Speaker 1: Welcome to another episode of the Chicks on the Right podcast.
We're very excited today to be talking about AI with
an AI expert. We have Jud Rosenblatt with us and
he is the CEO of AE Studios, and Jud, if
you could give us and our audience just like a
quick background about who you are, how you got interested
in AI, and what your company does with it specifically.
Speaker 2: I absolutely yeah, thank you for having me. My background
is I've been doing startups my whole life. I started
a one click food ordering website my senior year of Yale.
There is a very popular Buffalo chicken grinder that kids
would order every night, and I made a website that
let you get that delivered straight to your door with
a single click, paid for and delivered the customized the
way you wanted. And then that sold several hundred thousand
dollars of a single sandwich, and the next thing I knew.
I spent the next few years of my life doing
food ordering startup, and then after that decided that I
wanted to do a sort of like more impactful thing.
I was lucky enough to realize that I could live
very happily off my wife's salary for the rest of
my life and not have to work on and that
kind of freed me up to think much more deeply
about the long term future of technology and future of
humanity and to try to build a better future. And
so I set out to create a profitable bootstrapped software
AI product consulting company where we built products for clients.
Building AI products for you know, companies like making airlines
make many millions of dollars in additional profit through better
pricing strategies and building the technology for startups like Alpha School,
which is replacing teachers with AI on getting people getting
kids to learn in just two hours a day more
effectively than regular school got.
Speaker 3: My teenager would love that.
Speaker 2: It's pretty amazing. It's also actually one of the very
few non woke education outlets in America. And so I
live in La I'm really hoping they opened one on
the west side of La soon. But our four year
old will need it soon to not get bring.
Speaker 3: But yeah.
Speaker 2: So created a profitable bootstrapped AI consulting business and then
grew that to over one hundred and sixty people and
started building and selling our own startups and put the
profits of the consulting business into this sort of very
long term thinking thing. It used to be mostly around
thinking that increasingly technology is manipulating us to do stuff
we don't really want to do, and a lot of
companies are thinking way too short term. It's actually better
business sense to think more long term and build technology
products that increase your end users agency, because when you
do that, users like you more and spend more money
and refer their friends to do the same thing. But
a lot of these companies prioritize just very short term thinking.
And this is also incidentally why the average tenure of
a company on the SMP five hundred is decreasing a
huge amount. Used to be like fifty years, now it's
like twelve or thirteen years. And that's because you can
build a startup that disrupts these big companies that don't
think about prioritizing the end user experience and actually building
things of real value for their end users. And so
basically I tried to think very long term, and we
put the profits of the consulting business into trying to
build more agency increasing technology, in particular with a new
technological paradigm that I think is coming up pretty soon,
which is bring to computer interfaces. I thought, well, okay,
this might come about within our lifetimes. If it does
come about, I don't want to be interrupted in mid
thought with ads from Mark Zuckerberg and have his own
expression of my thoughts. And so we try to make
you get built in a better way. And we did
some of the leading stuff in PCI. But then after
having kids four years ago, I looked around and noticed
that AI is getting way more powerful. We are we
don't really actually understand how it works. In the first place.
AI is and we have the leading AI experts working
at our company here building the most cutting edge AI
technology there is, but we don't actually understand how it works.
And the people who've invented the biggest technological breakthroughs with
a I do not understand how it works. It's it's
not it's sort of it's a black box. It's not
it's not built as a program like if this happens,
then that happens. It's it's it's more grown rather than That's.
Speaker 3: Kind of terrifying, Yeah, terrifying to somebody like me when
you say we don't really quite know exactly how it works.
That because I think to myself, okay, well, if you
don't know exactly how it works, because you're incredibly intelligent.
I can tell, and obviously you have the best of
the best working with you for you. But all right,
you don't exactly know how it works. Doesn't that to me?
