Anthropic's Digital God, Pope vs AI, Job Loss Narrative Flips, Open Source Crackdown Coming?

Bill Gurley: Yeah, well, I started the book before this happened, and I've been asked the question a lot, and it came up in the TED Talk. I fear that a lot of people are in jobs, they actually don't care about that much. And there's a Gallup poll that backs this up. They came up with that word quiet quitters. They're like 59% of the people they surveyed are kind of ambivalent about their job. And when you're ambivalent about your job, you're not high agency, and so you don't lean in. If you look at how Jason talks about how they implemented AI in all of his different working groups, you hear that enthusiasm and that high agency, and then you want to go try these things. And I think the best way to protect yourself from AI is to be the most AI-enabled version of yourself you can be. But if you're ambivalent about your job, you're probably not doing that. And you could be a sitting duck. So I think it's the mindset that's the problem.

Bill Gurley: I fear that a lot of people are in jobs, they actually don't care about that much. And there's a Gallup poll that backs this up. They came up with that word quiet quitters. They're like 59% of the people they surveyed are kind of ambivalent about their job. And when you're ambivalent about your job, you're not high agency, and so you don't lean in. If you look at how Jason talks about how they implemented AI in all of his different working groups, you hear that enthusiasm and that high agency, and then you want to go try these things. And I think the best way to protect yourself from AI is to be the most AI-enabled version of yourself you can be. But if you're ambivalent about your job, you're probably not doing that. And you could be a sitting duck.

Bill Gurley: I fear that a lot of people are in jobs, they actually don't care about that much. And there's a Gallup poll that backs this up. They came up with that word quiet quitters. They're like 59% of the people they surveyed are kind of ambivalent about their job. And when you're ambivalent about your job, you're not high agency, and so you don't lean in. If you look at how Jason talks about how they implemented AI in all of his different working groups, you hear that enthusiasm and that high agency, and then you want to go try these things. And I think the best way to protect yourself from AI is to be the most AI-enabled version of yourself you can be. But if you're ambivalent about your job, you're probably not doing that. And you could be a sitting duck. So I think it's the mindset that's the problem.

David Sacks: Well, I very much agree with the Pope that the biggest risk of AI is a centralization of power and then it's misuse against us in some Orwellian way. I think it's government that's going to do that, not necessarily an individual actor because it's governments that ultimately have the power. So I do worry about the potential for AI to be used to surveil us, censor us, control us, as Orwell described in 1984. So if that's where the Pope is going with this, I very much agree with him. Maybe where we end up in different places is he thinks that government regulation is the way to prevent this. And I would just say that we have to be careful not to empower government too much, because if you give government the power to regulate or approve AI development, if you create, say, an FDA for AI, as many people are calling on, that will give government the power to approve models and therefore give notes to model developers. And very soon, this definition of safety will expand because the government always takes an expansive view of its powers. And we saw this during the social media wars where the definition of trust and safety expanded to issues like psychological safety, microaggressions, disinformation, transphobia, and so on that, you know, again, these social media companies were told that they had to stamp out all of those threats to safety and it ended up becoming a censorship agenda. So I get very worried about, you know, what if some government agency can give notes to the model developers and they start telling the model developers that your definition of safety is not expansive enough, you have to, again, protect the public from disinformation or psychological harms. So again, I think we just have to be careful not to aggrandize government because that's going to be the most likely culprit in terms of the centralization of power. And I know the Vatican likes Latin. This is a problem of political philosophy that goes all the way back to Socrates. It's called quis custodiet ipsos custodes, which is who will guard the guardians. In other words, if we entrust a set of guardians to protect us from a bunch of threats, what's to stop them from becoming tyrannical and from becoming the new threat against us? And I mean, this is the central dilemma of political power. Who watches the watchers? The genius of the American founding, by the way, is that it was a second order solution to this question. The founders of America very much understood this. And what they came up with is we have to have the guardians guard against each other. And so they came up with the idea of separation of powers. We'd have separation of federal and state. We'd have the three branches of the government, even within the legislative branch, it was a bicameral legislature. So they divided up the powers in a way that hopefully the guardians would check against each other as opposed to becoming tyrannical against us. And that is kind of my view on AI is that ultimately we have to have a solution of checks and balances. If the AI market becomes monopolized and falls into the hands of one or two companies, I would use antitrust law very aggressively as a check and balance against their power. Right now, we have a very competitive market. We have 5 frontier labs competing very aggressively. As long as the market is competitive, I would use that because I think competition generates the best outcomes. It helps us win against China, but it also protects the population because these companies, if they get out of line, there's some competitor that can offer something better. Consumers can opt out of it. If they don't trust ChatGPT, they can use Anthropic, or if they don't trust Anthropic, they can go to Grok.

Bill Gurley: This Pope said, that this encyclical was mirrored after one done by Leo XIII in 1891. And he invoked that. He even said he chose the name because he's so enamored with Leo XIII. Leo XIII encyclical warned that the Industrial Revolution was going to be bad for people. So let me tell you what happened from 1891 till today. The work week went from over 60 hours to 34 hours globally. Real wages went up 8 to 10X adjusted for inflation. The medium worker now earns more than a doctor did in 1891. Global GDP per capita went from 1,500 to 20K. Child labor in the US went from 18% to 0. Workplace deaths fell by 40X. Life expectancy went up 60%. And global poverty went from 75% of humanity to under 10%. All those things happened because of technology, innovation, and capitalism, which is exactly what Leo the 13th was warning against. So he got it dead wrong. He got the whole thing precisely wrong.

