How A.I. Agents Are Going to Transform Our Lives | Hard Fork

There are two things I'm having trouble keeping track of in tech right now. The first is all the new personal assistant agents. There's Meta's Muse.

Google's Spark.

An agent called Instinct, and just announced this week OpenAI's new product, Dots. Dots are remarkably capable, always-on agents built to handle really anything you can think of.

The other thing I'm having trouble keeping track of is all the websites and institutions that have been hacked, illicitly accessed, or otherwise meddled with by rogue agents. The AI platform Hugging Face, of course, plus the Australian government's Medicare data portal, the Education Department, the Commerce Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, an obscure German wiki. All of this culminating in OpenAI deciding not to release its latest model this past week. So, right now, two things seem to be true. One, agents are the thing that will make AI useful for regular people. And two, they're maybe going to kill, hack, or otherwise meddle with us all. The president's attitude about this, by the way, is that the companies should figure it out themselves.

This is Hard Fork. I'm Max Read, and over the next few months I'm going to be joined by an array of New York Times reporters and other tech experts to discuss some of the biggest stories in tech, AI, and our weird new future. Today we're talking about rogue agents, helpful agents, cute AI avatars, and whether there's such a thing as self-regulation.

I'm joined by Mike Isaac, Erin Griffith, and Eli Tan. Hi guys.

Before we really get into it, Casey and Kevin left me a scrawled note here in the studio. It says, "Run while you still can." I'm kidding. It says, "Don't forget to disclose that the New York Times is currently engaged in a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright violations related to the training of large language models." It also says, "Check to see if your wife works at Anthropic." My wife does not work at Anthropic. I want to start today with an icebreaker question. Tuesday was a big White House AI summit luncheon. Trump, as he is wont to do, Truth Social'd out a seating chart of it. Can we put the seating chart up so people can see it? Because what I want to ask each of you is where would you sit? Imagine you're walking in. You've got your tray. You've got a plate with a little pre-made sandwich and a glass of milk and like a green apple on it. Where do you want to sit?

Eli, where are you sitting?

Mike, what about you?

I know this is a bold choice. I think right in the Jensen-Mark-Trump circle is actually — it's like shooting the moon. It might be the most tolerable lunch that you could have. I think that if they're in a good mood, you probably get some good stories. You can rap with them about whatever's going on. I think it's a little dangerous elsewhere at that table. There's some strange — like sitting between JD Vance and Jeff Bezos. Like, what's the vibe there? I don't know. It seems a little scary to me. Unfortunately, none of us were invited. So none of us managed to be at the biggest party of the week. So this was a summit, as we were saying on Tuesday, between the Trump White House and some of the richest and most powerful names in AI, which culminated in a press conference. Can we play a little bit of Dario laughing and talking in front of the reporters?

Slow down to AI. So, I just want to hear from you after this big summit where you are today.

There's the side. I talked about benefits, the jokes, the laughing, the smirking. The president has said, you know, whoever wins, AI wins. I think that's very important. But I think the technology has very real — you know, the mechanism, how we address those risks is still under discussion.

And then we have Trump forcing Mark to say something, to basically answer a question he does not know the answer to in front of everyone, and don't get it wrong.

The upshot of this was that it was a rebranding exercise, right? Like the kind of what they got at the end of it was we're calling AI superintelligence. Now, that was the big commitment.

Well, my read on this scene was that Mark Zuckerberg seems to have quite the influence over the administration right now. From kind of the cordial talking with Trump to even the term superintelligence. This is something that, you know, Mark's been talking about for the last year. It almost seemed like — reminded me of like a high school friend group where they've invited the new awkward kid. And they're still trying to show that, you know, they've been buddies for a while.

I was thinking — I'm sure I'm not the first person to make this observation, but I was thinking that Dario really — we all know that Trump has a kind of central casting problem, that he needs people he interacts with to look like what he expects them to be. And without wanting to be rude about it, I do think Dario, if you are thinking like super intelligent math genius nerd, like that is like Dario is kind of what you're picturing in your head. And I think that maybe won him over to Trump, that Trump was like, I understand this. I think possibly Sundar had the same kind of effect. A sort of taller, ganglier, awkward version. Can we play the clip of Trump? This is what we're about to hear is Trump complimenting Sundar.

Wow. I don't know if I would want to be called a monster in front of everyone. I don't —

That was for sure the reference.

Okay, so in addition to this being a big exercise in branding, which is like the most Trumpian sort of, you know, aftereffect we could have gotten out of it, the other thing was that Trump effectively asked them all to self-regulate. And I want to focus on this for a second because self-regulation, the word, the concept has sort of been circulating for the last few months as AI safety has come to the forefront of a lot of people's minds. I'm sure you guys all saw Ezra Klein, our colleague, interviewed Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, last week.

And speaking of people who are very influential to Trump, Jensen was sitting right next to Trump and has been extremely influential to the way Trump has been thinking about this. And I have to say, and I want to talk about it with you guys, I found Huang's interview to be sort of — refreshing is probably taking it too far, but it was a little different from a lot of what we've heard about CEOs sort of directly in the AI industry. He's got a very different perspective, and I want to talk about why that is, not just on sort of regulation in general, but how he thinks everyone should think about the dangers of AI. When can we play the clip about the car, if you've got it?

So Jensen is sort of saying, look, if you're creating these things that are, you know, super dangerous, crazy, you know, going to kill people, why don't you just not release them at all? What did you guys make of this interview? Was it — did it feel new to me because of my perspective, or was this a fairly common view in the valley, do you think?

I like that anti-agency. That's a good — see, that's great.

