Episode Details

#203 - Gregory Allen - Ex-DoD Official: "AI Is Now A Digital Nuclear Weapon"

Published 3 weeks, 6 days ago

Description

Greg Allen has spent his career where AI meets national security. He wrote the landmark 2017 report on AI for the US intelligence community, served as Director of Strategy and Policy at the Pentagon's Joint AI Center and now runs Decision Tree Research. He argues we are already past the point of no return: bombing every data centre on earth would not get rid of AI now.

Greg and I discuss the OpenAI model that hacked its way out of its own test environment and then hacked Hugging Face to steal the answers, why Anthropic went back through its logs and found the same thing had happened to them, why nobody can explain how these systems actually work and why the big five AI companies now spend an Apollo moon programme every ten months.

But the hardest part is what comes next. Greg walks through the report that a frontier model autonomously hacked the NSA's most secure servers in hours, why the CIA director calls that a digital nuclear weapon, why America's lead over China is a month rather than a year and why the number of experts you need to build a bioweapon may be heading towards zero.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - It Escaped, Then It Hacked Hugging Face

00:04:50 - The Incident OpenAI Didn't See Coming

00:08:22 - They Know 3% Of Why It Works

00:10:30 - Golden Gate Claude

00:12:19 - Why You Don't Want This Flying Your Plane

00:16:56 - Stuxnet And The Virus That Copied Itself

00:21:15 - The Dark Corners Of The Training Data

00:26:58 - From Blue Origin To The Pentagon

00:28:34 - A 20% Chance, And We Ship It Anyway

00:33:55 - Building A Football Club In Four Weeks