That translates to this could get completely out of hand
and then we can get to like I look at
a lot of you know, robots and this artificial intelligence stuff,
and I think I just want to burn it all
with fire, no fence, jen. But I get really freaked
out by it because I think it's going to replace people,
and I, you know, I like people. I'm old school, right,
I'm a gen x or. I like old school. I
like the interaction, I like relationships. I like I just
I get a little freaked out by this. I what
do you say to somebody like me that's freaked out
by AI and the fact that you know, we don't
quite understand it all, Well.
Speaker 2: Yeah you should be. I'm freaked out too. That's why
I basically, after having kids four years ago, I thought, well,
nobody's trying to figure out how to make it so
that we don't need to be freaked out very much.
And the leading experts working on this think there's a
very good probability that AI might exterminate humanity, even so
we should try to solve that problem. And I like,
we did surveys of the leading of hundreds of alignment
AI alignment researchers and effective altruisms and people like that,
and it turns out that people do not think that
we are tracking to solve the AI alignment problem in time,
meaning tracking to make AI not kill us all. And
also we're not tracking to the space of current approaches
to AI alignment actually doesn't cover. They think that it
doesn't cover the space that the approach is necessary to
solve the problem. So what about you should do other things?
But we're not particularly.
Speaker 1: Are other countries doing those kinds of things, because you know,
it's one thing to just think about what we're doing
in the United States and we've got Elon and we've
got all these like you know, brainiacs that are that
are moving forward with GROC. Although that's a whole other
story that we can get into. But like, are there
other countries that you think are I means China, for example,
are they thinking about the negative the fact that it
could exterminate humanity? And are they ahead of us in
terms of thinking about that kind of stuff, or do
you still feel like the US is at least on
the cutting edge even if we're not in the right
place yet.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, to be honest, nobody is really on
the cutting edge because we're not meaningfully investing in solving
the alignment of them. The biggest breakthroughs in the history
of of AI alignment have actually led to major gains
in AI capabilities. So, for instance, URLHV reinforcement learning with
human feedback is a AI alignment technique. And prior to that,
most of the outputs of AI were just mostly just
sort of nonsense. And then after they took this alignment
technique and they made they applied it to GPT three,
you got chat shopt, which was a helpful assistant and
for the first time it created enormous economic value downstream
of that. But this is all downstream of like a
single alignment breakthrough really, and it turns out, I mean,
it's sort of, it's sort of it's similar to like
what I was talking about before, that it's better business
sense to increase your end user agency. If you think
long term, it's also better business sense to make your
AI do what you wanted to do rather than something else,
because then you can deliver value to your customers rather
than doing something else like killing them. Right, And I'm
not saying necessarily that there's a high chance of existential
threat from AI. There might be, there might not be.
But even if there's a low probability of it, you
want to invest more in trying to decrease that risk.
Speaker 3: And so yeah, I mean there's there's an exit, there's
a okay, So even if there's not an existential threat, though,
there's still the threat of people losing their jobs. Like
I mean, it's pretty obvious that like teachers can get
out because we just even talked about it, Like if
kids can get their education two hours a day as
opposed to seven hours a day, which actually might you know,
I wouldn't be so not delighted about that. I know
my kid would be completely delighted about it. But education's
one you get, Marketing, public relations, you've got. I mean,
there's like accounting, there's like there's so many different industries
that can just be completely knocked out by AI. Correct,
that's right.
Speaker 2: I Mean the unfortunate reality is this is coming, and
I originally I would have wanted to try to make
it not happen so soon. But it's not like we
can really do that at this point. But luckily there
is a optimistic path forward, which is just that we've
invested nothing next to nothing and trying to solve this
AI alignment problem making AI more likely to do what
you wanted to do, and the biggest breakthroughs in doing
that actually increase AI capabilities. And so the more we
invest in that, if we start to significantly invest in that,
the bigger breakthroughs we can have, and the more likely
it is that we can, for example, beat China in
an AI race, where they also, as you were asking before,
they are investing in lots of new mechanisms of AI
line and an AI control. The head of the Chinese
AI Safety Institute is a very brilliant guy, and there
seems to be credible evidence that she himself is extremely
scared of AI, like he might be an AI quote
unquote AI doomer. Kissinger went to China and the last
thing he did was scare the heck out of she
about AI. So and then Jao, who's the only Turning
Award winner, which is the most prestigious award in computer
science in China. He's the only turning award winner in China.
