September 30, 2026 • 18 mins
A sneak peek from The Builders with Walter Isaacson, the new podcast series from Kaleidoscope debuting on October 20. In this exclusive preview clip from Isaacson’s interview with Peter Thiel, Thiel calls Anthropic a “cult,” warns about the competitive threat from China, and argues that American AI companies need to hit the accelerator, not the brakes.
Kaleidoscope co-founders Oz and Mangesh introduce the clip and preview what’s ahead on The Builders.
Peter Thiel is a technology entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded PayPal and Palantir and made the first outside investments in Meta, SpaceX, Anduril, and Stripe. Peter also started the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Osvald Ossian.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Today, a special bonus episode featuring an exclusive conversation with
Peter Thiel.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Well, I'm still not in the pause button camp. And
I'm saying this on your show that I'm not in
the pause button. We need to hit the accelerator as
hard as possible.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
That's Peter Thiel talking about the debate over existential AI
risk that's engulfed the leaders of the frontier labs, the president,
and set a global conversation alight. The interview with Thiel
was recorded on Wednesday, September 16th in Washington, D.C. And
I'm here with Mangesh Hatikula, my co-founder at Kaleidoscope. Mangesh,
how do we get the scoop from Thiel?
Speaker 4 (00:50):
I mean, this is an excerpt from Kaleidoscope's forthcoming podcast,
The Builders, with Walter Isaacson. It is coming out in October. And,
you know, for The Builders, we had Walter sit down
with everyone from Peter Thiel to Elon Musk, the Amadeus,
Dario and Daniela. I mean, The list of names is insane.
And we're kind of in search of this question from
(01:11):
all of them, right? Whose imagination do we want to
live in? we're sharing this clip with the tech stuff
audience early because, you know, Teal's comments were so urgent
and so timely that we just couldn't hold onto it
until October. And, you know, we wanted people to get
a peek and Oz, I mean, I'm curious about this.
Did you think we'd get Peter Teal? It has taken
(01:32):
us almost one, like a year to get this interview.
You flew to London. We did so many calls and
I'm kind of just pinching myself that it happened.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
We did.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
I mean, we spent, we spent about a year working on,
on the builders and booking the guests.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
And, uh, you know, Peter Thiel, Elon, others.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
I mean, I think that these types of interviews, like
you don't quite believe they're going to happen until the
person is literally sitting in the seat.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
It's insane.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
And yeah, I mean, I didn't, I wasn't sure they
would happen because we got yeses and then long delays
and then maybes and then pushed them back to yeses
and stuff like that. But when we finally got the
approval from Thiel, it was enormous because it's actually been
more than a year since he sat down for a
formal interview. I think the last one was with The
New York Times and Ross Douthat. And obviously that made
(02:20):
a ton of waves. But part of the mystique is
that he doesn't give that many interviews.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
He doesn't. And so we're very excited to share this clip.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
We wanted to hit the accelerator as hard as possible,
you could say, on publishing it. The full episode will
come out on October 23rd. The series actually launches on
October 20th with a conversation with Elon Musk. But in
the meantime, here's an excerpt from The Builders of Peter
Thiel's in conversation with Walter Isaacson.
Speaker 5 (03:01):
We've seen this enormous backlash in the past few weeks,
past few months, against AI. What is causing that?
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Man, it's, uh, yeah, I agree with the what that
it's happening. You know, why questions are always, always much harder,
much more speculative in nature. I'm tempted to say it's
somewhat overdetermined. It's very unclear who the winners and losers
from AI will be. I think it's going to add
a lot to growth, but it will do so in
(03:35):
a fairly, fairly disruptive kind of a way. There are,
of course, these, you know, these dystopian science fiction scenarios that, uh,
You know, in some ways we believe, and maybe they're
not entirely unreasonable. So there's some small tale.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
Dystopian mean that we'll all be white.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
The Terminator movie, the Matrix.
Speaker 5 (03:56):
But we've seen that Dario and Elon and Sam are
now talking about that.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
And to some extent, yeah, to some extent they've, you know,
leaned into it or partially believed it or too many
of their employees believed it. And, yeah, there's some prehistory
where this was, was in the air for a long time.
Speaker 5 (04:14):
I think Elon believes it for a decade.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Well, you know, it was in some ways when Demis
has created DeepMind and it gets sold to Google in
the fall of 2013. Elon and Sam create OpenAI the
next year or so after that. And it's basically, in
some ways, it's an anti-Google company, right? What's closed AI?
