The Degenerate Gambler’s Guide to the Election

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Welcome back to Risky Business, our show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Kanakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

Today on the show, we'll be giving you a degenerate gambler's guide to the election, including a big proposed election bet, which has not been reciprocated yet.

But after that, we're going to talk about the threat of bots and automation to one of the things that Nate and I hold dear to our hearts, poker and online poker specifically.

And then we'll reevaluate P-Doom, the probability of severe misalignment from artificial intelligence in light of recent news at OpenAI.

This is a good episode, Maria.

I feel like we're kind of hitting all the basic angles here today.

I feel like we are too.

So

let's get it started.

Nate, I couldn't help but notice a recent exchange on Twitter that

you engaged in.

As so often happens, your views on Twitter were challenged.

I know this comes as a shock to everyone.

Every time I hear it, you know, people don't always agree with you.

And

this particular challenge was about Florida.

right and about the likelihood what percentage by what percent trump was going to carry florida So

do you want to talk us through a little bit what happened and

why we're starting our show with this particular Twitter exchange?

Yeah, so we published an article at Silver Bulletin late last week, pointing out that

Florida is kind of close in the polls.

Harris is down by about three and a half points,

similar to Trump's margin of victory in 2020.

And that maybe if you're the Harris campaign, since you have infinite money, it's worth actually investing in the Sunshine State.

um

the american investor keith raboy um he's like you're an idiot trump's gonna win florida by this is not the literal verbatim version right you're an idiot trump's gonna win florida by at least eight points if not 10 or 12.

and i'm like okay bro how much are you willing to like actually wager on this and he says 100k which seems like a seemed like a good amount to me right that's a serious it's a serious adult bet and by the way there is chance that trump will win florida by eight points or more if you look at um

polymarket about 25%, but I'm willing to take 100K

bet where I win 75% of the time.

And so I said, okay,

you got to send me a contract, though, because you've been sketchy lately.

And I don't really,

you know, he's not like a known gambler.

I mean, ironically, like known gamblers are like more reliable for payout stuff, right?

But I don't want him saying like, oh, the election was stolen.

I don't want him saying,

oh, ha ha ha, I was just joking, right?

So I need some type of third party to step in and

create a contract or at least create an obligation expectation.

So far, that has not happened.

We had a little bit of negotiations by back channel.

Emailed a mutual friend, said, I'm willing to do this.

And then Mr.

Raboy

has not replied yet.

So I'm not sure kind of how much more time I want to give my, I don't like giving people free options, right?

You know, if there's a poll that comes out this week showing Trump way up in Florida, then all of a sudden his bet becomes not plus CV, but better.

But yeah, so anyway, I think this is an honorable way to resolve differences, right?

That if you actually have to pay a tax for

your bullshit on Twitter, right, 75% chance of losing 100K, then that to me seems like, you know, I think the world would be better off if people spent more time betting and less time trolling on Twitter.

Absolutely.

I think that there should be a bullshit tax

for sure.

And just so that the audience is up to date, this is not the first time you've been challenged.

To date, not a single person has actually taken you up on your

ever actually

follows through.

Yeah, nobody has

ever done it to a further step than most people do, right?

So I'll give him credit for that.

But like, but yeah, they almost always back down because if I'm making a bet, they're typically carefully.

I'm not trying to eke out, you know, one or two percent EV bets, right?

In part because I have a lot on the line anyway, as far as the election goes, right?

So I'm not trying to like, but if you're going to give me a 75, 25 coin flip for 100K, then I feel like I would be negligent to pass up on that.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, tune in and

we'll see how that goes.

But the

news for people who do want to make bets like this,

not on Twitter with Nate Silver, but in general on elections, we talked a few weeks ago about Calci, which is a prediction market that actually operates within the United States, real money bets, and Calci had been trying to for years

basically make their way through the U.S.

court system to make election betting legal in the United States, to make those contracts legal here.

And they had prevailed and then

the order was frozen, right?

So their options on the election went live for a few hours and then they were no longer allowed to continue while the Court of Appeals reviewed this.

