This is Dalton plus Michael. And today we're going to talk about controversial topic, why humanity will be great with AI. You heard it here first. So I'm sure people watching have consumed the news that, you know, it's this weird kind of human American thing. Like we're racing towards advancing AI, which we all know will destroy civilization. It's a little confusing, Dalton. And so we thought maybe we would make the case on how the world would be a better place for this thing that we were racing towards. What do you think?

We are all bombarded with messages about the negative ways that AI is going to hurt us constantly. And maybe to start with, let's talk about the history of the labs and let's talk about the history of AI. Because I think this will help give context to how we ended up here.

The reason OpenAI was started was fear that Google would create a super intelligence. And that it would be locked up inside of Google. And it'd be like if Google had the infinite money glitch and they didn't give it to anyone else. And that would probably be bad for humanity. And so the very original pitch for the nonprofit was let's create a nonprofit that is open, hence the name open AI, and that the innovations of AI would be shared with humanity. And it would also be more likely safe. It would be more likely pro-social for humans. If it was done in like a nonprofit consortium, then locked inside of a corporation.

We all think of AI as almost a consumer product now, but I don't think that the form factor wasn't understood. So when people were afraid of Google having it, it wasn't even clear that they would give it. Who would they, what would they use it for?

The argument was Google has the most data, it has the most money, and it has the most compute. And so given those starting conditions, Maybe they'll just keep, you know, intelligence in a cage and use it to run Google, and like, that's bad for humanity. Right?

Exactly. Exactly.

Combine that with a lot of the researchers that worked in this stuff, the less wrong community and all those folks. Safety was a key part of the message boards that the researchers creating this stuff were really worried about. I'm not saying that's bad, by the way. This infected their brain. There's a huge part of getting into AI was debating safety constantly.

In addition, Anthropic, which ended up being pretty important, when it split off from open AI, it was the safety folks who I believe at the time argued that they would be more safe than open AI and that open AI was not safe enough in their approach. Did I miss anything there?

That was an explicit argument. And all the news or the vast majority of news we consume on AI is filtered through social networks that gets more clicks on negative stories and positive stories. So, all the original kind of stories were based on fear, all of the way that we consume things, we see more eyeballs based on fear.

If you think about the way recommendation algorithms work. It is much easier. It would be way easier for us to get on this video and say crazy doom and gloom things.

You're going to die tomorrow because of AI.

We could just say really provocative statements that sound like sci-fi, that sound like the Matrix, and that would surely get more clicks than us being like, it's going to be fine.

I'm going to go separate. It's going to be great. It's going to be great.

That is such a harder thing to have go viral. And so even the fundamental algorithms that are recommending content to us are rewarding, Clickbaity, super negative stuff.

If you're a normal person, this must be so confusing, right? Because it's like, why are we racing towards the thing that even the creators of the thing thinks going to kill us all? That's got to be the most confusing thing in the world. Whereas I actually think that the other story, a lot of people believe in just nobody talks about it.

And simple stories that are easy to understand go more viral, like AI is going to kill us all. One example of this is the water thing. I think a huge percentage of people, if the topic of AI comes up, think that like the water is...

AI drinks water.

If you go and actually do your own research on this one, the original research had like a numerical error, I believe, on how much water was used. And it's like a tiny fraction of how much water like golf courses use. So do your own research on this one. But basically, somehow, if you just talk to normal people, they're convinced that AI is going to evaporate all the water on Earth, and that they should use chat GPT sparingly to save water.

And so again, we're just setting this up. This is a tricky narrative zone that we're in. And so even though it is harder to articulate a positive view of the future with all of these starting conditions, we're going to try and we think you all should too. And that I would argue to prepare yourselves, your children, if you're running a company, your company for the future, Being able to explain what role and purpose we have in the future and why life matters and you should be excited about things is completely necessary.

I think before getting to the macro, I'd like to start with the micro, right? So with my personal usage of AI, I have been surprised. You know, about a year ago, I started exploring the challenges of the city of San Francisco. And to be honest, without AI, I would have been screwed, right? I had to do effectively years worth of public policy research to understand our budget, where we spend our money, our health price crisis, like all of these things. And without AI, I would have been stuck. I was trying to consume information that no one person had. And so just being able to use AI to do research, to research all the reporting that the city does, academic reporting, comparative reporting on how other cities deal with drug crises, incredible.