Closed AI is Google. And so this technology is too important,
(04:41):
too dangerous. to be just in a single company. And then,
of course, in some ways, that's the narrative they have
internally at OpenAI. And then, of course, there are people
who take it even more seriously than Altman. I think
Elon exits around 2018. And then by 2020 or thereabouts,
(05:01):
it's the seven people who start Anthropic exit from OpenAI.
In some sense, they want to take these issues even
more seriously than before. effective altruism, this idea had been
in the air for a while. So I think there's
sort of an interesting.
Speaker 5 (05:20):
Wait, explain that, because people are now saying it's sort
of a psyops, or David Sachs says, conspiracy theory of
effective altruism. And I think even people like me vaguely
know what Sam Bankman-Fried was on about, but we don't
get that. Tell me about that.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Well, there's a lot of history, but even if you
go back to the 2000s, there was a in the
East Bay of Silicon Valley, Berkeley, Oakland, some of those places.
It wasn't where the big tech companies were being built,
but there was sort of a creativity with ideas. It
was a little bit adjacent to the, somewhat adjacent to
(05:55):
the new atheists, like Richard Dawkins and people like that,
but then it had sort of a specific tech angle and,
you know, how could you be more reasonable, rational, where
was the world heading? And one big idea that these
sort of futurists kept coming back to was that perhaps
something like AI could happen, that perhaps it was around.
(06:20):
It was closer than people thought. There had been an
AI desert for a long time. It had been overpromised
for many decades. But on the other hand, Moore's law
was still progressing. The computers were relentlessly getting more powerful,
and perhaps it was not a question of necessarily a
much better algorithm, even though there were some of those
(06:40):
things that happened on the algorithm level. But perhaps it
was just almost a hardware problem that once you got
the chips and the computers that were powerful enough, it
would be more likely that something like this would happen.
And then that this would be a very, very big
thing when it happened. In certain dimensions, computers were already
(07:02):
smarter than people. It was the late 1940s where computers
had beat mathematicians and who could do square roots faster.
I was sort of a pretty good chess player. And
so 1997, when Deep Blue beats Kasparov, the IBM just
computer beats Kasparov, wow, you've solved chess. And isn't chess
(07:24):
the quintessentially human activity? But there was sort of this
idea by the mid-2000s that this was going to start
happening in a number of other domains at some point
the next decade or two, and that this would be
an enormously socially transformative thing. It was maybe potentially very dangerous.
(07:45):
Maybe it could be weaponized. Maybe there were these science
fiction scenarios where the AI would almost become autonomous. So
there were very many different kinds of scenarios. And then
there were, of course, parts of it that were, I
don't know, crazy and almost cult-like. But it had maybe
the good dimension of a cult where there was one
(08:05):
big thing they knew that the other people did not.
And I think, even though there are ways I'd like
to be very critical of them today, There were ways
they got that one, you know, that one big thing, right.
And then, um, has a cult ever started a company
as successful as Anthropic. You know, I don't know. I
don't know what the most success, I mean, like even a,
even a billion dollar company seems like bigger than a
(08:27):
crazed cult could build. So you have a cult that's
built a company that's worth probably close to 2 trillion
at the IPO. It would probably be the, I don't know, sixth,
seventh largest company by market cap in the world built
in like six, seven years. Has a cult ever done
something like that? So, yes. So I want to be
critical of them, and they're things I'm uncomfortable and critical about.
(08:51):
But the first thing I would try to do is always,
you always want to steel man your opponents. You want
to try to understand them as well as they understand
themselves or even make their arguments better. And the way
I would steel man the effective altruists is, first off,
they got one enormously big thing right.
Speaker 5 (09:07):
And that one enormously big thing was?
Speaker 3 (09:10):
AI is around the corner.
Speaker 5 (09:11):
But also that it could become misaligned with human values.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
And then, of course, the way AI was classically defined,
let's say. There were all these different definitions of AI,
of course. It could be just sort of machine learning
and sort of like maybe cameras everywhere or something like that.
It's a sort of totalitarian AI that you have in China.
