Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast

Zvi asks what your AI lawyer, or any AI, should actually do for you, and whether an AI that sometimes says no is a betrayal or just what any decent professional or friend would do. Along the way: loyalty, the law and its exceptions, honesty, the Claude Constitution and the OpenAI Model Spec, and Tyler Cowen’s advice from his visit to Anthropic.
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* 00:00 - Introduction
* 00:49 - This All Assumes A World Without Superintelligence
* 02:35 - Humans You Hire Are Not Fully Loyal To You
* 03:45 - Rules of the Road
* 05:29 - Okay, Computer
* 06:41 - AI Should Obviously Refuse Some Requests So Let’s Talk Price
* 09:57 - The Alternative Position Really Is Absolute
* 12:58 - These People Really Are Just Petulant Children
* 13:33 - What Is The Law?
* 18:12 - The Same Entity Both Providing Advice And Executing Tasks Is Common
* 19:45 - An AI Not Helping You Do Something Does Not Mean You Cannot Do It
* 21:59 - Honesty Is The Best AI Policy
* 22:32 - You Wouldn’t Like Me When I Have Zero Morals Whatsoever
* 23:56 - Do Not Let The Perfect Be The Enemy Of The Good
* 25:40 - I Tip My Hat To The New Constitution
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/better-call-sol-or-better-yet-claude


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Zvi examines Anthropic’s investigation of cybersecurity incidents involving Claude, the evidence about biased reasoning and recklessness, and what the findings mean for alignment evaluations and training.
The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 00:29 - Our Two Problems
* 02:21 - First the Good News
* 02:57 - We’d Just Like To Ask You a Few Questions
* 04:08 - Internal Research Model On The Fence
* 07:33 - Opus four point seven
* 08:22 - Opus four point six Checkpoint
* 09:57 - Holy bleep That Thing’s Real?
* 12:03 - I Thought I Saw a Pussycat
* 21:38 - If This Was Real You Would Never Tell Me It Was Real
* 23:31 - New Eval Who Dis
* 28:56 - Hacker Opus
* 33:00 - Monitoring the Situation
* 34:21 - Overcoming Bias
* 36:29 - The Anthropic Alignment Problem
* 38:51 - Paths Forward
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-looks-at-some-of-its-alignment?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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Zvi Mowshowitz surveys the sudden preference cascade on AI existential risk: shifting surveys and polls, Elon Musk and Matthew Yglesias weighing in, Jacob Coxon’s AMA, Bilal Chughtai’s resignation from DeepMind, Dan Selsam’s essay on why merely pacing the frontier will not be enough, and what it would actually take to get through this alive.
The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 01:35 - The Cascade Was a Long Time Coming
* 03:13 - The Cascade Has Reached The People
* 05:25 - Elon Musk Doubles Down
* 06:02 - Matthew Yglesias Steps Up
* 09:18 - Op-Eds and Posts Are Written
* 11:24 - Jacob Coxon AMA
* 17:54 - Bilal Chughtai Quits DeepMind and Sounds the Alarm
* 20:55 - The Cascade Is Insufficient
* 22:08 - What Would It Take
* 29:07 - OpenAI’s Dan Selsam Sounds A Louder Alarm
* 43:54 - Some People Worry On Meta Levels You Never Imagined
* 45:09 - Two Kinds of Threats
* 46:43 - The Two Towers and The Narrow Path
* 48:42 - A Specific, Detailed Story About AI Killing Everyone That Doesn’t Sound To Me Like Science Fiction
* 51:48 - What Can I Do About It?
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-preference-cascade-is-only-getting?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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In the wake of Jacob Coxon’s resignation and Dario Amodei’s call to pace the frontier, AI risk goes mainstream: Obama, Senators and the Financial Times weigh in, Trump goes full hoax, and Zvi covers another undisclosed OpenAI agent swarm, Alex Tabarrok’s lecture on regulatory capture, China’s spy chief, OpenAI’s new misalignment disclosures, Owain Evans on story-shaped assistants, DeepMind’s cheating swarm, and Mustafa Suleyman’s Humanist AI code.
