now, we've been talking in recent nights about the artificial intelligence companies that are going to the stock market, the likes of SpaceX, which is effectively an AI company. OpenAI is intended to go to the stock market at some stage in the future. And Anthropic is doing so soon. And indeed, Google's been raising extra money as well for its Gemini platform.
But as it happens, Anthropic has suggested that there should be a global pause on building the most powerful AI systems as the latest models are beginning to show signs that they could escape human control. We have a couple of guests with us. I'm going to start with Adrian Wachter, the tech editor. of the Irish Independent. What's going on here?
They say that they have seen evidence of potential recursive self-improvement. That's the term they're using. And what they say that means is that the AI, the anthropic AI, may be showing signs that it can possibly improve itself within a couple of years, escaping human control. Now, the context in which they're saying this is in terms of coding.
So they're saying that their own engineers get eight times more done, eight times more quickly with the code. But they're saying that the rate of improvement of the code in Anthropic is so fast and so impressive, according to them, that it may reach a point where it actually starts to write itself and improve itself without human control sooner than we think.
Okay, Puneet Kukreja is with us as well, the head of cyber at EY Ireland. What do you make of this?
I believe where we find ourselves is a pivot point. And I'll quote it from Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas. We talk about it a point... after 26. And the last time it happened was, again, surprisingly, I checked this before I came in, was when Pope Leo XIII in 1891 talked about Rerum Novarum, which was around the social consequence of industrialization.
And today, it's about the social consequence of artificial intelligence. I believe with all developments, there is a time when you need to take Take pause, take stop, but look at the control infrastructure that's required. You look at the models, the agents, the networks, the guardrails, and how they really operate.
And it's okay for a few, and I'll call them mango, Matt, because it's Microsoft, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Google, and OpenAI.
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Chapter 2: What concerns does Anthropic raise about AI development?
They could all decide and say, perhaps it's a time to pause and stop. But that's only from a Western world perspective when it comes to, let's say, the development of AI that's happening in China. And I call them bamboo because they have Baidu, they have Alibaba, they have Moonshot, ByteDance, and from an open frontier model, DeepSeek.
So we could simply say, let's stop, let's take a pause, but they're not stopping. So what does that actually mean for us? It means that we need to take a strong look, but really think about it as a pivot in time where it will be before AI and after AI.
OK, but Puneet, does that suggest that maybe Anthropic are a bit smart here in that sense? They're saying, we know that there needs to be guardrails put in place. We know that the brakes have to go on. But you know what? We can't do it because if we do it, the Chinese will move so far ahead of us that there'll be danger. So we've highlighted the problems, but on we go on our merry way.
I believe the market, the organizations, because let's just look at the facts. They're all for-profit organizations. The genie's out of the bottle. The code, the models, they are being developed. They are being developed both from the perspective of bringing in... and advancing how humans can do more. But AI always has been, and I've said it a couple of times now, it's a double-edged sword.
Chapter 3: How does recursive self-improvement affect AI control?
We're using it for good, but the perpetrators are also going to use it for bad. So when we say we use it for good, what evidence is there and what technology, what control, what advancements are there for the human defenders to defend against it, but also what advancements can we get with getting more productivity out of it?
Right.
Okay, I want to go back to Adrian this. Puneet mentioned there the genie out of the bottle.
I'm thinking more of the lid coming off Pandora's box in relation to all of this because do we have a sort of a dystopian situation developing here that having, you know, developed artificial intelligence using large language models, using things that humans have done, have we actually created a sort of a digital monster that can go on and do things itself now, sentient being,
that maybe does not have morals or does not have feelings and just does everything on the basis of outcomes that may not be to human good.
That is very much the picture that Anthropic is dangling in front of us by calling for a pause or a slowdown in development of AI generally, while we all figure out what might actually happen with it. Now, I would issue this note of caution, though.
Anthropic is quite famous within the tech industry for doing this, for sounding a warning, for telling everyone that its technology is so powerful that we should all stop and consider before going forward. They did exactly the same a few months ago.
you will remember with mythos which they restricted to a small number of countries not ireland as as as i understand it and some organizations because they said it was so powerful that it would be able to hack anything now they're saying with their updated models, that it's so powerful, it's so good that it's on the cusp of learning itself.
And Anthropic knows well that that evokes these kind of conversations where we're all starting to think the machines are going to rise up against us. And it knows what it's doing here. One of the co-founders is a guy called Jack Clark. I know him reasonably well. He was a tech journalist. They know what they're doing here. And it's no coincidence that they are going for an IPO this autumn.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of AI's rapid coding advancements?
We know that. And you mentioned the hundreds of billions. It's actually trillions. This year alone, the top tech companies, if you take, say, a company like Google, Google made a profit in 2025, a profit of $130 billion. It had to go out and borrow an extra $45 billion two weeks ago to build out its AI infrastructure plan. And that's repeated with Amazon, it's repeated with Meta.
This year alone, there'll be over a trillion dollars committed to building out AI capacity. And there is no evidence yet that there is a solid revenue stream from any of that technology. In fact, the opposite, you would say, is the case because the way AI is charged for big companies, for big enterprises, and
Chapter 5: Why is a global pause on AI development being suggested?
you know, Puneet would know this, is moving to a per token billing. What that means is that your 30 euro or your 50 euro a month subscription, you would use a certain amount of AI and that's measured in tokens. Now they're starting to charge you for the actual cost of those tokens. So your 30 euro subscription or 100 euro subscription for a company might go to 1,000, 2,000, 10,000 euro a month.
And it's cheaper to use people instead of doing that. A final one to you, Puneet. CiarƔn Emeo says, I'm thinking this is like Y2K all over again on a much larger scale. But obviously the AI companies will all profit off it. Is that a fair point? We had a lot of scaremongering about Y2K. And maybe there are some listeners old enough to remember that at the turn of the century.
Although not everyone profited off that at the time. I do agree with it. And I'll go back and talk about, we talked about glasswing and mythos. There's a lot of conversation about it. There's a lot of global media about it. Governments are getting together. But I would go back and make it really simple. I would go back and say, yes, AI is happening. Yes, tokenization is happening.
But the price of tokenization, of course, a nation state can use it, but it's not the average Joe who's going to now suddenly build models to attack us. And with Y2K and with Mythos, what we need to be comfortable and confident about is that this is about change at scale. This is about how would you respond if something bad really happens? And really, we're talking about AI, but are we...
actually measuring, monitoring the data that is going into all of the pilots that we're running. That's where the biggest impact is going to happen. Well, how are we doing it responsibly within the organizations and the data that we actually control today, rather than worrying about some mythical monster from 2030 coming in 2026.
Prunit Kukreja, the head of cyber at EY and Adrian Weckler, tech editor of the Irish Independent. Thank you both for joining us. One listener says, soon AI searches and prompts will be charged by use. The free use of the moment will eventually have to stop.
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