And they have now ruled in favor of Calci.

And so

people in the United States are once again allowed to bet on election outcomes.

I actually got a very funny email from Interactive Brokers, which is an online trading platform

on which I happen to have my retirement account.

And

they sent an email to everyone saying, hey, guys,

you can now bet on all of these election things.

We're going live.

So it's something that immediately seems like a lot of platforms were ready for this and are really excited to start taking these sorts of bets.

But we actually had some listeners who were interested in our takes on a few different bet ideas.

So one listener, David Paul, wrote in and asked, Would we bet that 2024 voter turnout will be higher or lower than in 2020?

And why?

And I thought that that was actually kind of an interesting

bet proposition because you and I have discussed this a little bit in terms of how close an election is perceived to be and what the turnout is as a result of that.

And also obviously how passionate people are and how engaged people are, right?

And different subsets of the population are more likely to actually go out and vote with their feet at the polls as opposed to vote on Twitter and talk about how,

you know, one candidate or the other, but then they don't actually go and cast a ballot.

So what do we think about this?

What do you think about this?

Well, let me ask an important question.

Are we talking about the raw number of voters or the share of the eligible voting population?

I don't know.

Let's discuss.

Because I actually don't know what has happened with voter registration.

Has that gone up with Taytay's endorsement and all of that?

Are we actually seeing a...

much larger number of voter registrations than we saw four years ago.

Look, so first of all, I would probably bet on turnout being a bit lower than in 2020, especially with,

you know, if you are accounting for population growth, then it might be kind of a toss-up.

But if you're looking at the share of the population, in part because like 2020 was a bit of an outlier, 66%

of eligible voters cast ballots.

That was up from 60% in 2016 and 59% in 2012.

And this is data from the University of Florida's election lab website.

But we have had an increase, you know, so turnout in the 2022 midterm was 46%, which is high for a midterm, but down from 2018, right?

You know, when it was Biden versus Trump, people were distinctly unenthusiastic about this election.

With the events of the summer, with Harris taking over for Biden, then there's more enthusiasm now.

But, but, you know, 2020 turnout was really high in part because it's a pandemic.

There were more ways to vote than ever before.

And I would vote on, I don't know, 63% of the voting eligible population instead of 66, I suppose.

So, so you would put your money on

lower turnout.

And to be clear, we're not actually making a bet.

We're not actually putting money on the line because this is not a topic that either one of us has probably a lot of conviction in.

Do you have convictions?

We actually have a model.

So the model predicts

156,685,680 people exactly will vote.

Okay.

Obviously, it's fake precision.

Let me see what the numbers were in 2020.

You've crunched the numbers and what do they say?

158.4 million people voted.

And I'm predicting our miles between 156.7.

So that would be off by just a million or two.

Okay.

But lower, but lower.

So

your gut was correct.

And now the silver bulletin model has validated your gut, at least as of now.

And these numbers might change, right, as you get more data.

Yeah, I know.

I mean, so what we look at is polls asking people how enthusiastic they are about voting in the election.

And people actually say they're pretty enthusiastic.

However, turnout was just really high in 2020.

So until we see more confirmation of that, then we're expecting some reversion to the mean.

Great.

Well, if we're going down that kind of degen rabbit hole, I actually think it's interesting because it does kind of touch on different pressure points of the election.

So some other ideas.

What's What's our over-under for when major news outlets will actually call a winner?

I think that's an interesting one because I don't think either one of us particularly feels like the election is going to be over on November 5th, given how close it is and given

the way elections have gone in recent years.

Yeah, look, I mean, the over-under might be,

you know, November 5th is a Tuesday, maybe Saturday, or excuse me.

Thursday morning, the 7th.

I mean, keep in mind that like the networks tend to be really conservative about making these these calls,

except for Fox News, which weirdly called Arizona for Trump when it was way premature to do so, but leave that aside for a moment.

Yeah, I remember doing in 2020, I was kind of like, like in the boiler room, it's during COVID, doing like these repeat TV hits over and over for ABC News.