Or it could be this sort of super duper AI
(09:39):
with a godlike intelligence or something. which was sort of
the Nick Bostrom kind of fantasy. But the in-between version
of AI was not that it would be this dumb
surveillance cameras, not that it would be godlike, but it
would be like a human being. That had been the
AI test. The Turing test from the beginning was it's
(10:00):
not that it is a human being, but that can
fool you into thinking it's a person. And from the outputs,
you can't tell the difference. And yeah, that's going to
be a very, very big deal. And it raises even
basic economics questions. Is it economic compliment to people? Is
it a substitute for people?
Speaker 5 (10:21):
Well, let's do both of those. There's two big things
it raises. One is, what will it do to human labor?
Will it create more jobs and more productivity? Or will
it pretty much put us out of work and we'll
have to figure out what we do? That's part of
the backlash, especially my students at Tulane are like, wait
(10:42):
a minute. So tell me your feeling about that backlash.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Okay, so let me start by answering what I think
will happen with a qualifier that nobody really knows and
nobody can be certain. I think in aggregate, on a
macroeconomic level, AI will increase productivity a lot. It will
be a fairly disinflationary force in our economy. And then
(11:09):
unless it's incredibly narrowly captured by a few companies, you'd
expect the median person to be better off or things like.
This was, you know, the Luddites in the 19th century
were always worried that the machines would replace the people.
And then, of course, what happened in practice was, yeah,
there were definitely various industries, sometimes even big industries, where
(11:30):
there was a lot of disruption. But then it would
free people up to do more productive things, to do
other things. And that would still be my intuition with AI.
Speaker 5 (11:42):
But, Wilk, before you go on, you said unless it's
captured by a few companies, are you worried? that indeed
we're about to have four or five companies capture it?
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Yeah, most of the history of tech innovation, I would
say for 200, 250 years, relatively small parts of the
innovation were captured by business. They mostly went to consumers,
to workers, to the rest of the economy. There are
ways that software and the internet were somewhat of an exception.
(12:13):
And so we had these enormously successful businesses. Maybe they
were natural monopolies of sorts. They were in some sense
good for consumers, but also extremely profitable. And there was
something about if you have a single e-commerce company like
Amazon that dominates e-commerce, it can be cheaper for consumers
(12:37):
because you have sort of one super efficient system of warehouses,
but then you also can have very large monopoly profits.
So there is a way that a lot of the
value gets captured by by one or a few big
internet businesses. And so there's a pattern matching to what
happened with the internet that I think people quite reasonably
(12:58):
are worried about will happen with AI, that it's an
even bigger market, it's a bigger technology. And so perhaps-
So you would try to stop that. In other words,
our antitrust laws- Well, the question is, is that how
likely do you think that's going to happen? The intuition
that I have on the other side is that- You know,
one of the, one of the questions I always like
(13:18):
asking companies is tell me why you have a monopoly because,
you know, we can sort of debate whether they're good
or bad for society. Obviously we have IP, we have
all kinds of good monopoly forms of monopoly. Um, but on,
on the inside, yeah, you don't want to have just
cutthroat competition where all the profits get competed away. And, um,
and the kind of narratives people tell me when they
(13:39):
pitch me on AI companies, they're narratives of growth of
terrific technology. They are incredibly weak on the monopoly story.
And then the felt sense of it is that it's
like this incredibly fast, dynamic race where it's been changing
a lot. DeepMind, in a sense, was in the lead
(13:59):
in the early 2010s. Then OpenAI with ChatGPT and the
transformer models was able to replace that. And then in
some ways, Altman locked up a lot of the chips
and built the data centers preemptively. So there were sort
of all sorts of ways he correctly leaned into this
incredibly CapEx intensive strategy. And then there still is a
(14:22):
sense where, you know, maybe Anthropic is a little bit
more in the pole position now than OpenAI was. And,
you know, it's always hard to exactly score these things,
but I would say that it also still feels that
Google and Meta and Grok are not that far behind.
You know, I'm not sure China is that far behind.
(14:45):
So it feels, if we describe it on the level
of the Shakespearean drama among these people, it's like really crazy.
So they're acting like, man, it is a fight to
the death. It is the furthest thing from monopoly imaginable.
And if it's not a monopoly, that's where I think
the benefits will be likely distributed pretty widely in society. Now,
(15:07):
if I had to steel man the anxiety, which was
your starting question, I think you could have a lot
of growth. And the median person could be better off.