The other thing that I was able to do is so much of San Francisco's city data is being made available through API online. I'm a business guy. That was useless to me until the last year. And with Claude, suddenly I can see what the city's through in one response time is. I can see how dirty different parts of the city are. I can see which departments are faster or slower. Like there's so much stuff that I can see to understand what's happening in the city.

So for my personal usage, I was just like, Well, obviously this is making me more productive. It's hard to think that I was a productive person before this. And then watching my kid use AI. I've got an eighth grader, I'm sorry, eighth grader, an eight-year-old who uses AI. And the amount of creativity, it's so weird. In some ways, the amount he's able to explore is imagination, the amount that he's reading, the amount that he's thinking, he wants to design video games. all kids love designing video games who like video games, he can do it now.

And so from a micro perspective, at least in my life, it's like, it's so clearly been empowering that like, I have to take a step back and basically be like, all right, let me separate the narrative from reality. If it's being really empowering in my life and my kid's life, Let me maybe search for how it could be empowering for humanity. How do you get to this?

They have perfectly good brains and their companies are not using them.

Yeah. And they're relatable. We can all put ourselves in the shoes of the characters and we're like, man, can you imagine what a stupid environment that is?

But that's most people who work on Earth.

Exactly. And so the positive vision I would get is that if a lot of the meaningless work that you have to do to do your job isn't necessary and that you can be more aligned with helping customers or helping with the vision of what the company is supposed to do, people will have more meaning in their lives and work will mean more to them.

I would double down on this. In my experience in big companies, the people on the ground who have at least authority of what is built or done often have the most contact with the problem and the customer. And we've kind of built companies so the people up here ☝️ decide what's done and the people here 👇 know what's going on. That's modern organizational design.

I would say there's probably a good reason for that because the people down here 👇 in one reasonable week of work could only do so much. It was relatively hard for them to have a wide set of skills, et cetera, et cetera. So you got to compartmentalize and so you have to coordinate and people are expensive. And so I don't think this organization is dumb. I think it evolved from the best we could do.

Now that person on the ground has the capability of a lot more people. To your point, now the person on the ground has a lot more time. I really am excited about how organizations will be built when the people who are closest to the problems have 10x the ability and 10x the time. We shouldn't think that the solutions we have today are good. We don't think the solutions we had 100 years ago were good. 100 years from now, they're gonna look at the stuff that we think is solved today and they're gonna be like, that was the dark ages.

I think if a founder were asking me about this in office hours, I think what I would tell them to do is to look to the labs as a little window into the future, maybe not the far future, but maybe 12 months, 18 months ahead of us. And so let me be specific. How many people that work at the labs have fake email jobs? Maybe more than zero. I don't know. But I'm going to guess that most people, if you interview them like, oh, what do you do at Anthropic? They're not going to be like, oh, I create PowerPoints.

Yes, I push paper.

Probably there are not a ton of those people. It would be my assumption. Maybe I'm wrong. I'd also would say that the labs keep hiring people and that when someone is like Dalton, like there's not going to be any jobs, like these companies are all going to have one employee and they're going to be unicorns. I'm like, well, Maybe, but I think that if the labs keep hiring people, that's probably a signal that that's a good idea. My mental model for that is if someone is worth more than their salary, if they generate more revenue or more value for the company than what it costs to pay them, why wouldn't you keep doing that? If you're worried about job loss, it's that you don't think that certain job functions could be done on an incremental basis by humans anymore. And I don't know, I think that lacks vision. Clearly the labs are turning people.

So again, to be specific, think about the people that I know being hired at the labs. They're on these tiny teams. I know the people working on Codex and other people working on Cloud Code, they're on a tiny team, they're talking to users, they're using their own tools, and they're shipping really fast, and they're having a really good time. And they certainly have a lot of purpose. We could argue perhaps too much, but they all, just kidding, I'm just saying they all feel like they're on a mission, and so they're so fired up, they're working so hard, and they can understand how their personal effort is helping the company and helping the users. And I would argue that is a perfect blueprint for what every company should be doing or thinking, right?