And like the networks, it was obvious, I thought by like midday Wednesday that Biden was going to have enough paths to victory, but the networks didn't call it until

Saturday morning.

But I don't mean to make light of this.

I mean, like,

you know, another disputed election outcome where Trump is sowing doubt about the results,

that would not be great for the U.S.

I think people are not quite pricing in

what's going to feel like if you have a, if you have an unclear, ambiguous, disputed election result.

Yeah, I mean, I'm actually hoping that we do get a winner announced on the 5th or, you know, on early morning of the 6th.

I hope that we do have a very clear-cut election because I think that that is something that we need because we have, you know, we've had some close calls and we've had a number of disputed elections in recent memory.

So that's not necessarily a great place to be when you're looking at

kind of when you're looking at democratic outcomes and peaceful transitions of power.

No, I mean, look, you don't need that much of a polling error

to have a pretty clear result, right?

If Trump beats his polls by three points, then he wins all the swing states.

Likewise, for Harris, you could even win Florida, which was a source of dispute with Keith Raboy.

So yeah,

unservice is a good question.

I'm just going to fuck with you on Sabreboi.

What other prep bets do we have?

Yeah, so there were a few others.

One was in which of the swing states will polling

turn out to be the most accurate and in which will it be the least accurate.

So do you have,

as our

poll guru, do you have a sense of how the polls are doing this year?

I mean, maybe Georgia for most accurate.

The polls have tended to to be pretty accurate in georgia in the past and also like um

like in georgia like you kind of know everyone's going to vote right you have like the evangelical whites and you have the african-american population and like you have the you know suburban so it's not like it's just a matter of kind of racing to see who can get more turnout and that tends to make um the polling a little bit easier versus states where you have like a lot of swing voters um but i'll go with georgia as the most accurate polling state.

Do you have an opinion, Maria?

No, I don't because I don't know, you know, I don't follow the polls as the way that you do.

I just look at your outcomes and I tend to trust you, obviously, when it comes to polling, when it comes to reading the polls.

So I just kind of look to see, look to see what the prevailing wisdom is.

But I don't know, you know, I think that it's one thing to say, oh, you know, these are high quality polls, these are worse quality polls, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

But I think it takes expertise that I frankly do not have to be able to say how accurate is polling within a state.

I'm so torn on differing to ex you know because on the one hand you have friends like Keith R,

who clearly

is outside his depth in this particular enterprise.

A lot of the time the experts are full of shit and the non-experts are even more full of shit, right?

Life is hard.

It's hard to make predictions about things.

It is hard to make predictions.

And let's do a shout out to the work of Phil Tetlock, who was one of the first people to show how hard it is to make predictions and how experts are also often wrong.

But if we can't, actually, I'm curious to hear the answer to this.

If we can't defer to experts, then

who do we defer to?

I mean, there's obviously

going back to

what we started off with, with prediction markets and places like Calci and as we know, you're

paid advisor for Polymarket.

I just, I hate having to throw that disclaimer out every single time, but

I think we do have to throw it out every single time.

Are prediction markets a better place?

Like,

what do we defer to then if we can't, if we say like, oh, you know, you can't really defer to experts.

How do you figure out, you know, how do I form an opinion on this?

Yeah, look, obviously I'm a fan of prediction markets.

I think, I think one of, if you read Phil Tetlock's book that you referenced, Maria, expert political judgment, I mean, you know, that actually forced experts to make probabilistic predictions, right?

Like, what's the chance that the USSR will break up in the next 10 years might have been a question that he asked, for example.

When you encourage people to do that, then you actually create more accountability, you create a paper trail, because for the most part, like experts don't actually have

incentives to make accurate predictions.

You know what I mean?

They have incentives to be ambiguous so they can't be proven wrong.

And so, you know, stuff like what we do at Silver Bulletin is actually quite unusual.

And if experts were forced to come up with actual answers, then they would do, they would potentially be a little bit better, although I think we would also expose people who are not very rigorous in their thinking.

Yeah.

So then maybe we would be able to have kind of a hierarchy of expertise, which I think is something that is very,

would be very, very helpful, at least to someone like me.

