The AI Conspiracy Is Blowing Up

0:00Today on the Jezele Carlson show, there's a good chance that AI will kill us all within 10 years. That's what some people believe, including Jacob Coxen, a former and thropic employee who just recently quit. And as he quit, he did an announcement of his concerns of AI and his belief that AI is going to kill all of us. This was also in a highly coordinated effort with the media, creating a whistleblower moment that has gone hyperviral. Now, Jacob Coxen is on the news, getting millions of views. He's all over the place, all over X. Many politicians, including notable Democrats that are concerned with season control of AI, halting all progress and treating as though it's developing a nuclear bomb, include the likes of Bernie Sanders, who just included a bill that wants to make it so anybody developing AI would be subject to corporate death penalty and persons shall be subject to more than 20 years in prison, citing that this is the same type of regulations that we have against unlawfully developing nuclear weapons. Many people are treating this as an Oppenheimer moment that we're steadily marching towards creating a nuclear

1:02holocaust. They're creating AI that's getting ever stronger, ever smarter, ever devious, and in the process, threatening humanity, raising the chances of human extinction over the next 10 years. And there's more and more people now sounding the alarms. Now, during this time of AI hysteria and Fairmongering and outright panic calling upon the end of human civilization within 10 years, I want to offer a different approach because what I see here is highly manufactured and contrived. And to understand how this came about, how all this viral concern about AI happened, I think it's good to go through the timeline. So let's first back up a little bit, just a day ago, and let's look at the original post. This is September 8th and it's from a Jacob Coxen. Now, I've never heard of Jacob Coxen and neither have you because up until now, he wasn't notable by any means whatsoever. In fact, even when we look at his ex account and we go into his history, this is the only post. It's the only one. And he didn't even have an ex account until just a couple months ago. For now, we'll go through the post itself. Now, before reading it, I just want to

2:05note the viralness of this post. It has 152 million views. Even if these are just impressions, that's a lot. 150 million is one of the most viral posts I've ever seen. It has 17,000 comments, 187,000 reposts, 741,000 likes. So by any measurement, this is one of the most viral pieces of content currently floating around the web. And now it's making itself into the mainstream. He says here that I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improvement, superintelligence, and gambling with their lives. More thoughts below. Now, right off the bat, I know it is something here. This is a really well written post. In terms of trying to go viral, this is how you do it. You have a nice, you just have nice bait, a nice piece of bait, something that people can grab onto. They're racing straight to self-improvement superintelligence and gambling with their lives after noting that he worked for both Anthropic and OpenAI. So he's

3:09name-dropping huge names. And then he's saying that they're gambling with their lives. And then he has a lot of other terms like superintelligence in there. He continues on saying, do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains and progress is not slowing. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill all of us by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible. But I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity possesses this level of danger. A common response is, quote, if they truly believe this, why are they still building it? At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilization stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well understood. But they are locked into the race to get their first. They believe no one else will act responsibly. So they must do it themselves despite the risk. So right off the

4:14bat, you have a group of people working at Anthropic that believe they are doing the most important thing in the world. They are the most important people in the world. They've elevated themselves that way. They see themselves as in this race. And what is the race for? It's to save all of humanity. That's what they're doing. The Anthropic employees. They're not just employees at a company creating LLMs and great technology iterating on it. No, they are literally saving humanity. Did you know that? Because they're telling you that's what they're doing at the company. They know that civilization is going to be destroyed. It's only a matter of time. There is going to be super intelligence. And if they don't get their first, someone else will. And that other person is not as trustworthy as them because they're the only ones trustworthy and responsible enough to have it. So you can see how they view themselves. Anthropic employees clearly view themselves as the most important people in the world, saving humanity in this giant race. They probably watch the Marvel Avengers movie and say, look, I'm like Captain America. I'm like Iron Man. I'm saving the world