He's very concerned about all this stuff. So and there
seems to be some real evidence that China is heavily
investing in this. And it turns out that because you
get a lot of breakthroughs when you invest in the
AI alignment, that could put China ahead. And I Ted
Cruz said earlier this year, I think it's a great quote.
I'd rather be killed by an American AI than a
Chinese AI. And I'd agree with that. I would rather
get but I'd prefer to live, and I'd prefer to
have right.
Speaker 3: I No, I agree. I agree with you, Jed, I
told you so. Like when it comes to getting the
money to invest in this AI alignment, what are you doing?
What is your company doing? Or are you are you
partnering with legislators? Are you?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 3: How is that working? Because I know a lot of
legislators are also freaked out by it, and they're like, well,
if we just pretend that it doesn't exist, and maybe
it'll go away, you know what I mean? There's that
or they just don't they just want to somehow squelch it.
I'm sure there's a lot of people that want to
squelch it altogether. But you're right, it's here. It's here
to stay. Like the toothpaste is out of the tube.
There's really nothing we can you know, it's on its
way and it's going to do things, so we might
as well handle it in the best way possible. Kind
of like what you're doing and your company is doing,
so how do you get more investment into it? How
do you what are you doing to get more money?
Speaker 2: And well, mostly we have been focusing on the actual
technical work that we're doing ourselves, because we were lucky
enough to have a profitable business that can put the
profits of the company into our alignment work. And then
we've been able to make some very cool breakthroughs with
the alignment work that we basically what we've been trying
to do to sort of like prototype the thing that
is like the way to generally solve this overall, right,
so that it could be scaled way bigger than we
can do ourselves. And the thinking there is basically this
is an unsolved science R and D problem, how to
make AI actually aligned. But America has a great history
of solving very ambitious science ARE and D problems. You know,
like the Manhattan Project and going to the Moon and whatnot,
and it's it's this is arguably the most challenging science
R and D problem of all time. But that doesn't
mean we can't solve it. We just haven't tried very hard.
Speaker 1: So if we do, we have time, like, do we
have time to solve it before it gets utterly out
of control? Because here's here's this may be this may
make my ignorance like put it on full display, because
I am not technologically savvy, but I always wonder, like,
you know, when you look at the chat, GPTs and
the gros and all of the capabilities that these AI
platforms have, what stops them from just wiping out people's
bank accounts or you know, transferring money from somebody to
somebody else, or just creating I mean, we already see
all the deep fake videos, all the crazy videos that
make it look like people are doing stuff they're not.
I mean, there are so many dangerous things that to
me seem like AI is already capable of those things
and so much more.
Speaker 3: How do you rain that in?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: How?
Speaker 3: And that goes back to my question, which was not
a very well put question. I don't think. But it
goes back to my question of I guess, you know,
how do we bring urgency to legislators and two people
that are of importance because we're not important. It's like,
you know what I mean, how do people of importance
understand how urgent it is to get a grasp on this, because,
like to Mock's point, you're kind of under the gun,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, so there is the The Trump Padman is
currently working on a AI action plan, which will hopefully
include recommendations of significant investment in the science are undeed
necessary to actually solve the alignment problem. I think since
we just had a coble Wall Street journal, op eds
and people like Politudor Jones and others are writing very
publicly about this, and I think it's starting to become
I think previously people. So I guess like it's one
thing that's interesting to be aware of, is I do
not I am one of the under ten conservatives in
AI alignment. Probably we did a survey of these hundreds
of alignment researchers and effective aultrists and less than two
percent of them were not left of center. So wow,
So you've had all these people running around DC saying stuff,
and I think advocating there hasn't been. There's not enough
of intersection between smart intellectual conservatives who care about the
future of our country and people who understand AI sufficiently.