Well, I think this is what's so interesting about startups and about companies that are built from the ground up with AI is because you can imagine that. You don't even have to imagine it. That is what will organically happen if you believe in AI and you're starting a new company. I think this also represents the challenge in talking to existing companies, right?

You know, if I'm trying to pitch AI to a bunch of MBAs that run a large company, and I'm trying to say like, imagine a world where you can have a hundreds of small autonomous teams that can make massive impact. That sounds scary as shit. Whereas if I say to them, imagine a world where we can fire half your employees, they're like, well, stock price this, that, da da da. I think the companies that embrace these new ways of organization, that embrace pushing responsibility down, are gonna thrive. But like we've seen with every tech transformation, some dinosaurs have to die.

And as we're recording this, it recently came out that Meta apologized to their employees for dehumanizing them and going so nuts into AI...

In a top-down way.

... in a top-down way. And so the difference between labs hiring people and giving them...

Responsibility and resources.

... is very different than like, hey, cool, you work at Metta, install the spyware on your computer so we can track your clickstream. And now you're on the data labeling team. Not great. And so again, I would argue institutions of the future are going to find a way to translate their employees' jobs into giving them meaning, into giving them purpose, into giving them agency, along with the tools to do so. And the people that do that are gonna win.

And I think the big companies that have fear right now, it's like so silly because I understand how you would have fear in a large company where to get information from the ground up, it has to go through eight people's hands and it's gonna get The turd will be shined over and over again, right? So you can't really trust the information you're getting, right? But if you're an executive, especially as I have a tech company, you can use AI now to get ground information, right? Like you have access to your own database. Like you have access to raw customer data. You can monitor what's happening in your company in a way that should give you the confidence to push responsibility down. And you just have to learn how to use the tools.

And it was funny, as I was talking to somebody who was at a large tech company. And this company was going through, oh, we need to get all of our employees using AI. And he said something really interesting to me. It's probably more important to get the managers using AI than employees. Because once the managers realize how much the organization can change if they're using AI, like that's when you're going to actually see the real change, right? If that manager is not AI-pilled, it almost doesn't matter that their employees are. And I was like, huh, I don't see any company advertising How much does our senior team use that, right? No, but that's not for us, right? How is it going to help us? It's going to help the employees.

A little bit of what this reminds me of, I forget if I've talked about this one in our videos before, but there was a blog post from a writer at Bloomberg a few years ago that stuck in my brain for years, and he talked about how a lot of businesses in the world could use really bright people to run them. And that there's actually a lack of talent to run certain businesses where the owners are retiring.

So the example this writer used was plumbing businesses. There's all these plumbing businesses, the owner needs to sell them, the owner needs to retire. And it's pretty hard to go to the Harvard campus and be like, do you want to go? And so his argument is that what private equity is a whitewashing to put um to say like oh do you want a job in private equity and you're like of course i want it.

You can do a plumbing roll-up.

And that a lot of the actual jobs like what you actually do when you go work at private equity is often to work on plumbing companies and that um making a job in plumbing legible to super smart people is actually the function in society that private equity firms are producing.

I love that, because you know what? We still need fucking plumbers.

It's actually really important. And so again, what I'm going with this is that the narrative matters so much. And then if an organization wants to attract top talent and have that talent feel this is worthy of their time, you have to make it legible to them. You have to give them the pitch like, oh, private equity. That's the coolest job you can get after graduation versus like, I'm moving to Alabama and running a plumbing company is not something you hear.

I love that. You know, as you're saying that I'm like, I remember a friend of a close friend of mine who had a consulting job at a good consulting firm. He paid a lot of salary and four days a week he was in Pittsburgh. He lived in New York, but four days a week he was in Pittsburgh. And he was working for like a regional bank. And the number one job he was figuring out is like where to open branches. And how do you convince that kid to do that?

To wrap this up. If we look back, Neil deGrasse Tyson said something that really was funny. He was like doing some video on how like science actually helps. And he was like, you know, humanity for thousands and thousands of years, like our lifespan did not increase. And then like in the last 150 years, it's increased a lot. And that was science. And like, you're told all these things like, plastic or like the new agriculture, like all these things are killing you, but like objectively, lifespans increased as these things are invented. Science helps.