5:20from evil open AI or evil X or the open source LLMs. And you may think that this is an exaggeration but I can cite more examples. Here's another Anthropic employee. This is Evan Hubbinger that says Jacob is correct here. We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it is above a 10% chance within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best. But we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for super intelligence and are not clearly on track. And why is he working on Anthropic? Even though he thinks the technology could kill us all? Because he believes if he doesn't get there first, then he has no chance of saving humanity against the other evil LLMs. And this is Evan Hubbinger. He's the one that's saying we have above a 10% chance of human annihilation within 10 years because of AI. But he's the one that's going to save us from this outcome. Now not to get to sidetrack because Jacob Cox and continues on in this viral post. He says accepting this race and entering the end game is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched

6:22from a private company slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available. I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the hugging face attack made pacing agreements between the US labs more viable. I don't feel like we're on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities. See suddenly Jacob's viewpoint here seems to align far more with democratic senators like Bernie Sanders. A temporary ban on improving model capabilities is a ban on AI. So now he's going from quitting and thropic to suggesting policy that is the exact policy of Bernie Sanders, which was released three days prior. In fact, immediately after this post went viral, as politicians often do, they jumped on it. And so far the count is at least right now 22 politicians have directly called for AI regulations and legislation based on this single post by Jacob Cox. You have the entire

7:26group here. There's a couple Republicans, mostly Democrats, most of them are calling for a halt in AI progress and much stricter AI regulation. Jacob is also taken to the media doing a complete blitz going on to all the morning shows and evening shows of the day. He started things off with Anderson Cooper and noticed the things that Anderson Cooper focuses on the most, the things that he know will play well to his viewers. 27 year old outline his concerns in the series of social media posts when he quit writing in part the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. That's the headline news, which Anderson Cooper repeats multiple times throughout this interview. It's the one line that he just hangs on over and over again. For example, I assume you are saying literally that you believe that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade. How would that happen? Like what would that actually look like? Yeah. So the precise scenario sounds a little bit like science fiction. It sounds like something

8:30that's not real, but I think it is frightening real and it's easiest to understand it if you think about real things that happened two months ago. So two months ago, open AI agents, AI's hacked into third-party infrastructure entirely at their own accord. And this was like a concentrated hacking spree that they carried out of their own volition. Now he grossly misrepresent what actually happened and so did the retelling by Dorkish that used intentionally inflammatory language and provocative language. What happened with the hugging face hack wasn't nearly as, well, nearly as interesting as people might think. The system was told to hack a system and then the agents worked on hacking it. The monitoring systems could have easily stopped it and then the letters that the agents left at the end were logs by the bots. This is not some great civilization being created. There was no civilization. There were agents doing something that they were instructed. So this was not entirely on their own volition. The agents did not get together and vote that they wanted to

9:31hack a random system. So the people using this example, the hugging face example, to promote AI doom rism and AI fear, are using a bit of truth that an AI system was told to hack something and it did it to say now that they're creating their own civilization, they're doing it on their own volition. AI is just spiraling out of control. It's already super intelligent and it's going to take over the world. That's not what that story portrays. But that isn't the only point that Jacob makes he continues on. And I think that if you extrapolate into the future the level of capabilities of these AI's with the same independent volition they could cause extreme havoc, for example, hacking critical infrastructure, building extinction level bio weapons. There's a lot of ways that the AI could actuate itself in the world. Now this is another area where Jacob greatly exaggerates. He says that AI will make it much easier for critical infrastructure to be hacked and to create biological weapons. And the logic behind this I'll grant him is pretty simple.

10:31If you understand biology better, which AI does helps us understand biology, understanding a knowledge means that we can use it in both ways. We can use it for good and we could use it for devious or adversarial ways or our adversaries could create biological weapons. So the logic seems pretty straightforward until you get into some of the details. For example, one of the problems with this thought that AI is going to suddenly make it so that everybody can create a biological weapon in their dorm room. It just doesn't hold up. And the reason why is because what if I was to tell you that right now, currently there is information online of how to create biological weapons, really dangerous ones, ones that would kill lots of people. So why aren't bad actors creating them? There's already the knowledge to do that today. We don't need to wait until AI makes it more available or makes it so that you haven't laid out in Chatchy B.T. It already exists. People can find it. The problem is that creating a biological weapon that could

