And we're joined now by the chief technology officer of Palantir, Shyam Sankar. Welcome to Face the Nation.
Thank you for having me, Margaret.
It's good to have you here in person. We've been talking a lot about technology, artificial intelligence, and public perception of it right now. And that's where I want to start with you because our polling shows there's a problem here. 50% of those polled by CBS say AI will create more problems than it solves. 29% say it'll solve more than it creates. And 21% just really don't know. Like 45% of Americans want the government to restrict use and development of AI. Is your position there should not be any guard rails at this moment?
No, not at all. Um, that's not my position. I think the burden is absolutely on the technology industry to show the American people that there are real benefits to AI and not kind of ephemeral sort of benefits like it can help me schedule travel, but actually meaningful benefits that result in job growth and prosperity for the American people. I think one of the things that's really complicated in the current discussion is that there's an unseen force driving the narrative around AI safety and it's really this millenarian doomsday cult meets messianic complex called effective altruism.
Uh, the most famous effective altruist that most Americans know is Sam Bankman-Freed. And the effective altruists, it's almost like a religion that they've been thinking about doomsday scenarios from AI since the early 2000s.
He was, he is jailed. He's the crypto investor.
Who defrauded investors. But this sounds very academic. Like what makes you so focused on this? Because there's only really roughly 2,000 AI researchers in America and the vast majority of them believe in this sort of worldview around effective altruism. And if you hear someone like Jacob Coxin telling you that AI has a 10% chance of ending humanity, and you believe
A researcher who had this warning recently.
Yes, correct. And you believe he's speaking as a technically informed individual who does this work, it's a scientific critique. I think the American people would be right to be quite panicked and worried about what's going on here. But if you understand that it's actually a theological critique, then you can weigh it against the empirical facts of what is actually happening out there. You know, I take, I think there's a profound truth to that Pascal saying that every human has a god-shaped hole in their heart. And it's important to understand that many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have filled that hole with the machine god of AGI.
And I mean there's so many interesting stories around this. Like for example, so many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI. I believe so much
That makes no sense. What do you think?
I believe so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer. So I'm showing you my chips are all in. So there is kind of this mass psychosis social delusion around it. And I think it's getting in the way of actually what is happening with AI. Where is it meeting the American worker in industry? What are the results of doing that? And the doomsdayers have basically been wrong about everything they predicted. They told us that ChatGPT2 was too dangerous to release. They told us at this point in the timeline we'd already have mass unemployment and job displacement, and the economists see that actually we're having job growth in areas that we wouldn't have predicted. So the technology industry has two burdens. One is to show very clearly to the American people that AI is going to result in economic prosperity and security for the nation. And two, to actually do and absorb the burden of engineering. You cannot abdicate this idea that designing safe products is your job. You can't handwave around it. If you look at the kind of narratives that come out of the doomsayers, they seem like two contradictory narratives. One narrative is this technology is going to end humanity,
Right?
And simultaneously they say but I believe it has some chance of creating utopia. Mhm.
So at first blush this seems contradictory, but they have one thing in common, which is that you as a human have no agency. The machine God is going to decide the future and only perhaps a small number of us can try to avoid the horrible outcome. And I think it obfuscates the more profound reality that we have a huge amount of human agency over how we're going to use this technology to deliver the outcomes the American people. Well, let's talk about that because the other part of this argument would be and no one who wants, the people who don't want guard rails are simply in it for commercial reasons. They want to keep selling chips or they just want access to market. So that would be the counterargument to the idea that you know what you're saying which is an ideological opposition to guard.
Maybe we could just back up and who's on the side of no guardrails?
Well, when I want to get into the specifics here because even just defining what guardrails is seems really complicated and there's not even common agreement on that right now. Um, but Jay Clayton, who is the new DNI and the new AIS are said this week the focus is on control and monitoring of technologies with the potential to do harm. So, what does that look like to you? Because it sounds like he's not even sure yet.
Well, I think there's a very clear view that we should be regulating the application of the technology. So, if you're going to use this in medicines, you know, the FDA, we as a republic, we have 250 years of rich laws and history on how to manage liability. Um, I don't want to trivialize the metaphor, but you know, if I buy a car and the car is defective,
That's the car maker's problem. If I then use that car to go drive into my neighbor's house, that's my problem.
And, you know, the sort of obfuscation, the narrative is this technology is a total difference of kind. I don't think so. I think it's a difference of degree.
Well, in that humans aren't in control of it. It would be a different kind.
No, humans are in control of it. Even if we look at the kind of salacious reporting around Hugging Face, the models did not do anything they were not instructed to do. You know, they were, the real first you have human error. They were not in a sandbox. They had access to the internet. It was a horrible cyber security configuration. Then from that perspective they were asked to succeed at a specific benchmark and they were not given constraints on how to do that and they said, oh, the best way to succeed at the benchmark is to get the answers to the test and to do so. So for that, who should take action to
I think it's a defective product like if you
Is it up to the Justice Department to then bring suit against the programmers? Like who's liable for the technology?
The companies, of course, in that specific case it would be the AI companies. If another company had licensed that technology to use in another application and the product worked as expected but you misused the product,
Then it would be you that are responsible for that.
So you believe that, am I understanding you, the existing laws on the books should be able to handle technology as it develops.
I think it is a massive running head start. I think the laws on the books speak to a lot of the current considerations. Might we need a few more things on the margin? Sure. But I think we'll figure that out as we go through it.
So, let's talk about some of those things because you were with the president when he summoned some of these AI leaders recently. Um, and he asked them all to sign a pledge to implement robust internal controls, partner with an external auditor and establish a committee to evaluate reports from auditors. That was Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, Elon Musk. They all signed it. Palantir, your company, didn't. Why?
Well, those accords were for companies that actually make AI models, which we do not. So,
But you help to use them and build out platforms. Like, you don't see a reason for constraints there.
Oh, we do have those constraints. In fact, that part of that's our entire business is how do you safely deploy these models in specific use cases? We're just not a party that, we weren't asked to be a party of the accord.
But you were there at that meeting.
So, what happened like what was the conversation?
Well, the conversation was really an assertion that the American people expect AI to generate economic prosperity and to do so securely and that we as companies have an affirmative obligation to deliver on exactly those things. Um, and that we have existing laws to look at this and that we should be all taking this quite seriously. It was a very productive conversation.
Because it sounded like the White House was saying something more should be done and now you have this new AI RJ Clayton um going out to Silicon Valley this week. He said he's launched this 120-day review of AI policy. What do you hope comes from that or is this another one of these like blue ribbon commissions that doesn't produce anything?
No, I think a lot will come out of it, which is really focus and energy and using the existing agencies and regulatory apparatus to make sure we're on top of this stuff and providing support where it's needed. I think one of the challenges, going back to my comments on effective altruism, is today the so-called independent research organizations that are overseeing this are not really independent. They have conflicts with the labs. Uh, they are made up of people with a singular worldview around effective altruism looking for the doomsday scenarios. You know, you have evaluators who are essentially pointing a loaded gun at a target saying, 'I can't believe the gun worked' when they should really be saying, 'What guardrails do we have in place? Are these products working to the specifications we designed and what are the opportunities for misuse?'
So, I've spoken to people, for example, in the financial industry who say, 'We did need some regulation here, but there's the SEC, there is, you know, the CFTC, they oversee certain operations here.' Don't you think within the current institutions there could be some sort of entity that oversees technology?
I think there's going to need to be um an incident response and reporting regime that creates more visibility and transparency into what you're learning in the testing well ahead of product launches that give visibility and transparency to the government of how people are doing at implementing exactly the existing laws.
Who does that or who could do that?