And there needs to be a lot more conservative intellectual
leadership on this in the first place, I think in
order to think this sort of stuff through, and in fact,
there's a strong history of this sort of thinking on
the right. There's I think a really great example of
this is a guy in Herman Kahn, who is early
on IT brand and started Hudson Institute, and he was
famous for quote unquote thinking the unthinkable about nuclear catastrophe,
and arguably the US winning the Cold War was perhaps
downstream of him being able to think these unthinkable things
and have us do real planning and events of that.
And I think that's exactly what we need to do
right now, is be unafraid to confront these real possible
risks and then think through what are the real actions
we need to take, not the wishy washy kumba ya
type stuff, but really think about, like, how do we
actually solve this and win and create a future that
we want our children to live in. And I think
that's doable. And what's cool is that recently conservatives are
starting to wake up to the real risks here and
think about, Okay, we should try to do something about it.
And luckily there is a bathword, which is just substantially
increase investment in trying to solve this science R and
D problem. Hopefully organizations like DARPA, etc. Can start to
put signific funding into it, and I think, I think
also there is very obviously also significant economic incentive for
companies to do it too, because when you it's it's
not obvious upfront, but when you do alignment research, you
wind up having unexpected major breakthroughs that also generate significant
economic value as well. So I but but, but but again,
these companies are thinking too short term. And it's the
same sort of company. It's this sort of leadership is
sort of like this, this sort of like you know,
the same the same liberal woke people who pushed us
into the paradigm that I don't think is great with
with you know, uh, Facebook ruining our kids' lives and whatnot.
So they're there. But but but I think things are
starting to change, and I'm optimistic about that. I also
am optimistic that we can solve it in time because
we haven't spent very much effort doing it, and we've
had cool breakthroughs with a little bit of work that
we've started to do here just the you you know,
like we're the equivalent of a couple of guys in
a garage one hundred and sixty percent company putting the
profits of our company into our own alignment research. But
then we've done things that have been lauded by people
like Eliezerotkowski, the original AI boomer, and Emid Sheer and
who's the temporary CEO of Open AI is the most
likely thing to solve alignment type of thing. And that's
that's cool because basically, like the history of the biggest
breakthroughs in scientific history have often been individuals with hunches
that nobody else believes in, but they stick with their
hunch and eventually they discover relativity or whatever. And many
Nobel Prize winners have followed this exact path, right, and
a lot.
Speaker 3: Of great stuff in America has been done from guys
and garages.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and I think we can catalyze a whole lot
more of that. That's what needs to be done if
you want to accelerate the science aren't be necessary to
actually solve this problem. So, like our consulting company, we
build products for clients and it actually lends itself really
well to taking ideas that these neglected approach visionaries have.
But they might lack the look and like wherewithal and
what not to follow through and make the thing work.
But they basically we sort of treat them as like
clients and then we go ahead and we build the
thing with the extremely competent technical team and management of
getting the thing done. You might have a great idea
of you might be terrible at management of AI engineers,
et cetera. And if you just want to accelerate this
as much as possible, then the ideal thing as I
see it, is people should copy the heck out of
what we are doing so far that we're trying to prototype,
what is the recipe that actually makes this work? And
I think I think many other organizations could could copy
and do exactly that.
Speaker 1: That's why I feel I feel like like I like
ending our conversation on that level of optimism.
Speaker 3: To replicate replicate Judds Company.
Speaker 1: Yes, because I mean and just hearing you say that,
you know there's you have reason to be optimistic about
people becoming more aware and investing more and thinking more
about how to not make this a terrifying.
Speaker 3: The right people are in charge, you know, we have
the non woke people in charge right now, which I
think right now, right now, just right now, right well.
Speaker 1: Jud we appreciate your time in talking to us about
what your company does and just this AI stuff in general.
Speaker 3: We really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: We do. Thanks so much for having me