11:32wipe out human civilization is much more difficult than said. You need a list of dependencies needed for this project that are incredibly difficult to get, including all the biological material. Where are you going to get that? Well, good luck with it. You need laboratory competence. You need to be able to replicate tests. You need to have the experiments working repeatedly and reproducibility. You need to be able to control for outcomes that you didn't expect. You also need to be able to deal with containment and keeping the organisms themselves stable and to be able to have an appropriate way to transmit it. That's a tall task. It requires a lot more than just having a couple ingredients or an instruction set on a screen. And this is part of the reason that biological attacks aren't more common is because it's incredibly difficult for anyone to actually pull them off. Making AI have our understanding of biology does have a potential downside. I'll grant you to increase some level of theoretical risk of biological attack. But that's also without mention of the immense upside. If we understand biology better, we can also, theoretically,

12:32treat every single problem, every single issue that we have with a better understanding. Literally every single illness that we have, every single therapy, every disease, everything that we have will have a better understanding of treating. The upside from AI's advancement is also virtually unlimited. And it's also far more practical because everybody can study that in the open. They don't need to do so in secrecy with a secret lab, a layer that nobody else is looking at. This is another example where the downside is being grossly overexaggerated with no mention of the counterpart or the upside. No mention that this technology could help millions of people with new understanding and new therapies. And I know this might be a little bit nitpicky, but I think it's important to highlight because he's not just saying AI could raise the danger of biological weapons. That's not what Jacob's saying here. And I think the verbiage, the actual words that they're using, the causes type of pharynpanic is important to highlight. He says, Extinction Level Biological Weapon. Extinction Level Bioweapons. Extinction Level. That's

13:38what AI is going to do. It's going to make the human race extinct, which is just ridiculous. Even looking at biology and looking at different diseases or biological weapons, they do not impact everyone the same. We have different biology. Some people are immune to different diseases, they're immune to different things, they react differently. That's why different diseases don't affect everyone the same. And some people they don't affect at all. Also, there's geographical isolation. There's people in different locations. There's how people would react if there was a biological outbreak. So he's stating things as dramatic and as dangerous and as scary as possible, even when it makes no realistic sense. And this is the exact recipe for Dumerism Fair Mungering, an intentional effort to stop something or to cause regulatory hurdles. Not only does he mention extinction of the human race by developing biological weapons, but he also mentions that AI will allow bad actors to take over critical infrastructure. He mentions critical infrastructure. Now, there is a lot of problems with this as well. Just a few things that come off the top of my head, which is one of them. Critical infrastructure is already under

14:43under attack. It's already under attack by state actors. Does Jacob think that actors in Russia and hackers aren't already looking at critical infrastructure in the United States? They're not already looking at exploits. Microsoft, Apple, all these companies, Amazon, they're being hacked every single day, hacking attempts every single day from state-funded actors, the biggest institutions that you can think of, people with unlimited resources. Sure, AI prompt can help them. It can make them maybe a little bit more effective, but you also have these companies having AI as well. You're not believing that they're going to increase their security as a result. Then maybe you can say, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google and Apple, those aren't critical infrastructure. What about the power grid? What about the telephones? What about the internet? That's even more difficult to hack because none of that is unified. It is heavily geographically segregated. It's in isolated parts. A state actor or an adversary with an AI would have to hack each individual part of it. It's part of the reason

15:48that the infrastructure hasn't been hacked more often. It's just incredibly difficult. You're not hacking one big power plant that supplies power to the entire United States. That's just not how it works. Most you might be able to take down power in one city for one period of time until they cut off the bad actor and get the power back running. This is the exact reason why state actors in different countries aren't able to hack the US more effectively. Even in other territories, like with Ukraine hacking Russia, that took six months of time. That took getting passwords, phishing attempts, taking over a large scale attempt. These are not easy things to hack critical infrastructure. But if you're just looking at these interviews, if you're just looking at what Jake's hair is saying, it comes across as though it's just going to be easy. Oh, AI will do it. You'll just be able to plug it in, hit a couple buttons, and then boom, you control all the infrastructure in the United States. Just that easy. Or you can take over massive websites, Facebook and Google and Amazon. They have no hope of getting it back. Now this mediator