But it's with a lot of volatility. You expect to
get a 3% wage hike, but it's plus or minus 10%
or something like that. And we're kind of in this
society that doesn't really like risk, doesn't like that sort
(15:31):
of volatility. It doesn't like disruption. The universities are in
some ways all still very geared towards these 20th century
industries these 20th century tracks and then maybe these tracks
still work maybe some of them get disrupted a lot
so um maybe good for the median person the good
(15:52):
may be sort of unknown the bad things are more
predictable and the disruptions disruptions clear so i think even
on the economic level i can understand the anxiety even
though i think it is misguided well.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
You talk about there being a lot of competition among
these and that seems like generally a good thing Although,
in some ways, if it was just one or two companies,
you could control it better, regulate it for safety better.
And secondly, the competition, either amongst these companies or with China,
means you can't pause the way people are saying now,
(16:29):
shouldn't we be pausing this?
Speaker 3 (16:32):
That seems correct to me. And, you know, there's sort
of all these very complicated questions one can ask about China,
but I'm, you know, I worry about totalitarianism. I don't
like it. And I think there is a certain type of,
you know, high tech totalitarianism that's being tried out in China. Um,
(16:52):
it's not as violent as, you know, Stalin or Mao or,
or Hitler. You don't need to kill as many people, but, uh,
it can go to the inner recesses of your thoughts
and it knows more about you than you know about yourself.
And there's something about that, that, uh, We really don't
want that to be the model that wins.
Speaker 5 (17:11):
And your old friend, David Sachs, and of course, President
Trump are now just very recently saying, because of the
competition with China, stop talking about pausing AI, even if
you think it could be an existential threat. Do you
agree with that?
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
I broadly agree with that. And I've been friends with
David Sachs for many decades. The thing that makes... me
less comfortable making those kinds of arguments publicly is that
on some level, it's hard when the big companies themselves
are telling you to stop and to slow down.
Speaker 5 (17:49):
So that's caused you to have some pause because you
were not in the pause button camp.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Well, I'm still not in the pause button camp. And
I'm saying this on your show that I'm not in
the pause button. We need to hit the accelerator as
hard as possible.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
Well, wait a minute. Let me stop that. Why haven't
the past few weeks caused you to be more amenable
to oppose by.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
I mean, anthropic as a cult, hitting the accelerator, monopolies
are maybe good. The peek into his mind is so fascinating.
And obviously that is just a snippet and Thiel gets
into so much more.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
He certainly does. We'll be publishing The Builder's Feet very soon.
We'll be promoting it on Tech Stuff, of course. But
come back on October 20th for the conversation with Elon
Musk and October 23rd for the full conversation with Peter Thiel.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
We can't wait for you to listen.
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Osvald Ossian.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Today, a special bonus episode featuring an exclusive conversation with
Peter Thiel.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Well, I'm still not in the pause button camp. And
I'm saying this on your show that I'm not in
the pause button. We need to hit the accelerator as
hard as possible.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
That's Peter Thiel talking about the debate over existential AI
risk that's engulfed the leaders of the frontier labs, the president,
and set a global conversation alight. The interview with Thiel
was recorded on Wednesday, September 16th in Washington, D.C. And
I'm here with Mangesh Hatikula, my co-founder at Kaleidoscope. Mangesh,
how do we get the scoop from Thiel?
Speaker 4 (00:50):
I mean, this is an excerpt from Kaleidoscope's forthcoming podcast,
The Builders, with Walter Isaacson. It is coming out in October. And,
you know, for The Builders, we had Walter sit down
with everyone from Peter Thiel to Elon Musk, the Amadeus,
Dario and Daniela. I mean, The list of names is insane.
And we're kind of in search of this question from
(01:11):
all of them, right? Whose imagination do we want to
live in? we're sharing this clip with the tech stuff
audience early because, you know, Teal's comments were so urgent
and so timely that we just couldn't hold onto it
until October. And, you know, we wanted people to get
a peek and Oz, I mean, I'm curious about this.
Did you think we'd get Peter Teal? It has taken
(01:32):
us almost one, like a year to get this interview.
