AI leaders warn of existential risks as Trump pushes “superintelligence”

All right, so recent warnings about the rapid development of AI have gone as far as suggest that technology could pose an existential threat to humanity, and some of those warnings have even come from leaders at the very top of the biggest companies in the business. So let's talk more about that with my guest tonight, Yale Losowski, who is the deputy director of the Consumer Choice Center. He's up late with me tonight live in studio on The Final Five. Welcome back. Good to see you again. Thank you so much, Jim. Pleasure being here. Okay. First of all, I just, I want to get your take just on all of this talk right now. You know, the president today laying down law, he wanted to give it a new name, superintelligence. But as we see world leaders right now and state leaders, is anybody on the same page when it comes to coming up with a game plan? Realistically, the only thing that we know is that people want to control this technology. Everybody in the room except for President Trump. He really has his own agenda. You've seen the European Union, you've seen China, you've seen all these others. They have different versions of it, and it all comes down to control. And even as you mentioned, the top leaders in the frontier AI companies all want to have some kind of modicum of control. They want to be told what to do. And President Trump is the one saying, not at all. I'm the accelerationist president and we're now superintelligence is this American idea and we're going forward. And, you know, it goes back to, I think, the conversations we've had about social media regulation where the question is, does anybody truly know what they're looking to regulate in the first place? And there's some lawmakers who are walking the walk. I know Don Byer, the Democrat from Virginia, is working on a master's in machine learning. So you get to give some credit to get some some grasp of what's going on. But it seems right now that there's a lot of people who have a lot of thoughts, but not a whole lot of grasp of what what they're trying to regulate. As the same with with AI generally, people don't know exactly how to use it. Perhaps they've never heard of it. Perhaps they've only used the free versions. They actually haven't seen the capabilities. And now we have agents that are apparently running amok and hacking into things. I think it's just so much of it is esoteric. It's numbers. It's ones and zeros. People aren't really seeing how it can actually impact their life for the better, nor for the worse. So we're kind of stuck in this thing where it's data centers, it's AI and all of the kind of strange imaginations of how this stuff will be bad for us when realistically this stuff is being used all the time to improve our lives and we just don't see it. Why do you think in the last couple of weeks we've seen a lot of tech leaders, some of these some of these engineers from from companies like like like Anthropic coming out and talking about what they believe is this threat that it's going to end civilization in 10 years? A lot of it comes down to responsibility. So they do not want to be the ones that are ultimately responsible. But it's this key ideological goal. They have this idea of effective altruism. Their idea is that we have extreme rationality with all of the decisions that we make. And if we are in any way leading to something that could have any type of extinction for humanity, we don't want to have a part of it and we don't want to contribute to it. Therefore, we must all be liable. I think that is core to the element of what this movement is. And it has infected the very top people at these frontier companies. A lot of the people who are mid tier who are now the researchers coming out as whistleblowers are coming out telling the truth. So there's a lot of that sort of Silicon Valley ideology that is now permeated throughout the companies. Sometimes we'll call it doomerism or effective altruism. They don't see technology in the same way that certainly President Trump does, nor is I think normal users of this stuff do. When you talk about these these guide rails, it's suddenly they're talking about throwing up in some way, shape or form. Is it too late for that? I mean, is the toothpaste out of the tube? I don't really think so. I mean, we just have to think about who is going to be controlled. You can put all kinds of things on developers, on the company, if they're trying to make money from something before I as a consumer actually pay for a subscription. You can do that. But the problem with code is that it is open. And a lot of this stuff now, the bigger debate is between open models, a lot of them coming from China and some American companies and the closed frontier models. So if we can control one, can we control the other? And how do we do it? And that's kind of the bigger question right now. And with with all these different calls for regulation, because your pal in mind, Stephen Kent, has been on my show before back during the tick tock debates. And I know you and I have talked about that as well, where you had states wanting to step in and we've seen, you know, Maryland looking to do something on that. You just have all of these people on different pages. And that seems to maybe dissuade innovation in as far as, you know, you want to put something out, you put out to the whole country. So where do these where do these guidelines and where do the regulations ultimately come from? I think one good way of thinking about it is money. Let's think about money and banking. So we have money. It goes throughout the economy. We spend money. We have money. We have it everywhere. Where is it regulated? The most is actually at the bank, because that's where we hold it. That's where we show our ID. That's where we have our savings. It's this central point where all of the regulatory compliance is done. That might be something that we need is just a one stop shop. Let me use the code. Let me be able to program my things, use agents. But I don't need to do this with every state, every municipality, every different country. We have to figure out a way to do that. I think there right now there's a lot of competition between jurisdictions who wants to be more open on AI, who wants to be a bit more closed. California has its own regime that they're building. No, not California. They're going to have their own regime and you'll be signing up for all types of different things and the California spillover effect and the other states will happen. But I do think you're going to have a lot of competition between states. That'll be a good thing. I think Americans will find the one that they prefer the best. Yale Osowski from the Consumer Choice Center. Great to see you again, man. Thank you so much for having me. Always appreciate you coming in. Cheers.