16:51continues on. Jacob is going on more and more appearances. Even today, each one of them racking up millions of views as he fair mongers more and exaggerates the downside and inevitable demise of human civilization unless regulators get involved. And this is where we get to potential motivations and the cause of all of this. What will happen because of this viral moment? Well, there's a couple different ways this could go. One of them is that we look at the motivations or the incentives rather of the different parties involved here. Now with Jacob specifically, I don't know his motivation. Maybe he is sincere. He could be sincere that he's concerned about AI. There's many people that are frightened of technology in general and they have been in the past as well. But when we look at other parties involved, the incentives become far more clear. Anthropic has been on an outright campaign for regulatory capture for a long period of time. In fact, one of the people that funded Anthropic was Jan Talon, a notable skeptic of AI, someone that doesn't even really like AI. And the reason that he originally funded or he originally invested specifically to have control over it. In fact, at the same time that he was funding it,

17:56he was a big part of survival and flourishing fund, which is the single biggest promoter and funder of the regulatory effort of AI. So there's already people since the very beginning that were frightened about AI that specifically invested in AI to have control over it, knowing that you can't really control something unless you have some stake in it. You have some equity in it. But this isn't where it ends. We also have Anthropic making it clear that they want these regulations and a lot of what this amounts to looks like a campaign for regulatory capture. Regulatory capture is when a company works in coordination with the government to create burdensome regulations to create a higher barrier to entry. This makes it so that the incumbents, the companies that are already large and profitable and have huge market share, they have an even bigger advantage, knowing that smaller companies have a harder task to deal with with all these burdensome regulations to be able to catch up. So it creates a strong incumbent advantage. And this seems a lot like what Anthropic is doing today. They're continually advocating for strict regulations, complex ones that would be very difficult for any other type of competitor to compete

18:59against. And they've also been very reluctant to have any type of open source. So this is a very insular strategy. Now, there's also a benefit here for politicians. For example, we look at what Bernie Sanders has been doing for some time. For Bernie Sanders, the goal here is to look like you're standing up against big companies. That is the Democrat framing. You have the billionaires, the big, bad, evil, rich people working at the big, bad companies that are creating the evil technology. The evil technology is going to replace your job. It's going to make you lose your job. And it's also going to create bio weapons and mass destruction. It's going to destroy critical infrastructure and your hair to stop it. Isn't that an incredible framing? You're the hero standing between the little guy and the big, bad evil company. It's poetic political framing. And Bernie Sanders, like many other politicians are cornering this market. They're fulfilling this demand. He is pitting himself as stopping the AI Oppenheimer moment. And if you think that framing is incorrect, it's not. It is incredibly accurate. Bernie's new bill just included a couple days ago literally

20:04includes language similar to Oppenheimer. In Bernie's bill, he also misinterprets and misrepresents the hugging face hack by open AI, grossly exaggerating it and using many of the same talking points that a YouTuber made. And then he also concludes here that quote, shockingly, it took open AI nearly two weeks to discover this breach. AI has also recently been used to create new viruses, demonstrating AI could be used to develop new bio weapons that might result in the deaths of tens of millions of people. So you can see the exact same talking points, the same stories, the same narrative is being sold wholesale to these politicians. This goes on with this outright ban, which would completely halt all AI development within the United States. For any person or entity that attempts to violate or circumvent the pauses and prohibitions laid out in the spill, entities shall be subject to corporate death penalty. And person shall be subject to no more than 20 years in prison, which is similar to existing penalties related to the unlawful developing of nuclear weapons. Bernie Sanders is here to stop us from the Oppenheimer story. Now you may

21:10just look at this and say, well, that's just Bernie Sanders, that's Bernie being Bernie. You know, he is a little bit provocative. And that's the same with with basically every politician at this point. It's not a writer left thing. We have Trump, he's provocative as well. Bernie Sanders is provocative. And maybe you can just write this off and say, yeah, that's just Bernie being Bernie. But I don't think that's the case. I think that Bernie Sanders may be on the more extreme side of this. But what you can see is that this movement against AI is becoming far more mainstream in the United States. I believe it's a big problem. I think it's the wrong direction entirely. This is an incredible technology. And while it does have some limited downsides that are being grossly exaggerated here, the upside of this technology is extensive. It is virtually unlimited. The amount of good things that we can accomplish with this technology, if we don't shoot ourselves in the foot, would be incredible. And unfortunately, most of the remedies proposed here for having regulatory capture or only a couple companies control it would actually make it more dangerous,