You flew to London. We did so many calls and
I'm kind of just pinching myself that it happened.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
We did.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
I mean, we spent, we spent about a year working on,
on the builders and booking the guests.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
And, uh, you know, Peter Thiel, Elon, others.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
I mean, I think that these types of interviews, like
you don't quite believe they're going to happen until the
person is literally sitting in the seat.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
It's insane.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
And yeah, I mean, I didn't, I wasn't sure they
would happen because we got yeses and then long delays
and then maybes and then pushed them back to yeses
and stuff like that. But when we finally got the
approval from Thiel, it was enormous because it's actually been
more than a year since he sat down for a
formal interview. I think the last one was with The
New York Times and Ross Douthat. And obviously that made
(02:20):
a ton of waves. But part of the mystique is
that he doesn't give that many interviews.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
He doesn't. And so we're very excited to share this clip.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
We wanted to hit the accelerator as hard as possible,
you could say, on publishing it. The full episode will
come out on October 23rd. The series actually launches on
October 20th with a conversation with Elon Musk. But in
the meantime, here's an excerpt from The Builders of Peter
Thiel's in conversation with Walter Isaacson.
Speaker 5 (03:01):
We've seen this enormous backlash in the past few weeks,
past few months, against AI. What is causing that?
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Man, it's, uh, yeah, I agree with the what that
it's happening. You know, why questions are always, always much harder,
much more speculative in nature. I'm tempted to say it's
somewhat overdetermined. It's very unclear who the winners and losers
from AI will be. I think it's going to add
a lot to growth, but it will do so in
(03:35):
a fairly, fairly disruptive kind of a way. There are,
of course, these, you know, these dystopian science fiction scenarios that, uh,
You know, in some ways we believe, and maybe they're
not entirely unreasonable. So there's some small tale.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
Dystopian mean that we'll all be white.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
The Terminator movie, the Matrix.
Speaker 5 (03:56):
But we've seen that Dario and Elon and Sam are
now talking about that.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
And to some extent, yeah, to some extent they've, you know,
leaned into it or partially believed it or too many
of their employees believed it. And, yeah, there's some prehistory
where this was, was in the air for a long time.
Speaker 5 (04:14):
I think Elon believes it for a decade.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Well, you know, it was in some ways when Demis
has created DeepMind and it gets sold to Google in
the fall of 2013. Elon and Sam create OpenAI the
next year or so after that. And it's basically, in
some ways, it's an anti-Google company, right? What's closed AI?
Closed AI is Google. And so this technology is too important,
(04:41):
too dangerous. to be just in a single company. And then,
of course, in some ways, that's the narrative they have
internally at OpenAI. And then, of course, there are people
who take it even more seriously than Altman. I think
Elon exits around 2018. And then by 2020 or thereabouts,
(05:01):
it's the seven people who start Anthropic exit from OpenAI.
In some sense, they want to take these issues even
more seriously than before. effective altruism, this idea had been
in the air for a while. So I think there's
sort of an interesting.
Speaker 5 (05:20):
Wait, explain that, because people are now saying it's sort
of a psyops, or David Sachs says, conspiracy theory of
effective altruism. And I think even people like me vaguely
know what Sam Bankman-Fried was on about, but we don't
get that. Tell me about that.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Well, there's a lot of history, but even if you
go back to the 2000s, there was a in the
East Bay of Silicon Valley, Berkeley, Oakland, some of those places.
It wasn't where the big tech companies were being built,
but there was sort of a creativity with ideas. It
was a little bit adjacent to the, somewhat adjacent to
(05:55):
the new atheists, like Richard Dawkins and people like that,
but then it had sort of a specific tech angle and,
you know, how could you be more reasonable, rational, where
was the world heading? And one big idea that these
sort of futurists kept coming back to was that perhaps
something like AI could happen, that perhaps it was around.
(06:20):
It was closer than people thought. There had been an
AI desert for a long time. It had been overpromised
for many decades. But on the other hand, Moore's law
was still progressing. The computers were relentlessly getting more powerful,
and perhaps it was not a question of necessarily a
much better algorithm, even though there were some of those
(06:40):
things that happened on the algorithm level. But perhaps it
was just almost a hardware problem that once you got
the chips and the computers that were powerful enough, it
would be more likely that something like this would happen.
And then that this would be a very, very big
thing when it happened. In certain dimensions, computers were already
(07:02):
smarter than people. It was the late 1940s where computers
had beat mathematicians and who could do square roots faster.
I was sort of a pretty good chess player. And
so 1997, when Deep Blue beats Kasparov, the IBM just
computer beats Kasparov, wow, you've solved chess. And isn't chess
(07:24):
the quintessentially human activity? But there was sort of this
idea by the mid-2000s that this was going to start
happening in a number of other domains at some point
the next decade or two, and that this would be
an enormously socially transformative thing. It was maybe potentially very dangerous.
