Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, everybody. I want to take a couple minutes and talk about the Pope and the position that the Catholic Church has taken on AI and why, despite a lot of criticisms, I think it's a really groundbreaking thing for all of us. So I read most of the encyclical and read it multiple times, and obviously there's a lot in it. And I'm not a religious historian and I'm Jewish, so I didn't spend a lot of time study studying Catholicism. But I really respect what he did because what he did for me at least, is he created a historic context for this massive amount of investment we're making in this technology. If you saw the article I wrote on Substack, I believe that we've spent trillion dollars on infrastructure for AI already, mostly in the last two years, not even three.
[00:00:54] And so this technology that we're building, which is being flooded with new entrants all the time, is going to cost the world a lot of money. And I don't mean that negatively. I just mean that the excitement and exhilaration of investors is so high that the expectations are enormously high. And what that does is it puts CEOs and tech leaders under huge amounts of pressure to sell and deliver this stuff, regardless of what it's being used for. And we saw this in social media.
[00:01:27] We didn't see it in other technologies like mobile, but we did see it in social media, where the use cases were not. Were a little bit pernicious. But nobody cared because there was so much money to be made. And I honestly blame the venture community and the investing community for this because they don't care that much about the value of what they're building. They just want to make more money. And he pretty much said that. And I think pointing out the Tower of Babel for me was a really educational experience to read. And I've been watching videos on that fable a lot and comparing it to the creation of Jerusalem. And I've been to Jerusalem. It's quite a fascinating, beautiful city, is actually really interesting. It's because if we could build something as big and beautiful and important as AI in a methodical, collective, thoughtful way, it would be great. But that's not what's happening at all. People are rushing into this market, worried about going public, worried about making money, selling tools to the government or the military, building drones, building autonomous cars, you know, all this stuff. 95% of what's happening is positive. 90, maybe 97% is positive. Just like 95% of Facebook was great when you could Find people's birthdays and talk to them. That was great, but look where it went. In fact, Facebook is a funny example. If you go into Facebook now, it feels like an IBM mainframe. It's so old and clunky and junky. It's like almost like Meta just dropped it. They just lost interest in it because they can't make as much money in it. And we don't, I hope we don't want that to happen to AI. AIs. I mean, the new, the manifestation of ChatGPT is only three years old. The AI industry is much older than that. And I mentioned in the last podcast when I was in New York last week listening to Jeffrey Hinson. He's very worried about this and he knows how this stuff works better than almost anyone else in the, in the world. And our experience with AI shows that these are infinitely trainable systems. You can train them to do whatever you want them to do. Infrastructure. And as he stated in his comments to us, would you want to teach your children to read by reading the writings of serial killers? Of course not. I've been reading about the Ku Klux Klan because in the 1920s, 100 years ago, we had a huge uprising of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States.
[00:03:59] Much, much bigger than I had realized. I didn't know a lot about this. And we're in some sense we witnessing the rebirth of that. If, if we used that book about the Ku Klux Klan to teach people about history, I don't know what it's going to teach them. I mean, it'll teach them one piece of it, but maybe it'll teach them the glorification of it. I don't know. So anyway, this is a very malleable technology that we have to put some guardrails on. Now the Pope's manifesto talks about a lot of things. Jobs, healthcare, the honor and value of humanity, taking care of the environment, war. I mean, he's covered a lot of topics and it really was impressive that the Catholic Church has really studied this a lot. I think it was very, very unfortunate that somebody from Anthropic was involved in this because they are a money making enterprise. Also, whether you think they're, you know, on the right or wrong side of history, it's hard to tell. But you know, they're in the same profit seeking part of the world as everybody else. And you know, I'm a private citizen and I run a company and I know profit making is fun. It's what people do for a living. So we're not going to stop that. We're not going to interrupt that. But we need some mindset of thinking about AI in a collective way. And if you look at all the graduations this month, most of the graduations that end up going public show young people booing, speakers talking about AI. They don't feel like it's an opportunity for them. I think they're wrong. I think it is. There is an opportunity for them. And the book that we're publishing in the fall will explain that in great detail why we believe that. But put that aside, there's legitimate fear about a lot of things. So where will this go? I don't know. I mean, it could be that the Pope's message goes down as a historic artifact and a lot of people in the left wing or thoughtful people read about it and talk about it and everybody in the AI industry ignores it. That's probably the most likely scenario. But I would hope that's not what happens. Interestingly enough, the United States government and I think this is unique to the United States at the moment, but it may be true in China also is taking the attitude that this is a war, like the space race, and if we don't get there first, somebody's going to land on the moon and fire a missile at us. In other words, we have to remove all of the obstacles to growth so that the Chinese or the Russians or somebody else doesn't overTake us in AI. It seems to me that the Ukrainians are probably the smartest on this at the moment, but it's hard to tell. And that's given birth to, you know, massive investments here and data centers and companies and jobs. In the Bay Area where I live, there are millionaires all over the place buying houses on for cash, just like in the dot com era. Luckily, I already own my house, but I hate to be buying a house right now because you're going to be competing with a bunch of people in their 20s who have cash for multimillion dollar houses. It's the way it goes. And then of course there's the VCs and then there's the peripheral businesses that are surrounding these AI firms. And then there's the rest of us that are trying to buy it, consume it and use it. And I don't know who, if anybody, is really watching over this technology.