The other thing that happened in the news, kind of putting our little prop bets aside, obviously we had the VP debates since you and I last spoke.

Did that make any difference whatsoever?

I know you've said over and over and over that, you know, the VP debates don't really matter.

VPs don't usually matter.

Have we seen them matter at all in the last week or no change?

There's been oddly little polling of any kind.

I think the poll search just all decided to take the weekend off.

I don't know, man.

Let me say something that will get clipped onto the Twitter, right?

Like, I'm not into Tim Walls, really.

I mean, he's fine.

But like,

you know, first of all, there's all this discussion about like, oh, you don't want to, the term sanewashing.

It's like, oh, you don't want to make Trump and Vance seem sane.

And he's like, he's doing this whole nice guy thing.

And and I think Vance is just objectively like a better debater than Tim Walls.

And Tim Walls was obviously extremely nervous for the first 15 minutes of the debate, which is a part that people often remember.

Like, it won't matter.

I don't think very much in the end.

The polls show that people thought the debate was a tie, basically.

But I don't know.

You know, it's kind of, you have your one job thing

and you should really nail that.

debate and hey i think it was tactically not very good at going after jd vance and i'm just not i'm just not that into it.

I don't really understand.

You know, there's like feeling of euphoria after Harris replaced Biden.

And I think people therefore overrated everything she did in that period after that.

And if it were me, I would rather have, say, the extremely popular governor of Pennsylvania, which is the most important tipping point in the state.

Yeah, well,

let's see what ends up happening.

And after the break, we'll talk about betting on something else, which is betting on cards and poker bots.

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Nate, if I remember correctly, way back when,

You made a living professionally playing poker online, playing limit hold'em is that correct that's correct for um for a period of two and a half or three years i guess three years yeah my main source of income was playing freaking party poker

what when was this um let's put it on a timeline it's 2004 to 2006 and then then i had a year where let's not tell anybody but i actually lost money in 2007 after the games cut.

So the U.S.

Congress passed a bill called the UIGEA.

Yeah, U-G-E.

Yeah.

And once that happened, the game started to dry up and party poker closed.

But anyway, yeah, I'm actually,

I was able to change my whole career by playing online poker, basically.

Okay.

So the reason that I asked about this is this past week, we've had several blockbuster investigation pieces come out about bots in online poker and bots as kind of an existential threat to the game.

So the first of these came out on September 20th, and it was a piece by Kit Chillel, who's been doing this

deep dive investigation into a massive, massive Russian bot.

He calls it an army.

So usually in the online poker world, we talk about bot farms, but when you read this piece, you realize that, holy shit, army might actually be

a legitimate way to look at this.

So he had kind of found a few breadcrumbs that then led him to poker forums, to people who actually were involved in this bot operation.

And it turns out that this group, originally this group of students, then it grew much bigger,

is working, you know, in the depths of Siberia.

And these are stats nerds, college students who need extra income, and they want to get better at poker, at online poker.

And so they start kind of playing around with basically what, you know, today we'd call solver software.

Then they start developing little bots to try to implement some of these ideas.

Fast forward to kind of the capabilities that these bots can actually be deployed onto poker platforms.

And

these bots start being used and start winning money on online poker sites in great numbers.

And then it turns out that some online poker sites might even be deploying bots themselves in order to generate artificially larger player pools.

Because if you're an online poker site, you don't particularly care if the person playing the rake is a little bot or a human, as long as you get the money.

And so then after this Bloomberg piece came out, a second piece came out by Jonathan Robb,

and he investigated further and actually named names of some online poker companies.

Anyway, this is a very long introduction, so we'll talk more about this later.

But it seems like we see quite the existential threat to online poker and to players, Nate, like yourself, who look at online poker as a way of making money.

So, what do you think?

You know, have you been following this poker bot explosion at all?

And have you given any thought to kind of the state of online poker play?

I mean, first of all, I don't look at online poker as a way to make money.

I look at it as a form of recreation, I suppose.