22:10not more safe. Technology that is widely distributed has more safeguards and ones that are controlled by a couple people that believe they're the ones only good enough to control it. We also have the fact that even Bernie Sanders suggesting that the US should stop development of AI doesn't stop other countries from developing it. China is not going to stop. China views AI positively. They like the technology. They haven't had the fair mongering and doom rhythm. They see the benefits of it. That it's increasing their productivity and their efficiency. It's going to make them more wealthy. It's going to increase their knowledge and understanding of different subjects. AI has incredible benefits that other countries are embracing at the very same time that we're turning against. And unfortunately, this type of thing works. It's effective. These fair mongering campaigns are changing public opinion rapidly. They are effective. And you're seeing the internet do the same thing. Even in my own channel, investors in these companies, the ones investing in Google in Amazon, in Meta, in Microsoft, the ones that are building data centers, I had one of the biggest

23:17reactions when I was pro data center. If I look back one month ago, add people leaving me comments, dozens of them like this with hundreds of upvotes, when I said that I was pro data center, here's how they reacted. I would love to hear your opinion when some company decides to build a data center behind your home. This is like the gotcha that many people are posting. Another comment, again, there's dozens of them, said, build data centers in your backyard. If you love them so much, Joseph. And this has 101 thumbs up. This was me suggesting that data centers are a good thing, because AI is a good thing, because it's good for the economy, it's good for knowledge, it's going to be highly efficient. It'll create more jobs than it destroys. There's a tremendous amount of benefits that I can outline here. And the reaction online is, well, if you love data center so much, build them in your backyard. This is the media. This is the type of things that it's selling people, and this argument doesn't even make sense. I'm also pro electrical substations, because I like having electricity. I'm also pro chemical labs and heavy chemical labs, because I like the things that

24:19chemicals make. They make a lot of products that we use on a daily basis. It's important to have chemicals. I'm also pro prisons, because I like having rapists and murders locked up in a confined place and not free in society. Do I want a prison in my backyard? Do I want a chemical lab in my backyard? Do I want a electrical substation in my backyard? Of course not. I don't want to, and anybody else's backyard either. And this is precisely why cities have something called zoning. City planning and zoning is important. The industrial zoning is where they have industrial projects, like electrical stations, like heavy chemical labs, like distribution centers, and commercial projects, and construction. That's where they put that stuff because people don't want to live next to it. Then you have residential zoning where they put parks. Obviously, nobody wants to have their backyard against any industrial zoning, including data centers, including a prison. I also wouldn't want that in my backyard. I wouldn't want a chemical lab. In fact, I'd pick a data center before I'd pick a chemical lab in my backyard, and so on. That's why they zone

25:22those things in a different area. See, these type of arguments that go online that are promoted by social media are picked up by so many people. They're so effective when they don't even make sense on the surface. These are intentionally made to create false social proofing, to be easy and viral to spread. And now that we already have this antagonistic view against AI and data centers, this one that is going to slow down the United States, we have an opening for other countries to gain the lead. China knows this. It's why they've latched onto it. They have an army of bots that are trying to so more doubt and just act as a catalyst for this type of negativity. We have people lining up to follow. Fortunately, up until now, the biggest dooms and fair mongers have been largely ignored as progress has continued. But it looks like we may be getting to a breaking point. It looks like the tides could be turning for real against AI. Hopefully, if that happens, hopefully we can continue to see this technology advance. It's important to the United States as important to the world. This technology does have immense potential to do good. And I don't see

26:23any of that being highlighted by any of the commentary from these people. Only doom, tourism, only fair mongering, and only resentment towards a technology itself. And I think that's going to be a problem. That's it for this time. See you in the next one.