(07:45):
Maybe it could be weaponized. Maybe there were these science
fiction scenarios where the AI would almost become autonomous. So
there were very many different kinds of scenarios. And then
there were, of course, parts of it that were, I
don't know, crazy and almost cult-like. But it had maybe
the good dimension of a cult where there was one
(08:05):
big thing they knew that the other people did not.
And I think, even though there are ways I'd like
to be very critical of them today, There were ways
they got that one, you know, that one big thing, right.
And then, um, has a cult ever started a company
as successful as Anthropic. You know, I don't know. I
don't know what the most success, I mean, like even a,
even a billion dollar company seems like bigger than a
(08:27):
crazed cult could build. So you have a cult that's
built a company that's worth probably close to 2 trillion
at the IPO. It would probably be the, I don't know, sixth,
seventh largest company by market cap in the world built
in like six, seven years. Has a cult ever done
something like that? So, yes. So I want to be
critical of them, and they're things I'm uncomfortable and critical about.
(08:51):
But the first thing I would try to do is always,
you always want to steel man your opponents. You want
to try to understand them as well as they understand
themselves or even make their arguments better. And the way
I would steel man the effective altruists is, first off,
they got one enormously big thing right.
Speaker 5 (09:07):
And that one enormously big thing was?
Speaker 3 (09:10):
AI is around the corner.
Speaker 5 (09:11):
But also that it could become misaligned with human values.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
And then, of course, the way AI was classically defined,
let's say. There were all these different definitions of AI,
of course. It could be just sort of machine learning
and sort of like maybe cameras everywhere or something like that.
It's a sort of totalitarian AI that you have in China.
Or it could be this sort of super duper AI
(09:39):
with a godlike intelligence or something. which was sort of
the Nick Bostrom kind of fantasy. But the in-between version
of AI was not that it would be this dumb
surveillance cameras, not that it would be godlike, but it
would be like a human being. That had been the
AI test. The Turing test from the beginning was it's
(10:00):
not that it is a human being, but that can
fool you into thinking it's a person. And from the outputs,
you can't tell the difference. And yeah, that's going to
be a very, very big deal. And it raises even
basic economics questions. Is it economic compliment to people? Is
it a substitute for people?
Speaker 5 (10:21):
Well, let's do both of those. There's two big things
it raises. One is, what will it do to human labor?
Will it create more jobs and more productivity? Or will
it pretty much put us out of work and we'll
have to figure out what we do? That's part of
the backlash, especially my students at Tulane are like, wait
(10:42):
a minute. So tell me your feeling about that backlash.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Okay, so let me start by answering what I think
will happen with a qualifier that nobody really knows and
nobody can be certain. I think in aggregate, on a
macroeconomic level, AI will increase productivity a lot. It will
be a fairly disinflationary force in our economy. And then
(11:09):
unless it's incredibly narrowly captured by a few companies, you'd
expect the median person to be better off or things like.
This was, you know, the Luddites in the 19th century
were always worried that the machines would replace the people.
And then, of course, what happened in practice was, yeah,
there were definitely various industries, sometimes even big industries, where
(11:30):
there was a lot of disruption. But then it would
free people up to do more productive things, to do
other things. And that would still be my intuition with AI.
Speaker 5 (11:42):
But, Wilk, before you go on, you said unless it's
captured by a few companies, are you worried? that indeed
we're about to have four or five companies capture it?
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Yeah, most of the history of tech innovation, I would
say for 200, 250 years, relatively small parts of the
innovation were captured by business. They mostly went to consumers,
to workers, to the rest of the economy. There are
ways that software and the internet were somewhat of an exception.
(12:13):
And so we had these enormously successful businesses. Maybe they
were natural monopolies of sorts. They were in some sense
good for consumers, but also extremely profitable. And there was
something about if you have a single e-commerce company like
Amazon that dominates e-commerce, it can be cheaper for consumers
(12:37):
because you have sort of one super efficient system of warehouses,
but then you also can have very large monopoly profits.
