All right, welcome back. The debate over the risks and rewards of AI reaching a fevered pitch this week with a former Anthropic researcher going public with his own concerns. His warnings drew a sharp rebuke from our next guest, Brad Gerstner. He's the founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, joins us now. He's an investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as, all of you know by now, in several of the hyperscalers. Good to have you back, especially to have a conversation in this important time.
Well, it's good to be here, Scott. And first off, you know, I can't believe it's been 25 years. I was watching those images this morning. I know you were around, I was around New York City at that point in time, and here we are 25 years later, and my prayers are still with so many of my friends and families that lost people that day. So, thanks for having me on today.
Yeah. No, it's a pleasure to have you here. Appreciate those words, and of course, we share all of that with you and everybody. Let's have a conversation about what I think has become the national conversation: the risk and rewards, the promise and the peril of AI, which I feel like picked up this week with Jacob Coxon from Anthropic, the researcher who quit and posted the following on social media for those who don't remember or didn't see it. "I resigned from Anthropic today," he wrote. "I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They're racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." You responded to that on X saying, quote, "Ridiculous hyperbole from an ex-junior employee who worked a total of 6 weeks at Anthropic, now calls for regulatory intervention. No thanks." And a couple of emojis after that. I can understand why those in and around the AI ecosystem would want to both discredit and disparage this person for saying what he did. But he is not the only one who has either posted or written about concerns about AI, especially self-improving. I'm sure you saw the Paul Tudor Jones op-ed from The Wall Street Journal where he said that AI may become the third superpower. Quote, "The threat is real. What are the chances that very soon an AI model reinventing itself thousands of times over makes one mistake that is harmful, if not devastating, to humanity? Now multiply that risk by tens of thousands of users." How would you respond to all that?
Well, first Scott, I would say that we should always have open debate about the risk and reward of technology. And this discussion's been going on for a decade. There was nothing new this week. In fact, I've not talked to a single person in AI who says full steam ahead, disregard safety. It turns out we all care about kids. We all care about the future of the country. We know the massive benefits it offers, but we also want to take the extra time to make sure that we do this safely. But what I didn't like this week is these hyperbolic scare tactics, which I think are hiding behind a political agenda, and we ignored all of the extraordinary steps already being taken, unlike in the age of the internet, unlike with social media, to get ahead of these downsides.
So let me just share a few. Number one, the companies themselves are investing a massive amount of money and compute in making sure that we build sophisticated safety systems. They're deeply coordinated with the national security apparatus of the federal government to make sure that we secure our national security and other safety issues. And they're issuing transparency reports like we saw out of Anthropic yesterday. Second, the Treasury and Commerce Department this year already took the unprecedented step of shutting down Mythos because they were concerned about potential cybersecurity hacks. So, they hardened the systems and forced them to put it on the shelf until they re-released it. They also had an EO around the model release framework, which is effectively regulatory scrutiny that occurs before any frontier model is released.
In fact, you know, there was a lot of celebration this week about the model that cracked Navier-Stokes, right? That is an Astra Plus One model working inside of OpenAI. Ask yourself, why doesn't the public have access to this model? Because it's undergoing scrutiny by the lab and by the government. They're not just going to release these models. Mythos was completed at the end of January and just now is rolling out to the broader public. So, we're taking a lot of time. And then finally, broader industry is coming together. Jamie Dimon, Michael Dell, myself, many others, dozens of CEOs coming together to make sure that we're coordinated around our critical industries and making sure that we're taking safety very seriously. So, I don't think we've invested this much time and energy in safety before a new technology in my 25 years in Silicon Valley. And if you listen to the echo chamber this week, you would think that we were hurtling ahead with total disregard to safety, and it's simply not true.
