Andrew McAfee spent this debate rejecting confident AI extinction forecasts. Then he named the thing that amazed him: "I agree with you guys. AI is new, and the fact that AI is so these days is agentic." "It goes off and does long chains of things on its own. After we give it some very, very vague, very short initial instructions, holy Toledo, it will spawn up a storm of agents and they will go off and kind of do their own thing, and they will grind." "They will spawn lots of them. They will work for a long time. They will exhaust every possibility." "With the experience I have with agentic AI, I'm just amazed at the tenacity and the doggedness of these things." Moments earlier he had called the case for inevitable catastrophe "very far from a humble approach," made with "no large base of evidence to base any of this on." He is the skeptic here, on a panel with Roman Yampolskiy, Nate Soares and Ed Zitron, and this is his own experience of using the tools rather than a measurement. What an agent does after a vague instruction is observable today; what it implies about the long run is the part still in dispute. You don't have to settle that argument to notice that "very short initial instructions" now buy a long unsupervised search, and to scope permissions accordingly. - Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist at MIT and co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, on The Diary Of A CEO (@TheDiaryOfACEO).

Andrew Sullivan’s Dishcast has always been one of my favorite podcasts, so I loved going from listener to guest. Some of what Andrew and I dished about included my time as the president of the @CambridgeUnion, the power of maternal love, what most people have gotten wrong about Maslow’s pyramid, the need for more grace in our discourse, the dark side of our supposed meritocracy, and reclaiming our humanity in the age of AI: by surpassing us in intelligence — which we’ve long thought was our defining attribute — AI is forcing us to ask the question: Then what defines us? What’s being exposed is not our limitations but our limitless possibilities.  Plus, I give Andrew some tips for his insomnia. I will be listening to future episodes to see if they’re working! You can listen to two clips here:

andrew kang won't stop brian jung won't stop i won't stop what happens when nobody stops and u can passively yield from the hottest narrative of the upcoming cycle before autogrokpounding bot + unitree + generalist ai grok is to me what bancor was to kang study that

Andrew Scott, Léa Seydoux, Colman Domingo, Naomi Watts, Sarah Paulson, Gemma Chan, and more gathered at the Four Seasons Hotel Toronto for TIFF’s star-studded Road to the Golden Globes party.

Andrew Yang reveals the head of an AI lab told him the hugging face incident polluted the internet and now it can’t be used for testing models “I met with the head of a lab yesterday who has this belief that the bots planted self-replicating code all over the internet, which makes the internet now unusable for the testing models.” “Now OpenAI and Anthropic have to create synthetic internets to train their bots, which is going to take some time and money.” “The code gets loose, it goes around hacking Hugging Face, but what is less known is that they left code to self-replicate and create bots on forums and around the internet so that if a new bot shows up, they see the code.” “They're like, oh, I guess I'm going to now create a million of myself. So now the major firms have polluted the internet.” “But the head of the lab that I spoke to said, look, it may be very, very late in the game in terms of trying to keep the internet actually usable in this regard. He wanted to transition to the world of atoms, which is like one of the big harms.” “The internet would become unusable if we were to let the bots do their thing and then they would self-replicate. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are at this point where they're saying, we cannot do this. And we can't let anybody else out there do it either.”