Nathan Labenz: evaluation

Transcript context

…for? Yeah, yeah. So my background is definitely cybersecurity. That's what I did for, and I'm still doing. But that's what I did for my whole career starting in 99. And that took me all the way through. I started getting into AI at Apple. I joined a machine learning team there. It was doing a bunch of stuff with machine learning and security there. So I got exposed to AI, I want to say probably around 2016 or so. And then I took the job at Apple in 2018 and got more exposure there and thinking about it for a long time. But it wasn't until I went independent in about six months before ChatGPT, actually, so great timing. And then ChatGPT came out in late 22. And obviously, I hard-pivoted, not getting away from security, but just seeing security as embedded inside of AI. I see AI as like a container for magnifying everything else that you're doing. My main focus now, though, is basically trying to help humans and companies, mostly humans, to just be able to adapt to what's coming. That's the main thing. So I do a whole bunch of open source stuff. You mentioned the Pi project. That's probably the biggest one. I've got another project, open source project called Substrate. And all of it is just trying to just move humanity forward. I feel like the place that we've been at all this time has not been a good place. And it's only after it starts getting disrupted, people are like, oh, AI is going to disrupt our jobs or whatever. But right before this happened, everyone hated those jobs. You know what I mean? It's like everyone knew that this was a bad way to live. One of my favorite metrics is how much you dread Monday. And one of my favorite metrics for what a good life looks like is do you look forward to Monday? And I think going by that metric, we haven't really been happy with corporate jobs for a very long time. What I'm trying to do is figure out what does it look like to have a better version of the human future and obviously using AI to like sort of power that. I love the starting point that just reminds us that most people didn't and frankly still don't love their jobs. I think that is one of the weirdest bits of clinging to the present or some sort of cope or whatever. It's a very strange thing to me. And I think it obviously correlates strongly with the fact that a lot of people who are in AI professionally are very privileged in many ways. And one of the great privileges that they maybe don't even realize that they have is that they have employment that they find intrinsically valuable and motivating and to some degree would probably do some of the same things, even if they weren't being paid to do so or didn't need to work for money. But I think that is just not the case for the large majority of W-2 workers in the economy today. And we do, I think we would do really well to remind ourselves of that a bit more often. A couple of things that I wanted to double-click on that you said. One is the just what's coming. So I want to go, I'll have you unpack that as you see it. Obviously, people have radically different understandings of what's coming, everything from still outright denialism, which I think is increasingly discredited and can be ignored, but there's still this sort of more credible version of AI as normal technology. And then we've got people thinking. thinking the singularity is like very near. I'm somewhere in the middle, but I think I'm definitely more toward the latter. The other thing that I thought was really interesting there was AI as a container for security. I don't know exactly what you mean by that, but it does strike me that is in contrast to a lot of what I see going on in the AI safety and control space where the idea is like we need to put AI in a box somehow. And so let's develop all these security measures around it, whether that's formal verification of containers to keep them sandboxed or all sorts of other AI agents checking each other's work or what have you. But yeah, let's start with what is it that you see is coming and then we can go into the sort of way in which AI and security relate to each other. Yeah, I think what I see coming is largely the same as a lot of people, not everyone, but a lot of people are saying just this, it affects the balance of capital and labor, right? So it's like what happens when most knowledge work jobs, robotics is a separate thing. Who knows how long that follow will be, but I don't think it'll take too long after AI. But essentially, labor gets massively diminished. And so then ownership matters a lot more. All right. And then the question is, okay, cool. We've done all this productivity. Sounds amazing. You can now make a thousand times more stuff for one thousandths of the cost. Who's going to buy it? Because traditionally, the entire system has been built on this concept of you spend your wages to buy things and then some people make things and then the cycle goes round and round. What happens when that fundamentally breaks? So that's the main change that I'm worried about that's going to break the status quo. But at the same time, I'm happy that's going to happen. I'm not happy about how it's going to happen. I think it's going to be disruptive and a lot of people are going to get hurt by it. And that's the whole point of what I'm trying to do is like ease that transition if possible. To answer your question about the security and AI thing, I think it's a great question. There's no doubt that AI is creating a bunch of security problems, but here's the way I think about this after doing all this consulting all this time. A big part of security problems, I would argue, one of the major problems is actually that people don't know what's going on. There are too many things happening inside of an organization. New products are being developed. Leadership has no idea. Things are being shipped to production. Servers are coming up and down. Ports are opening up. Applications are opening up. New APIs are being presented. Software is decaying and becoming vulnerable. And all of that is happening at a speed at any size of company, like any decent size of company, that you just can't human keep up with. Even if you're logging all this stuff, there's nobody to look at the stuff. There's not enough people. Let's say you have 100 people and you're like, we really want to take this seriously. Let's increase our number of people to a thousand people, which is not going to happen in any security org, right? Because security is not the priority. But even if they did that, it still wouldn't be able to look at most of the logs, at most of the changes, because things are just happening too fast. The unique thing about AI is that with the whole agent stuff, and more importantly, the ability to just encapsulate an explanation of what we're trying to do, easily form our goals, and align our projects and our work actually with those goals. This is a thing that AI can do all the time, right? It could be doing this continuously. So it can help with planning inside of the company.…

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