[00:07:12] Now for people like me who are semi technical, we don't see a pernicious purpose to a technology. It is just a technology. It just is what it is. It's like cement. You can Use cement to build a prison, or you can use cement to build a school, it's still cement. But this particular technology, because it is so malleable and it does have sort of a life of its own, can do some strange things. So I personally think what the Pope did is a very, very important positive step towards some future where we consider AI in an ethical and positive way. I don't really have a lot of confidence that that will happen. Just like social media turned into the politics that we have today and the angry debate that happens online and all of the mental anguish for young people and other ills that have come from that, just like the automobile resulted in car crashes and a variety of problems in spite of its value in other ways. I mean, this is just the way technology works. But it's good to have the discussion and, you know, for those of you that are maybe on the slight outside of the AI market, or maybe you're a little bit older like me, and you have grandchildren or you are come from a more educational or ethical background, you've probably thought about this a lot and you've probably talked to your children about it or even your grandchildren about it and tried to explain it to them. And I would hope that the financial community who tends to drive the behavior of most of these technology companies, develops some sort of context, investment philosophy of some kind that pushes this technology towards the better ends and away from the worser ends. My experience in my daily life, for those of you that know me, you know, I'm pretty busy. I work a lot and my incoming email is almost unusable. There are so many AI bots sending me emails customized to me that I get at least three or four hundred a day. And I've tried running agents and using Outlook to try to scan them and do different things to stop them. I can't, I cannot figure out how to stop them. And we had an anti spam law in the United States that was working for a while. It actually worked pretty well. I don't think that law even exists anymore. And most of these bots are AI generated because when I reply to them, I never get an answer. They all have strange domain names and that's just a teeny, teeny tiny example of the potential hazards, maybe is the word of this technology.
[00:09:39] I'm a very optimistic person and I look at the bright side of things and I'm. And just as everybody else gets frustrated about the, the negatives, but I just hope that we have a conversation about this that's positive and that some People make some decisions that are aligned towards some of the topics that the Pope talked about. When you read the articles coming out in the last week or two about anthropic and OpenAI going public, you do wonder if that's possible. There is so much pressure on these guys to make money and to compete with each other.
[00:10:12] It's a race of hatred of your competition. You know, one of the things, by the way, just to mention that went through my mind that I learned in my early days at IBM. One of the rules at IBM for many, many years when I was there was do not disparage your competition. In the early days of the computing industry, when IBM was the king, they really reinforced in that company that we are a positive player in the industry and that IBM would not disparage competition, would, would do the right thing and take the industry in the right direction. And that company, which has had lots of issues over the years, is still here, was, and probably still is, has that sense of conscience at its core. I think Cisco is that kind of company. I think Microsoft is that kind of company. I think Apple is that kind of company. And for some reason you have to become very, very big to develop that sense of conscience. And maybe that's because you learn it from your own mistakes. These AI companies are already very, very big, but they're very, very, very young and very immature. So maybe they can each or all of them, they're all different, get this sense of conscience and respond to what the Pope said in some fashion with some philosophies of their own and tools and methodologies and so forth. It didn't work in social media, unfortunately, but maybe it will this time. Okay, that's it for me. Bye for now.
