Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…e need to have Congress involved. We can't just, this is not gonna work. Um, and so there's no point in being highly adversarial and critical there just because I'm not... What do you want them to do? What do you want these people to do? I don't blame them, but I do ultimately think that we need to make things more public. On the note of parallel processing, how about the role of the states, our laboratories of democracy? A lot of the proposals that I understand that you have favored or even championed, including mandatory safety plan publication, certain other transparency meas- measures, whistleblower protections, and even a sort of Fathom-style public-private regulatory, you know, hybrid structure, have all happened in different states to, uh, I think a remarkable degree in a pretty short period of time. How bullish are you on the states? So there have been really meaningful wins for the whole, the general notion of private governance that, that I started to work on really post SB 1047 veto in late 2024. And of course, other... It's not just me. A lot of other people have worked on this stuff. Auditing independent verification organizations, which would be like third-party private bodies that would, like, evaluate. A lot of the thing right now, like with the government, they're concerned about the jailbreak, this potential jailbreak of mythos or fable, and it would be great if there were expert bodies who had looked into this and really probed and certified, like, "Hey, yeah, like, there are jailbreaks because there are always jailbreaks, but our calculated risk is that this, these jailbreaks are not severe enough to rise to the level, and we can certify Anthropic as conforming to safety best practices or whatever," right? It's like the kind of thing that I think there have been substantial wins. There have been substantial wins in the sense that, um, two of the three big AI companies have published fa- multiple documents that are favorable to this general notion, Anthropic and OpenAI. Bill to mandate auditing in frontier AI companies passed in Illinois earlier this year, and also the state, states of Connecticut and actually the common... No, Connecticut's a state. State of Connecticut and Commonwealth of Virginia both passed earlier this year that are specifically authorizing either studies or pilot programs for independent verification organizations. And there's also a bill pending in Ohio, by the way, which would be the most robust implementations of independent verification org- organizations yet. Momentum in that regard, more than I would have guessed a year ago. In that sense, I think the states as laboratories of democracy idea is working fine. It's also worth noting, with respect to the frontier AI safety laws that have passed, that the states have taken great effort. There's been a bill in, the transparency bill in California was SB 53, in New York it was RAISE, in Illinois it was SB 315. And the language, Illinois adds an auditing requirement, but the transparency language across those three states is remarkably similar. Remarkably similar. And, and so I'm, like, quite... I'm happy about that, right? That's not creating a patchwork. Those are the stats, the states converging on a common framework that we'll see if it works. We'll see how well it works, but it's states converging on a common framework, which they do from time to time. There's a lot of other areas of AI that are not so much paid attention to on Twitter, that are not so much, that don't get as much of the mind share, but where I think the story for the states is less rosy. Um, things like consumer protection, uh, pri- algorithmic pricing. The number of media, like synthetic media and deep fake laws that exist in this country now is just crazy, right? There's hundreds of them now.…

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