But how would you then respond to the fact, let's just say, Dario Amodei himself back in January posting writings about the warnings of AI? Those who are leading us into the future with the models they're building are also seemingly raising the warnings that they think exist and questioning whether we're doing enough to deal with it. Sam Altman just recently said that he's telling staff that OpenAI is open to slowing AI development, that he's pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements in the US, citing concerns that advanced AI systems could accelerate its own development. That says to me—
Scott, doesn't that make you feel great? Doesn't it make you feel great? Did you ever hear that out of Mark Zuckerberg about social media? Did you ever hear him saying that, "I'm so concerned about what this might do to America's kids"? I think it should make you feel good that America's leaders, starting with Elon Musk back in 2016, said this will be the most positive thing that we can ever build for humanity, but we have to do it safely. We've been having this conversation in Silicon Valley for a decade. The conversation continues. It's an important conversation to have. But to go on national television in a highly coordinated way and sit in the living room on NBC, on ABC, on CBS, on Fox and have a single researcher who spent 6 weeks at Anthropic tell the moms and dads of America that this can kill all of humanity in the next 3 years without any countervailing conversation is deeply irresponsible.
Look at what people said about it. Jensen Huang yesterday called it deeply untrue. Andrew Feldman, the founder of Cerebras, who spent decades studying this, called it utter horseshit. Elon himself, who's concerned about safety, said it was a coordinated psyop. So my only concern here is that we have a balanced conversation. This week has not been a balanced conversation. Everybody who's invested in AI, everybody who's leading these companies, the government takes AI safety very seriously. That should make everybody at home feel very comfortable about it. Let me say one other thing: we act like there's no risk in the alternative.
So I would ask these folks who are causing this alarm: what would they like us to do? What is the alternative? What are the things that we're not doing that they want to see happening? My sense is they don't have a very good understanding of all of the things that are happening in government, all the things that are happening in the labs. But if the idea here is that we need to unilaterally disregard to all of our potential adversaries around the world who, by the way, are not going to slow down or stop, right? Roll the clock back 70 years. We may not have wanted to pursue the Manhattan Project, but we knew our adversaries would whether or not we did. This is a matter of national economic security. It's a matter of national security.
We have great track records. Despite the hyperbolic claims—remember all the claims around nuclear that it was going to kill all the kids, Ralph Nader that it would wipe out the city of Cleveland—not a single person in this country died or was injured by nuclear energy. But we shut down 67 nuclear reactors. We unilaterally disarmed while China's building 100 fission reactors. Why did we do that? Because of alarmist activists that went uncountered. And all I'm asking here is for a balanced conversation that looks at both the risk and the rewards of AI. And I think we're moving forward safely.
I understand. But when you're in an environment where, if you look at the polling, and they suggest one after another that a growing number of Americans don't want data centers in their backyard, so to speak, don't trust the technology. Certainly, they're not all fools who don't understand where all of this may be going. They see an industry that's racing ahead. They hear us talk about IPOs. They see people getting rich. They worry about this technology that's coming into their backyards, and they think causing their water bills, their electricity bills to go up, and God forbid, take my job. And that's why there's this growing level of distrust.
Correct. Correct. And by the way, we need to do a much better job in a very reasoned and fact-based way of explaining what in fact is happening, right? The Economist is out with a story just this week that despite all the doomers who said 10% of all jobs would have gone away by now, in fact, AI has created a million new jobs in America, right? We learn that all of this catastrophizing about data centers may, in fact, have had support from the CCP, right? So, I want a little investigation: who is behind all of this negativity? Is it coordinated? Where is the money coming from? I don't see anybody who's saying, Scott, like you did, "full steam ahead, disregard safety," etc. I think it's a false narrative. I think it's a straw man argument. It's simply not true. Every single person in Silicon Valley has kids. We take this very seriously. We want to usher in a safe world of AI. But that doesn't mean that we need to stop, shut down, overregulate because of the hyperbolic fears of a few who have their own political agenda. We've seen this in every technological revolution, right? And like I said before, we've shut down really important industries, giving up massive upside to humanity before it even takes flight.
I want to address the role that some suggest that the technology industry has played in getting to the point where we're having this national conversation and where this level of distrust, I think we can both agree, seems to be only on the rise. I want you to listen to what the Treasury Secretary had to say at the G20 recently, and we can react to that on the other side. Here's Scott Bessent.