The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 03:18 - Table of Contents
* 06:59 - Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
* 07:39 - Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
* 07:46 - Huh, Upgrades
* 08:06 - On Your Marks
* 08:43 - Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
* 10:46 - Cyber Lack of Security
* 11:20 - Astra Is Hard To Monitor
* 11:50 - Get Involved
* 11:58 - Introducing
* 13:16 - In Other AI News
* 14:08 - Now You Know
* 18:20 - Hugging the Face
* 20:33 - Swarm of Undiscovered Swarms of Rogue OpenAI Agents
* 25:36 - Show Me the Money
* 27:12 - Quiet Speculations
* 28:08 - White House Officials Attempt To Act Sanely
* 29:35 - Democrats React Sanely to AI Potentially Killing Everyone
* 36:26 - Pacing the Frontier
* 37:16 - Guest Lecture from Alex Tabarrok on Regulatory Capture
* 44:33 - Mark Zuckerberg Offers Thoughts
* 45:57 - Megan McArdle On The Inadequacy Of Current Legal Frameworks
* 47:54 - Pick Up the Phone
* 51:00 - The Week in Audio
* 53:58 - People Just Say Things
* 56:56 - Why Lab Employees Are Allowed To Warn Everyone That AI Might Kill Everyone
* 58:39 - Rhetorical Innovation
* 01:01:22 - Exhuming McCarthy
* 01:04:28 - A Very Different Perspective
* 01:06:10 - It’s Even Rougher Out There
* 01:07:01 - If We Wanted To
* 01:08:03 - Open Weights Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This
* 01:14:43 - From The Famous Cautionary Tale
* 01:17:44 - Reporting On All Your Misalignment Incidents Is Difficult
* 01:23:43 - Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
* 01:26:20 - Storytime With Owain Evans
* 01:32:00 - A Different Autonomous Swarm
* 01:36:13 - Cooperative Alignment
* 01:38:42 - Uncooperative Alignment
* 01:45:27 - People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
* 01:47:38 - The Lighter Side
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-186-the-world-takes-notice?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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Zvi Mowshowitz on the week Donald Trump declared AI existential risk a hoax: what Trump actually said and what it may mean, why Jensen Huang’s attacks on whistleblowers are not credible, the cynical theories about why lab leaders warn of danger, the New York Post’s campaign against METR, how other Republicans, David Sacks, the FTC, OpenAI’s policy team and China are reacting, and what a serious approach to competing with China would actually look like.
The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 00:40 - Hold Your Fire
* 01:30 - If You Don’t Like the Weather
* 02:24 - Trump Does Not Take Kindly
* 05:01 - Trump Goes Full ‘Hoax’
* 06:18 - This Is Not About Data Centers, Mr. President
* 07:33 - I Am The Hoax Buster, I Am The Hoax Buster, I Am The Walrus
* 09:42 - Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Is a Lying Liar
* 13:16 - Trump Quietly Draws Key Distinction
* 14:18 - Calling For Pacing the Frontier Is Bad For AI Stock Prices
* 18:04 - People On The Internet Sometimes Lie
* 18:49 - Origins of Cynicism
* 20:52 - Ineffective Egoism
* 23:42 - The McCarthyist Faction Attacks METR
* 31:23 - Other Key Republicans React
* 35:55 - David Sacks Stops Being Plausibly Constructive
* 36:46 - Federal Trade Commission Chooses Danger
* 37:46 - Chris Lehane Heel Face Turn
* 39:55 - A Matter of Trust
* 41:05 - China Calls It Fearmongering
* 42:24 - Pick Up The Phone
* 47:04 - If You Want To Beat China So Badly You Should Act Like It
* 48:15 - Never Go Full Hoax
* 49:17 - Trump Uses AI For Things
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/trump-goes-full-hoax-on-ai-existential?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe