00:00Let's start with the essay from Anthropics CEO Dario Amadei, which was published this Saturday.
00:04What do we need to know?
00:05I mean, he's talking a lot about some of the wonderful things that AI can lead to,
00:10but also how recent events such as an inverted hack by OpenAI models of Hugging Face
00:16are leading to this moment where he believes that some sort of pacing is necessary
00:22in order to ensure safety of AI.
00:24Shep, you were on hand all weekend on duty to basically bring together all of the responses that came in.
00:31First, it was Sam Altman, then Elon Musk, and then lots of investors and politicians weighed in too.
00:36Try and summarize it.
00:38Well, you know, quickly, we saw the arch rivals of Anthropics, Sam Altman from OpenAI,
00:45Elon Musk from SpaceX AI, quickly embrace in broad terms Dario Amadei's call for a slowdown.
00:51When you get into the specifics, it's a little bit unclear how closely aligned they all are.
00:58But on the broad strokes, they back it.
01:00Investors are a little bit skeptical about how far the companies will actually go in slowing this down.
01:06And for their part, Dario Amadei and Sam Altman are insisting that slowing the pace at the frontier
01:12does not mean stopping spending or slowing down work or growth in their businesses.
01:18There is no commitment to end training runs or reduce spending.
01:22I think that's really important.
01:23Rachel, I think it's worth going back over the timeline of the last seven days.
01:27When we started this story, it was because an anthropic researcher had resigned.
01:32And we also had reporting that Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI,
01:36had already gone company-wide to say, we think we should slow the pace, fill the gaps.
01:41Okay. So we had this resignation.
01:44It seemed to gain ground.
01:47It gained a lot of attention, not just within AI, but also outside of AI.
01:52And then Sam Altman, as you mentioned, our reporting indicated that he had said that the company was interested
01:59in pacing and was hoping other companies would join as well.
02:03And then since then, we're just seeing this sort of snowball effect where we're getting more and more talking toward
02:12this idea of pacing.
02:14But as you guys both mentioned, it's not clear what that would mean.
02:18And it certainly doesn't include any commitments to actually slow down innovation internally, perhaps more externally.
02:24And also they're talking about using some outside companies as well to look over their models and that kind of
02:30thing.
02:30So a lot of unanswered questions still, I would say.
02:34We've had the reaction from the president this morning over the weekend, the reaction from Congress,
02:38Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware speaking to Bloomberg this weekend.
02:42Now that we've got agreement from Elon Musk and Sam Altman and Dario Amidai,
02:47we need agreement from Republicans and Democrats in Congress to put aside our partisan pre-election bickering
02:53and put in place some real guardrails before AI goes off the rails.
02:59Shep, what's happening on Capitol Hill right now?
03:02Well, it was a lot of talk.
03:03And we heard Chris Coons really lay out his vision for trying to get both parties together quickly before the
03:10election
03:11to find some consensus on this.
03:13But in a bitterly divided House and Senate, it's hard to imagine that they would be able to agree on
03:18something
03:18that's so technically difficult to wrap their heads around.
03:22And that interview, Coons also pointed to a relative lack of tech expertise on Capitol Hill.
03:28And then meanwhile, going down Pennsylvania Avenue inside the Trump administration,
03:32we heard the president just now in social media really going after Dario Amidai directly over this call for guardrails,
03:39insisting that he as president is the best guardrail of all.
03:43And, you know, you look at this stepping back for a moment.
03:48AI development is central to the president's economic agenda.
03:51And it's also critical to this upcoming meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
03:56The president, Donald Trump, has put AI at the center of the economic competition with China.
04:02And he doesn't want anything holding the U.S. back in this moment.
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