The Valmy

Podcast: Working Definition
Episode: Working Definition episode 3: Freedom, with Tyler Cowen
Release date: 2025-08-29

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In this episode, Tyler Cowen and I discuss freedom. We talk about how people talk about freedom, whether you can define freedom, freedom's relation to other concepts, the relevance of free will and consciousness, what it might mean for a country to be free, and much more. In short, we do some philosophy! I hope you enjoy it..

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit endsdontjustifythemeans.com

Podcast: Doom Debates!
Episode: Debate with Vitalik Buterin — Will “d/acc” Protect Humanity from Superintelligent AI?
Release date: 2025-08-12

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Vitalik Buterin is the founder of Ethereum, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, currently valued at around $500 billion. But beyond revolutionizing blockchain technology, Vitalik has become one of the most thoughtful voices on AI safety and existential risk.

He's donated over $665 million to pandemic prevention and other causes, and has a 12% P(Doom) – putting him squarely in what I consider the "sane zone" for AI risk assessment. What makes Vitalik particularly interesting is that he's both a hardcore techno-optimist who built one of the most successful decentralized systems ever created, and someone willing to seriously consider AI regulation and coordination mechanisms.

Vitalik coined the term "d/acc" – defensive, decentralized, democratic, differential acceleration – as a middle path between uncritical AI acceleration and total pause scenarios. He argues we need to make the world more like Switzerland (defensible, decentralized) and less like the Eurasian steppes (vulnerable to conquest).

We dive deep into the tractability of AI alignment, whether current approaches like DAC can actually work when superintelligence arrives, and why he thinks a pluralistic world of competing AIs might be safer than a single aligned superintelligence. We also explore his vision for human-AI merger through brain-computer interfaces and uploading.

The crux of our disagreement is that I think we're heading for a "plants vs. animals" scenario where AI will simply operate on timescales we can't match, while Vitalik believes we can maintain agency through the right combination of defensive technologies and institutional design.

Finally, we tackle the discourse itself – I ask Vitalik to debunk the common ad hominem attacks against AI doomers, from "it's just a fringe position" to "no real builders believe in doom." His responses carry weight given his credibility as both a successful entrepreneur and someone who's maintained intellectual honesty throughout his career.

Timestamps

* 00:00:00 - Cold Open

* 00:00:37 - Introducing Vitalik Buterin

* 00:02:14 - Vitalik's altruism

* 00:04:36 - Rationalist community influence

* 00:06:30 - Opinion of Eliezer Yudkowsky and MIRI

* 00:09:00 - What’s Your P(Doom)™

* 00:24:42 - AI timelines

* 00:31:33 - AI consciousness

* 00:35:01 - Headroom above human intelligence

* 00:48:56 - Techno optimism discussion

* 00:58:38 - e/acc: Vibes-based ideology without deep arguments

* 01:02:49 - d/acc: Defensive, decentralized, democratic acceleration

* 01:11:37 - How plausible is d/acc?

* 01:20:53 - Why libertarian acceleration can paradoxically break decentralization

* 01:25:49 - Can we merge with AIs?

* 01:35:10 - Military AI concerns: How war accelerates dangerous development

* 01:42:26 - The intractability question

* 01:51:10 - Anthropic and tractability-washing the AI alignment problem

* 02:00:05 - The state of AI x-risk discourse

* 02:05:14 - Debunking ad hominem attacks against doomers

* 02:23:41 - Liron’s outro

Links

Vitalik’s website: https://vitalik.eth.limo

Vitalik’s Twitter: https://x.com/vitalikbuterin

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s explanation of p-Zombies: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies

—

Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.

Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates

Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

Podcast: FT Tech Tonic
Episode: Trump’s tech bros: The enigma of Peter Thiel
Release date: 2025-07-08

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Peter Thiel is unlike any other Trump tech bro. As well as a wildly successful investor, he’s seen as a thinker - the philosopher king of Silicon Valley. Thiel’s acolytes in the tech world and Washington include vice-president JD Vance but his relationship with the Trump camp is complicated. And there are still questions about what, if anything, he wants with the president.

In the final episode of this season of Tech Tonic, Murad Ahmed speaks to FT columnist Gillian Tett about Thiel’s political philosophy, and to Tabby Kinder, the FT’s West Coast financial editor, about his influence in Silicon Valley.

Free to read:

How Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley funded the sudden rise of JD Vance

A time for truth and reconciliation (written by Peter Thiel)

How a little-known French literary critic became a bellwether for the US right

Palantir’s ‘revolving door’ with government spurs huge growth

This season of Tech Tonic is presented by Murad Ahmed and produced by Josh Gabert-Doyon. The senior producer is Edwin Lane and the executive producer is Flo Phillips. Sound design by Sam Giovinco. Breen Turner and Samantha Giovinco. Original music by Metaphor Music, Manuela Saragosa and Topher Forhecz are the FT’s acting co-heads of audio.