No, I mean, maybe refreshing is the wrong word. I feel like I've spent the last few months or few weeks at least hearing a lot of kind of hand-wringing about what's happening. I find this sort of — the Dario-Altman pose a little — I don't know. It just feels — I mean, I suppose in some ways I have a sort of Jensen-esque like, okay, well, like why are you — okay, so stop. And I know that there's this elaborate scaffolding of rationalization and justification for why you would continue building AI even if you think it's got a 10% chance of blowing everything up. But I do think that Jensen, in his heart — I'm just calling him by his first name. That's how you can tell I'm captured. I want to be clear. I really disagree with a lot of stuff in this interview. This is not an endorsement of the take. But I do find him — he's an interesting figure to me because he's not somebody who has come up through the world of machine learning, which has a really specific — as you guys all know — has a really specific kind of culture and a kind of sense of what they're doing and what they're building is. I mean, this is a guy who is a graphics card salesman. That is his job. That is what he's been doing, you know, for 30 years now. And I'm sort of very sympathetic to a guy coming around, you know, if we can extend the car metaphor. He's like a guy who sells mufflers or whatever. And all of a sudden, Volkswagen is saying, you know, if we build cars, like they might all blow up on the highway and kill all of us. And he's like, well, you're stopping me, first of all. Like I've been selling these mufflers forever, and it's been — I've gotten really rich off of it. It's been great. Why are you messing up a good thing? But also, he's like, "They're just cars. Just build the cars." And I thought this was an interesting contrast with the Bill Gates interview that Ezra did this week, which was another end of this sort of spectrum. You can't rely on the industry to self-regulate here. I mean, it's just insane.

Yeah. I think that's right. I mean, I definitely am getting — I'm like I've like contrarianed myself into like a position that I don't actually hold just by like trying to triangulate my way out of it. But I do think — I mean, the one thing —

I know. Exactly. The one other thing I'll say, I think that there's a real — the value of having Jensen Huang talk like this is that it feels to me very often like there's a real echo chamber in the AI world. And I'm not saying that like adding more wrong opinions to the echo chamber is necessarily going to somehow produce a right opinion, but it is nice to have to like start to like to, you know, sort of bounce around some ideas that don't have anything to do with the kind of rationalist-directed, rationalist-oriented, you know, EA-oriented, AI safety-oriented things. I mean, at the end of the day, I think I more agree with Bill Gates than I do with Jensen Huang about the need for some kind of like sector-specific regulation, but I also feel like this is such a fast-moving environment, it's really hard to say how we should approach it at all.

It's a very good question, and I'll just note that the FTC is now looking into OpenAI and Anthropic, which feels a little bit like — does the government want them to self-regulate or does it not? Because the way they seem to want to self-regulate is by effectively forming a cartel. And if the government is going to, you know, bring antitrust prosecution against them, then that's not — they're not going to be self-regulating anymore. But I want to follow that thread a little bit because part of what's at play here that I think gets ignored by the fact that it's all the CEOs at the summit and these are interviews with Bill Gates and Jensen Huang is that there's this huge mass of people inside the labs — researchers and workers and engineers — who are themselves trying frantically to pump the brakes or to figure out, you know, exactly what they're doing and how to do it. There was a great — our colleague Sheera Frenkel had a great story this week about people inside OpenAI raising the alarm over lack of monitoring, lack of proper security procedures around a bunch of the hacking tests that have resulted in stuff like the Hugging Face incident. Are you guys hearing — I mean, is this — do I have the right sort of take on this, that there is a fair amount of unrest within these companies, or if not unrest, at least sort of a sense that the workers are taking it into their own hands?

What about inside Facebook, say, which is a major player in the AI space? Is there — I mean, is it because they're not a frontier lab, there's just less of a sort of employee culture of fear and dissent and whatever else?

I'd like to see — I'd like to Meta-ify the three of you. I'd like more products and more flywheels on this call. I want to talk — so but this is all leading somewhere because the other big news, or the big news to me at least this week, was that OpenAI scrapped the release of its newest AI model, GPT-6.1 Astra. The quote that has been ringing in my head is the head of OpenAI safety systems, Sachin Jain, says GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception. It wasn't always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn't take.

You should have. Yeah. Well, this is one of those like AI — like they can't not talk in like sci-fi cliches, but also they are building cliched sci-fi, you know, minds. So I guess that's kind of how you have to talk about it.

You know, like I'm interested in this in a bunch of different ways. One is to what extent do we think this is about this sort of internal, you know, push? Is it that the people at the top at OpenAI might have released this, but they're worried about pushback from inside the lab? Is it more that they're just — they've like brutalized by story after story of the various, you know, hacking, scraping — to use our favorite word — meddling with websites that OpenAI agents have done? Erin, when you read about this, what was your reaction?

They are. This is in fact them pacing the frontier. I mean, is this self-regulation?

Yeah.

So this is an example of rogue agents. One of the things that I thought the Jensen Huang interview sort of underlined quite well, in fact, was the way that part of what we're talking about here is a shift change in just in the last six months, say, where we have a sense of how much more powerful, how much more capable, and in some ways how much more dangerous these models can be. But one of the funny things about this technology is that the power and the capability and the danger also overlaps quite a lot with usefulness. So we've also been hearing a lot more recently about useful AI agents, autonomous AI agents that can do things like change your calendar, respond to emails, you know, reschedule your haircuts, whatever else. Eli handed his life over to the Meta one for the sake of the education of all the rest of us. And after the break, we're going to ask him about that.

Among the funniest things about this week, in addition to OpenAI apologizing to the Australian government for improperly accessing various websites and announcing that its new model was too scary to possibly release, they also announced that they were going to have a personal assistant called Dots. So Dots joins, among others, Instinct, Google Spark, and Meta's newest product Muse, which has been —

Does it do something different?

From Boston.