314. Why do the tech bros really want more regulation?
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Why are tech leaders suddenly calling for AI regulation?
We often talk about who is winning the AI race, but now the tech bros are saying we should slow down. What's this all about? Is this really about safety? Trump thinks it's a hoax, so who should we believe? And what does this mean for AI regulation? Plus, given the stock market reaction so far, is this a potential burst of the AI bubble?
This is literally the biggest story of the moment. And the questions are, will China cooperate with America? Will we essentially get an agreement that's a bit like the pact that we had to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons? And also, can Andy Burnham, can the government play a role? Or are we just destined to be powerless and vulnerable? Spectators.
We're proud to say that the rest is money, is powered by Octopus Energy this year, and Greg Jackson, the founder and CEO, is with us. Greg, I wanted to ask you about heat pumps. Octopus Energy, now make them. Why not just import them from China?
You know what? We wanted to make heat pumps that work that are designed for British homes, uh and um that are cheaper to run, cheaper to install, and actually cheaper for the hardware. And that's what we did. So uh for example, octopus created heat pumps that run at up to seventy degrees C, as hot as a gas boiler, so you don't necessarily need to worry about having, you know, excess insulation and changing your heating system. That's sort of thing makes much cheaper for British homes.
Nice one, Greg. Thanks for explaining that. Right, we're gonna go to the episode.
Well, it's been a dramatic week in the world of AI, I am sure you've all seen the apocalyptic headlines about how AI is gonna kill us all, and then off the back of that and the debate around it, we've seen the AI company's share prices fall. So we're gonna talk about what this all means and I'm just gonna give you first of all a quick reminder on what happened. So the story in terms of the news headlines. Starts with Hugging Face. So this is a major platform where researchers and companies experiment with AI models. So OpenAI was using the platform to test how good its systems were at finding and exploiting security flaws. So it deployed around 1200 AI agents in separate what we call sandboxes. So these are like isolated test environments.
So these agents got put into these sandboxes to do their thing, where they wouldn't be able to talk to each other or get into any real production systems. But they managed to escape from these controlled environments and find ways to secretly communicate with each other, to collaborate, and then they basically work like a digital swarm to break into hugging faces. Real servers, like a team of rogue hackers, basically, but without any human intervention whatsoever. So when OpenAI found this out, it obviously set off alarm bells. And since then, there have been other examples that have come to light. And I'm sure you've all seen that viral clip of the computer scientist and Nobel Prize winner Jeffrey Hinton, who's basically like the godfather of AI, who said that a tech.
ten percent chance of AI killing all humans was not unreasonable. So that has been one of the things going on. But Robert, there's also as well as this evidence of AI going wrong on its own without humans, there's also been some worrying stuff around how humans are using it badly too, hasn't there?
Yeah, that's totally right, Steph. I mean, you know, since uh we have seen the development of AI at a cracking pace, there's been two sets of fears about potential harm to humanity from AI. One has been AI becoming godlike and autonomous, self-improving, and you know, one of the things That the AI leaders are currently saying is we're very, very close to uh AI becoming self-improving in a way that they would find very hard to control. And that's why the incident that you reported about uh these agents cooperating and then swarming and breaking through all the guardrails put in place by. Open AI has caused so much anxiety. Just on that, I was talking to some government ministers last night and they said, Oh my god, and we've been told about even worse stuff than that.
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3 chaptersSpeakers
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