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Podcast: Joe Lonsdale: American Optimist
Episode: Ep 114: Flying Cars Are About to Change the World — Joby CEO JoeBen Bevirt
Release date: 2025-06-04

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JoeBen Bevirt has spent two decades building electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, and now he's on the cusp of commercial approval and rollout. Will flying cars be as transformational as the automobile? How will air taxis impact our cities and the way we live? And how did JoeBen achieve this feat of ingenuity?

This week we're joined by the Founder and CEO of Joby Aviation, an American aviation company pioneering eVTOL aircraft for air taxi service. All-electric, virtually silent, and traveling up to 200mph with a pilot and four passengers, Joby is opening new possibilities in the skies above — starting at the price of an Uber Black. The implications for productivity and quality of life are massive, saving the average person an hour or two a day sitting in traffic and unlocking new swaths of land for development.

I'm proud that 8VC co-led Joby's first investment round about a decade ago, when many others, even flying enthusiasts, thought it was a pipedream. Since then, Joby has single-handedly shaped an entire new industry, from engineering breakthroughs to regulatory pathways, ensuring that American aviation stays ahead of China. Joby expects its first passenger rides in Dubai within a year and is working closely with the Trump administration as it nears the final stages of FAA approval. Inspired by SpaceX, Joby is vertically integrated and plans to aggressively ramp manufacturing here in the U.S., backed by a $500 million investment from Toyota (bringing Toyota's total investment near $900 million). While we await the first passenger flights, Joby is also building out its infrastructure nationwide — and they're looking for real estate and partners! You can contact JoeBen and the team here: [email protected]

00:00 Episode Intro

01:38 Flying cars are here

04:00 JoeBen's journey

05:48 Battery progress & hydrogen breakthroughs

08:50 Air taxi for the price of Uber Black

12:35 When will commercial flights start?

20:30 Why Joby is the industry leader

24:20 Why China is copying Joby

28:00 How air taxis will change your life

32:10 How Joby will transform real estate

35:45 Solving intractable problems

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.joelonsdale.com

Podcast: The Trajectory
Episode: Richard Ngo - A State-Space of Positive Posthuman Futures (Worthy Successor, Episode 8)
Release date: 2025-04-25

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This is an interview with Richard Ngo, AGI researcher and thinker - with extensive stints at both OpenAI and DeepMind.

This is an additional installment of our "Worthy Successor" series - where we explore the kinds of posthuman intelligences that deserve to steer the future beyond humanity.

This episode referred to the following other essays and resources:
-- A Worthy Successor - The Purpose of AGI: https://danfaggella.com/worthy
-- Richard's exploratory fiction writing - https://narrativeark.xyz/

Watch this episode on The Trajectory YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/UQpds4PXMjQ

See the full article from this episode: https://danfaggella.com/ngo1

...

About The Trajectory:

AGI and man-machine merger are going to radically expand the process of life beyond humanity -- so how can we ensure a good trajectory for future life?

From Yoshua Bengio to Nick Bostrom, from Michael Levin to Peter Singer, we discuss how to positively influence the trajectory of posthuman life with the greatest minds in AI, biology, philosophy, and policy.

Ask questions of our speakers in our live Philosophy Circle calls:
https://bit.ly/PhilosophyCircle

Stay in touch:
-- Newsletter: bit.ly/TrajectoryTw
-- X: x.com/danfaggella
-- Blog: danfaggella.com/trajectory
-- YouTube: youtube.com/@trajectoryai

Podcast: Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
Episode: AI, data centers, and power economics, with Azeem Azhar
Release date: 2025-02-27

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Patrick McKenzie (patio11) is joined by Azeem Azhar, writer of the Exponential View newsletter, to discuss the massive data center buildout powering AI and its implications for our energy infrastructure. The conversation covers the physical limitations of modern datacenters, the challenges of electricity generation, the societal ripples from historical largescale infrastructure investments like railways and telecommunications, and the future of energy including solar, nuclear and geothermal power. Through their discussion, Patrick and Azeem explain why our mental models for both computing and energy systems need to be updated.
–
Full transcript available here: www.complexsystemspodcast.com/ai-llm-data-center-power-economics/

–
Sponsors:  Safebase | Check

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–

Recommended in this episode:

• Azeem’s newsletter: https://www.exponentialview.co/ 
• Azeem Azhar’s guest essay: The 19th-Century Technology That Threatens A.I. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/28/opinion/ai-electricity-power-plants.html
• Electric Twin: https://www.electrictwin.com/ 
• Video of Elon Musk’s Colossus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw696JVSxJQ 
• Complex Systems with Travis Dauwalter on the electrical grid: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5JY8e84sEXmHFlc8IR2kRb?si=35ymIC0UQ5SKdV8rrBcgIw 
• Complex Systems with Austin Vernon on fracking: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0YDV1XyjUCM2RtuTcBGYH9?si=YshjUXPEQBiScNxrNaI-Gw 
• Complex Systems with Casey Handmer on direct capture of CO2 to turn into hydrocarbon: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0GHegWgLSubYxvATmbWhQu?si=xNYBjn0ZTX2IT_pAZ5Ozsg 

–

Twitter:

@azeem

@patio11

–

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro 

(00:27) The power economics of data centers

(01:12) Historical infrastructure rollouts

(04:58) The telecoms bubble 

(06:22) Unprecedented enterprise spend on AI capabilities

(11:12) Let's have your LLM talk to my LLM

(16:44) Is there a saturation point?

(19:25) Sponsors: Safebase | Check

(21:55) What’s in a data center?

(24:52) The challenges of data centers

(29:40) Geographical considerations for data centers

(36:53) Energy consumption and future needs

(40:48) Challenges in building transmission lines

(41:35) The solar power learning curve

(43:51) Small modular nuclear reactors

(51:26) Geothermal energy and fracking

(01:01:34) The future of AI and energy systems

(01:12:57) Wrap

Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast
Episode: #212 – Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway
Release date: 2025-02-14

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Technology doesn’t force us to do anything — it merely opens doors. But military and economic competition pushes us through.

That’s how today’s guest Allan Dafoe — director of frontier safety and governance at Google DeepMind — explains one of the deepest patterns in technological history: once a powerful new capability becomes available, societies that adopt it tend to outcompete those that don’t. Those who resist too much can find themselves taken over or rendered irrelevant.

Links to learn more, highlights, video, and full transcript.

This dynamic played out dramatically in 1853 when US Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay with steam-powered warships that seemed magical to the Japanese, who had spent centuries deliberately limiting their technological development. With far greater military power, the US was able to force Japan to open itself to trade. Within 15 years, Japan had undergone the Meiji Restoration and transformed itself in a desperate scramble to catch up.

Today we see hints of similar pressure around artificial intelligence. Even companies, countries, and researchers deeply concerned about where AI could take us feel compelled to push ahead — worried that if they don’t, less careful actors will develop transformative AI capabilities at around the same time anyway.

But Allan argues this technological determinism isn’t absolute. While broad patterns may be inevitable, history shows we do have some ability to steer how technologies are developed, by who, and what they’re used for first.

As part of that approach, Allan has been promoting efforts to make AI more capable of sophisticated cooperation, and improving the tests Google uses to measure how well its models could do things like mislead people, hack and take control of their own servers, or spread autonomously in the wild.

As of mid-2024 they didn’t seem dangerous at all, but we’ve learned that our ability to measure these capabilities is good, but imperfect. If we don’t find the right way to ‘elicit’ an ability we can miss that it’s there.

Subsequent research from Anthropic and Redwood Research suggests there’s even a risk that future models may play dumb to avoid their goals being altered.

That has led DeepMind to a “defence in depth” approach: carefully staged deployment starting with internal testing, then trusted external testers, then limited release, then watching how models are used in the real world. By not releasing model weights, DeepMind is able to back up and add additional safeguards if experience shows they’re necessary.

But with much more powerful and general models on the way, individual company policies won’t be sufficient by themselves. Drawing on his academic research into how societies handle transformative technologies, Allan argues we need coordinated international governance that balances safety with our desire to get the massive potential benefits of AI in areas like healthcare and education as quickly as possible.

Host Rob and Allan also cover:

• The most exciting beneficial applications of AI
• Whether and how we can influence the development of technology
• What DeepMind is doing to evaluate and mitigate risks from frontier AI systems
• Why cooperative AI may be as important as aligned AI
• The role of democratic input in AI governance
• What kinds of experts are most needed in AI safety and governance
• And much more