Because, like,

to me, it seems like like a somewhat unsolvable problem that you have

solvers now that can give you a game theory optimal solution to a poker hand, never mind anything more advanced about like doing data mining about particular opponents.

You know, to me, unless you're in a position where you're actually having somebody like physically on a camera or something, then,

you know, combined with the fact that like,

as it says in the Bloomberg article, it's kind of a Darwinian struggle to begin with online poker, right?

People are already playing pretty close to optimal.

I just don't, I wouldn't want to have to live my life now trying to make money playing poker online.

And there are home games that people say, but I just think the risk is pretty, is pretty high.

Yeah.

And when we look at kind of these further investigations, so this the second article that I

alluded to, the Jonathan Robb piece in in Poker Pro.

He actually found kind of this one site, Jack Poker, that seemed to be almost entirely creating their player pool out of bots, which is kind of crazy, right?

And he, you know, signed up as a real person with real money, and then he noticed these crazy patterns in their tournaments, etc., went down that rabbit hole and actually saw that they were connected to their user interface, was connected to this corporation that Chillel had wrote about, the Bot Farm Corporation, BFC,

and what kind of their deep play software, which is kind of these bots that they were deploying.

And if it's true that sites like that are actually kind of embracing bots in some ways, like that to me is quite worrying.

By the way, time for my own disclaimer.

As people know, but I should say I'm an ambassador for PokerStars, which is also an online poker site.

PokerStars was not implicated in any of this, but

I i should throw that out there i mean like there there are incentives to not have perceived or actual cheating i suppose it's just that you know i mean when you can like i don't know i mean it's i've i tried to play poker against chat gpt once um really how did that go that's amazing it's very nitty um

no matter what options you give it it always just checks the pot down even if it has like the nuts so i you know maybe we still have some time for humans to be better than chat gpt at poker but like but you know it's an asymmetric arms race.

It's just hard for me to imagine that someone who is connected to a computer can't find efficient ways to cheat, basically.

Yeah, I mean, this is clearly a real problem.

And

I do think there are solutions, by the way.

You can usually figure it out when you're looking at deep analysis.

So Nate, as a statistician and someone who does this kind of analysis, you can probably appreciate that if you have a database of hundreds and thousands of hands, you can start seeing, is this a person or is this a computer that has some sort of

regular type of output?

And

flagging and getting rid of those things immediately

is a big one.

The other one, and I don't think anyone wants to do this, but I think it's potentially kind of the future of a safe poker environment is what if we play on camera, right?

Like what if you have those types of checks where you actually try to monitor who's playing, how they're playing, etc.

And even that's not perfect, obviously.

But there are certain things that you can start doing, but it takes a lot of resources.

And the incentives, unfortunately, are often with the players.

And as you said, it is an arms race.

Like we can learn to try to figure out, oh, what's this kind of bot look like?

What does that kind of bot look like?

And then someone comes up with something better, someone who deviates, or you know, something that looks more human-like, like the Turing test, right?

Every single year becomes more and more likely that we'll actually have someone be able to beat the Turing test.

I think all of our listeners probably know what the Turing test is, but do we want to pause for a second to

explain what that is for people who might not know?

Yeah, I think probably most people know, but the Turing test is basically, can you program?

I mean, it actually anticipates

ChatGPT pretty well, right?

But can you tell if you're having a conversation with a human being versus a computer?

And yeah, I know, I mean, like ChatGPT, I mean, it has signature.

For example, it frequently says as a large language model, which is something that like,

but the thing, even that, though, like, you know, so if you do play online poker and you're playing a lot of hours and sometimes you get a prompt saying, prove that you're a human, right?

Do some task now that proves that you're a human and not just a bot.

But the thing is, though, like, you could intentionally introduce some degree of like randomization.

I mean, one thing about cheaters in general is that most cheaters are really greedy, or at least the ones that get caught, right?

And so they cheat too much.

When if you were a smart cheater in poker, you could just kind of get away with the edge cases where you magically happen to know in a spot where you're different, what your opponent has on the river.

And instead, people get very greedy.