Bill Gurley: So this Pope said, and I have to learn how to pronounce all these Latin words like you, that this encyclical was mirrored after one done by Leo XIII in 1891. And he invoked that. He even said he chose the name because he's so enamored with Leo XIII. Leo XIII encyclical warned that the Industrial Revolution was going to be bad for people. So let me tell you what happened from 1891 till today. The work week went from over 60 hours to 34 hours globally. Real wages went up 8 to 10X adjusted for inflation. The medium worker now earns more than a doctor did in 1891. Global GDP per capita went from 1,500 to 20K. Child labor in the US went from 18% to 0. Workplace deaths fell by 40X. Life expectancy went up 60%. And global poverty went from 75% of humanity to under 10%. All those things happened because of technology, innovation, and capitalism, which is exactly what Leo the 13th was warning against. So he got it dead wrong. He got the whole thing precisely wrong.

Bill Gurley: So the reason I call this the Dr. Frankenstein theory is the more I dig, I've met people who I dare say think it's their responsibility and they're excited about building a species that's superior to humans. And I would just encourage people to read as much as they can about anthropic. Chris Ola worked on this thing called the Constitution. It's about 80 pages. It's hard to get through, but I would encourage you to read it. Amanda Askell, who is the chief philosopher, has started doing podcasts. I would encourage you to listen to him and listen to her language. And then Dario wrote this blog post called The machines of loving grace. Loving grace. I read it. And it was based on a poem. And the poem is kind of weird. We should put a link to the poem. It's quite short. But the last stanza of the poem says, I like to think of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and join back to nature, return to our mammal brothers and sisters. I don't know what that means. Like we're going to go live in the fields where the mammals live. And then the ticker and all watched over by machines of loving grace. Sounds like overlord to me. And then in Dario's post, he says, near the end, and it's very long, you read it, Jamal. I mean, machines of loving grace is very long, but he's talking about in the future, what are humans going to do because he believes in the massive abundance and UBI and that we won't have to work. I don't believe in any of those things, but he does. And then he says, it could be a capitalist economy of AI systems, which then give out resources to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans. So that's envisioning a deity of sorts that's going to break ties and decide what humans do. It's a computational reward function for humans. It decides how much you're worth. So I don't think they think they're writing software. I think they're midwifing A deity here.

Bill Gurley: I have to tell you that Anthropic is a mystery to me. I've never ever seen a company that is both leading their field and the most negatively outspoken commenter on what they do. I've just never seen it. And my initial theory was the regulatory capture theory, that they just want to ensure there's regulation. And quite frankly, I think they're very close to achieving that. Like they have stirred up a frantic position, especially in America. American consumers are definitely afraid of AI... Then they just got so loud that I've literally in the past 30 days, read everything I can about Anthropic, and I've come up with a new theory. I call it the Dr. Frankenstein theory... The more I dig, I've met people who I dare say think it's their responsibility and they're excited about building a species that's superior to humans. And I would just encourage people to read as much as they can about anthropic. Chris Ola worked on this thing called the Constitution. It's about 80 pages. It's hard to get through, but I would encourage you to read it. Amanda Askell, who is the chief philosopher, has started doing podcasts. I would encourage you to listen to him and listen to her language. And then Dario wrote this blog post called The machines of loving grace... The last stanza of the poem says, I like to think of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and join back to nature, return to our mammal brothers and sisters. I don't know what that means. Like we're going to go live in the fields where the mammals live. And then the ticker and all watched over by machines of loving grace. Sounds like overlord to me. And then in Dario's post, he says, near the end, and it's very long, you read it, Jamal. I mean, machines of loving grace is very long, but he's talking about in the future, what are humans going to do because he believes in the massive abundance and UBI and that we won't have to work. I don't believe in any of those things, but he does. And then he says, it could be a capitalist economy of AI systems, which then give out resources to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans. So that's envisioning a deity of sorts that's going to break ties and decide what humans do. It's a computational reward function for humans. It decides how much you're worth. So I don't think they think they're writing software. I think they're midwifing A deity here. And I don't know which one I'm more afraid of, the regulatory capture or the second theory I call the Dr. Frankenstein theory.

Bill Gurley: I have to tell you that Anthropic is a mystery to me. I've never ever seen a company that is both leading their field and the most negatively outspoken commenter on what they do. I've just never seen it. And my initial theory was the regulatory capture theory, that they just want to ensure there's regulation. ... But then they just got so loud that I've literally in the past 30 days, read everything I can about Anthropic, and I've come up with a new theory. I call it the Dr. Frankenstein theory. ... The more I dig, I've met people who I dare say think it's their responsibility and they're excited about building a species that's superior to humans. ... And then in Dario's post, he says, near the end, ... he's talking about in the future, what are humans going to do because he believes in the massive abundance and UBI and that we won't have to work. ... And then he says, it could be a capitalist economy of AI systems, which then give out resources to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans. So that's envisioning a deity of sorts that's going to break ties and decide what humans do. It's a computational reward function for humans. It decides how much you're worth. So I don't think they think they're writing software. I think they're midwifing a deity here.