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Who's Allan Dafoe? (00:00:45)
• Allan's role at DeepMind (00:01:26)
• Why join DeepMind over everyone else? (00:04:31)
• Do humans control technological change? (00:09:30)
• Arguments for technological determinism (00:20:57)
• The synthesis of agency with tech determinism (00:27:10)
• Competition took away Japan's choice (00:38:11)
• Can speeding up one tech redirect history? (00:43:20)
• Structural pushback against alignment efforts (00:49:17)
• Do AIs need to be 'cooperatively skilled'? (00:53:53)
• How AI could boost cooperation between people and states (01:03:34)
• The super-cooperative AGI hypothesis and backdoor risks (01:08:44)
• Aren’t today’s models already very cooperative? (01:15:15)
• How would we make AIs cooperative anyway? (01:18:19)
• Ways making AI more cooperative could backfire (01:24:36)
• AGI is an essential idea we should define well (01:32:37)
• It matters what AGI learns first vs last (01:43:39)
• How Google tests for dangerous capabilities (01:48:24)
• Evals 'in the wild' (02:00:57)
• What to do given no single approach works that well (02:05:05)
• We don't, but could, forecast AI capabilities (02:09:08)
• DeepMind's strategy for ensuring its frontier models don't cause harm (02:15:05)
• How 'structural risks' can force everyone into a worse world (02:18:52)
• Is AI being built democratically? Should it? (02:23:40)
• How much do AI companies really want external regulation? (02:29:01)
• Social science can contribute a lot here (02:38:07)
• How AI could make life way better: Self-driving cars, medicine, education, and sustainability (02:40:48)

Video editing: Simon Monsour
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

Podcast: "The Cognitive Revolution"
Episode: Claude Cooperates! Exploring Cultural Evolution in LLM Societies, with Aron Vallinder & Edward Hughes
Release date: 2025-02-12

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In this episode, Edward Hughes, researcher at Google DeepMind, and Aron Vallinder, an independent researcher and PIBBSS fellow discuss their pioneering research on cultural evolution and cooperation among large language model agents. The conversation delves into the study's design, exploring how different AI models exhibit cooperative behavior in simulated environments, the implications of these findings for future AI development, and the potential societal impacts of autonomous AI agents. They elaborate on their experimental setup involving different LLMs like Claude, Gemini 1.5, and GPT-4.0 in a cooperative donor-recipient game, shedding light on how various AI models handle cooperation and their potential societal impacts. Key points include the importance of understanding externalities, the role of punishment and communication, and future research directions involving mixed-model societies and human-AI interactions. The episode invites listeners to engage in this fast-growing field, stressing the need for more hands-on research and empirical evidence to navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Link to Aron & Edward's research paper "Cultural Evolution of Cooperation among LLM

Agents"

SPONSORS:

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CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Teaser

(00:42) About the Episode

(03:26) Introduction

(03:40) The Rapid Evolution of AI

(04:58) Human Cooperation and Society

(07:03) Cultural Evolution and Stories

(08:39) Mechanisms of Cultural Evolution (Part 1)

(20:56) Sponsors: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) | NetSuite

(23:35) Mechanisms of Cultural Evolution (Part 2)

(27:07) Experimental Setup: Donor Game (Part 1)

(37:35) Sponsors: Shopify

(38:55) Experimental Setup: Donor Game (Part 2)

(44:32) Exploring AI Societies: Claude, Gemini, and GPT-4

(45:50) Striking Graphical Differences

(48:08) Experiment Results and Implications

(50:54) Prompt Engineering and Cooperation

(57:40) Mixed Model Societies

(01:00:35) Future Research Directions

(01:03:10) Human-AI Interaction and Influence

(01:05:20) Complexifying AI Games

(01:18:14) Evaluations and Feedback Loops

(01:20:50) Open Source and AI Safety

(01:23:23) Reflections and Future Work

(01:30:04) Outro

Podcast: Epoch After Hours
Episode: AI in 2030, Scaling Bottlenecks, and Explosive Growth
Release date: 2025-01-16

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In our first episode of Epoch After Hours, Ege, Tamay and Jaime dig into what they expect AI to look like by 2030; why economists are underestimating the likelihood of explosive growth; the startling regularity in technological trends like Moore's Law; Moravec’s paradox, and how we might overcome it; and much more!

Podcast: AI Summer
Episode: Ajeya Cotra on AI safety and the future of humanity
Release date: 2025-01-16

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Ajeya Cotra works at Open Philanthropy, a leading funder of efforts to combat existential risks from AI. She has led the foundation’s grantmaking on technical research to understand and reduce catastrophic risks from advanced AI. She is co-author of Planned Obsolescence, a newsletter about AI futurism and AI alignment.

Although a committed doomer herself, Cotra has worked hard to understand the perspectives of AI safety skeptics. In this episode, we asked her to guide us through the contentious debate over AI safety and—perhaps—explain why people with similar views on other issues frequently reach divergent views on this one. We spoke to Cotra on December 10.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aisummer.org