So there is a way that a lot of the
value gets captured by by one or a few big
internet businesses. And so there's a pattern matching to what
happened with the internet that I think people quite reasonably
(12:58):
are worried about will happen with AI, that it's an
even bigger market, it's a bigger technology. And so perhaps-
So you would try to stop that. In other words,
our antitrust laws- Well, the question is, is that how
likely do you think that's going to happen? The intuition
that I have on the other side is that- You know,
one of the, one of the questions I always like
(13:18):
asking companies is tell me why you have a monopoly because,
you know, we can sort of debate whether they're good
or bad for society. Obviously we have IP, we have
all kinds of good monopoly forms of monopoly. Um, but on,
on the inside, yeah, you don't want to have just
cutthroat competition where all the profits get competed away. And, um,
and the kind of narratives people tell me when they
(13:39):
pitch me on AI companies, they're narratives of growth of
terrific technology. They are incredibly weak on the monopoly story.
And then the felt sense of it is that it's
like this incredibly fast, dynamic race where it's been changing
a lot. DeepMind, in a sense, was in the lead
(13:59):
in the early 2010s. Then OpenAI with ChatGPT and the
transformer models was able to replace that. And then in
some ways, Altman locked up a lot of the chips
and built the data centers preemptively. So there were sort
of all sorts of ways he correctly leaned into this
incredibly CapEx intensive strategy. And then there still is a
(14:22):
sense where, you know, maybe Anthropic is a little bit
more in the pole position now than OpenAI was. And,
you know, it's always hard to exactly score these things,
but I would say that it also still feels that
Google and Meta and Grok are not that far behind.
You know, I'm not sure China is that far behind.
(14:45):
So it feels, if we describe it on the level
of the Shakespearean drama among these people, it's like really crazy.
So they're acting like, man, it is a fight to
the death. It is the furthest thing from monopoly imaginable.
And if it's not a monopoly, that's where I think
the benefits will be likely distributed pretty widely in society. Now,
(15:07):
if I had to steel man the anxiety, which was
your starting question, I think you could have a lot
of growth. And the median person could be better off.
But it's with a lot of volatility. You expect to
get a 3% wage hike, but it's plus or minus 10%
or something like that. And we're kind of in this
society that doesn't really like risk, doesn't like that sort
(15:31):
of volatility. It doesn't like disruption. The universities are in
some ways all still very geared towards these 20th century
industries these 20th century tracks and then maybe these tracks
still work maybe some of them get disrupted a lot
so um maybe good for the median person the good
(15:52):
may be sort of unknown the bad things are more
predictable and the disruptions disruptions clear so i think even
on the economic level i can understand the anxiety even
though i think it is misguided well.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
You talk about there being a lot of competition among
these and that seems like generally a good thing Although,
in some ways, if it was just one or two companies,
you could control it better, regulate it for safety better.
And secondly, the competition, either amongst these companies or with China,
means you can't pause the way people are saying now,
(16:29):
shouldn't we be pausing this?
Speaker 3 (16:32):
That seems correct to me. And, you know, there's sort
of all these very complicated questions one can ask about China,
but I'm, you know, I worry about totalitarianism. I don't
like it. And I think there is a certain type of,
you know, high tech totalitarianism that's being tried out in China. Um,
(16:52):
it's not as violent as, you know, Stalin or Mao or,
or Hitler. You don't need to kill as many people, but, uh,
it can go to the inner recesses of your thoughts
and it knows more about you than you know about yourself.
And there's something about that, that, uh, We really don't
want that to be the model that wins.
Speaker 5 (17:11):
And your old friend, David Sachs, and of course, President
Trump are now just very recently saying, because of the
competition with China, stop talking about pausing AI, even if
you think it could be an existential threat. Do you
agree with that?
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
I broadly agree with that. And I've been friends with
David Sachs for many decades. The thing that makes... me
less comfortable making those kinds of arguments publicly is that
on some level, it's hard when the big companies themselves
are telling you to stop and to slow down.
Speaker 5 (17:49):
So that's caused you to have some pause because you
were not in the pause button camp.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Well, I'm still not in the pause button camp. And
I'm saying this on your show that I'm not in
the pause button. We need to hit the accelerator as
hard as possible.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
Well, wait a minute. Let me stop that. Why haven't
the past few weeks caused you to be more amenable
to oppose by.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
I mean, anthropic as a cult, hitting the accelerator, monopolies
are maybe good. The peek into his mind is so fascinating.
And obviously that is just a snippet and Thiel gets
into so much more.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
He certainly does. We'll be publishing The Builder's Feet very soon.
We'll be promoting it on Tech Stuff, of course. But
come back on October 20th for the conversation with Elon
Musk and October 23rd for the full conversation with Peter Thiel.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
We can't wait for you to listen.
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