Jaan Tallinn: AI Risks, Investments, and AGI — #59

Jaan Tallinn is a billionaire computer programmer and investor. He was a co-founder of Skype, and has invested in companies like DeepMind and Anthropic.Tallinn is a leading figure in the field of existential risk, having co-founded both the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom and the Future of Life Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States.Steve and Jaan discuss:00:00 Introduction00:33 Jaan Tallinn: AI Investor02:03 Acceleration Toward AGI: Excitement and Anxiety04:29 AI Capabilities and Future Evolution05:53 AI Safety, Ethics, and the Call for a Moratorium07:12 Foundation models: Scaling, Synthetic Data, and Integration13:08 AI and Cybersecurity: Threats and Precautions26:52 Policy goals and desired outcomes36:27 Cultural narratives on AI and how they differ globally39:19 Closing Thoughts and Future DirectionsReferences:Jaan’s top priorities for reducing AI extinction risk: https://jaan.info/priorities/Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.--Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to [email protected] or Steve on Twitter @hsu_steve. Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.