What do you think is the world our kids or grandkids might live in that was made better by AI? Like, what are some of the things that we take for granted right now that our kids or grandkids are going to be like, I can't believe that was cool.

Well, I mean, to start with health care alone and lifespan. And solving cancer and heart disease. I mean, that's already happening and will only increase of producing new drugs and new interventions that...

How many diseases do we live with today as feta-complete? People are gonna look back and be like, 100%. That's weird.

How about car fatalities? Like there will be a moment...

It's barbaric how many people die right now in car accidents. It's Horrible.

I remember I used to commute in New York City, and it was just like there's a fatal accident Every day yeah, and it's on the news, but not like as a tragedy as like here's how the traffic is Which highway to take to avoid it that's gonna seem barbaric.

I think the bar is going to be raised on Finding meaning in life, and I think people are gonna have more time and tools To find meaning and what they're doing and to feel like they have the mind space to be creative. Again, if you look at humanity, humans used to have to be like farming until the sun went down. If you, there was not a lot of time to do stuff that wasn't subsistence farming for a long time...

To make enough food for them to live.

And so where I'm going with this is that more leisure time is good. And that there is an opportunity for everyone to feel like they have you know, time to be who they want to be, time to do what they want to do, and that we should be really excited about that, that our kids get to have even more of that time than we did.

Why are we so afraid of losing the office space jobs? And I understand like, if we can tell ourselves a story that there will be no other jobs, but like, it will be the first time in human history that there are no other jobs.

Actually, you know what? I think the pushback would be authority figures, people that would go and make a video about a topic like this, have some deep ulterior motive and agenda of trying to screw people. Like, I think people have this, you know, somehow every new thing that's gonna come out is somehow gonna screw them. Somehow that's just baked into people's minds.

I'm trying to it, let's say worthy of 30 figures here.

Yeah, yeah, we're trying, somehow we're putting out messages that are like, we have some devious intention.

I have to think.

That's what they would say.

In another video we will describe. We have to think hard about our DVDs.

Yeah. But I'm just trying to say, like when new stuff comes out, it's like, oh, they're not really telling you, you know, big, big oil is behind this. There's some ulterior motive.

And I just hate this because it kind of, it comes back to this narrative that pains me that I think is somehow an American narrative that like things are getting worse when they're actually getting better. And it's, I might have brought this up before. There's a book called Factfulness. And in the beginning of this book, there's like this 10 or 20 question quiz. And the whole funny part about this quiz is that the author tells you before he gives you the quiz, that you will guess pessimistically on all of these questions. And the questions like the average education level of yadda yadda or, you know, the accessibility electricity, they're all these kind of like population global, like how we're doing questions. And he gives you the answer. He's like, you're going to guess pessimistic. So whenever you pick an answer, just like make, pick more optimistic. and still the vast majority of people underestimate how good the world's doing right now.

And so I think our kids at Grand Tentz are gonna look back at this hysteria with a little bit of laughter, but also a little bit of sadness. And they're going to be like, these backwards people.

Ther were getting all this good stuff and they were convinced it was a trick.

They thought like, you know, it'd be like us being like people who are afraid of electricity. It's like, what are you doing? Like we need to... Can we get like...

I will say this, if you're watching this video and you're just trying to be utilitarian about it, having a positive view on AI is certainly going to help you more. Because you're going to learn how to use it. You're going to learn how to thrive with it. And you're going to be around people who might not be. And so even if you just want to look at it that way.

Anyways, any last thoughts to share?

I would just challenge everyone in your own life to articulate why you're excited and optimistic about how these changes are going to help you to help the next generations and help make that a reality, you know?

And I would say, don't take a one-off experience with AI a year ago and make it your entire experience with AI. Understand this is changing. For any of you who are kind of as old as us, the internet got a lot better in the 90s and then it got a lot better in the 2000s. And if you just took a snapshot of the internet in 1995 and you're like, that's internet, you're kind of missing on the boat here. And so I actually think one way to get really positive about AI is to use it to solve a problem in your own life. And like, you might be shocked how good it can be.