But I just think it's kind of asymmetric warfare in the end.

Live poker is good, though.

Yes.

Play more live poker.

I agree.

I think live poker is certainly a safer arena, though not altogether safe.

You know, we've we've had live cheating scandals as well.

And this always bugged me that like poker, poker is quite forgiving, I think, of cheating and other bad behavior and ways like, yeah, it should just be banned from any casino for a lifetime or for five years or for things like that.

And instead, they're kind of like slap on the wrist a lot of the time.

Yeah.

You know, Isaac Haxon, I talked to for the book, one of the best players in the world,

and told me that his ROI and online poker is about 10%,

which is not actually very good, or I said under 10% to the single digits, right?

So

for every $1,000 he invests in playing a tournament, this is one of the best players in the world,

maybe he has an expected return of $50 or $60 from that.

That's actually, given the variance in poker,

not a very good deal, right?

And if he, one of the 10, 12 best players in the world, is only making that much, then

I don't think very many people are really beating online poker sites without cheating in the long run.

Yeah, I think that

that's very sobering.

I did not realize that that Ike had

communicated those numbers to you.

If one of the best players in the world says that, but I will caveat that with saying Mike also plays in a lot of much harder games, right?

He's probably not playing in some of the lower buy-in tournaments that you and I would play in.

He's probably playing the higher roller, but still it's pretty it's pretty frightening.

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

So I'm very curious to see what the fallout is going to be of all of this, whether sites are going to address it, whether they're, you know, what the, what the changes are going to be.

There was, you know, for instance, I, the last poker, live poker I played was European poker tour EPT Barcelona.

And at that stop, that happened right after

there were some cheating allegations.

We don't have to go into details on those, but of live poker and of certain methods of being able to kind of see cards live at the table.

And so what PokerStars announced at the stop was some new rules,

including no phones on the tables, no phones on the rails.

And I think that, you know, things like that actually show that, okay,

we're trying to take some of these threats.

seriously as they're evolving.

And I went a step further and I said, you know what, like we should ban phones at the table, period.

We should ban sunglasses at the table.

You know, there are certain things that like we just know that there's cheating technology that can be used in those instances.

And I love having my phone, but you know, I'm willing to put it on the floor and to not touch it for an hour at a time.

Like I'm okay with that.

And I actually think it would be very good for everyone's mental health to not have your phone on you 24 seconds.

Day 26 of 52 when the world tries at poker, you're playing in some $800 freeze-out 10-handed with the guy from Buffalo who is taking 15 seconds to fold.

I mean,

you want your fucking phone, don't you?

I do want my fucking phone, but for the greater good of the- I'm gonna wait.

I'm making fun of Buffalo, by the way.

We love Buffalo.

Oh, Buffalo has taken some flack from us in the past.

I just remembered because you were so- I forgot the unexpected layover.

Yeah, you had a Buffalo layover.

Anyway, sorry, Buffalo.

You're great.

But, you know,

I would take one for the team and be willing to give up my phone a little bit if it meant game integrity and things that are kind of safer for the game.

So, you know, I think, but just to wrap this up, I think there are existential threats.

We need to address them and we need to figure out kind of the best way.

forward because I think you and I both feel that poker is a great game and a game that can really kind of help people think better, make better decisions.

And it would be great if people could safely continue playing

in all forums.

And I hope that happens.

Speaking about existential threats, you want to talk about open AI real quick?

Yeah, so now we've been talking about existential threats to poker, and after the break, let's talk about open AI and revisit some of those existential threats.

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In a region as complex as the Bay Area, the headlines don't always tell the full story.

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Hey, a while ago, I think the last time we spoke about the concept of P Doom was what, a few months back, right?

Where we talked about the risk that AI poses to the world.

Last week, in the last week, there's been a lot of news coming out of

Open AI, a lot of new departures and a lot of fundraising.

So yeah, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion, we are told by our reliable producers, at $157 billion valuation.

It is losing a lot of money, by the way.

This hardware is expensive.

Compute is expensive.

The commercialization has not been great so far, but people are betting on the upside outcome of this being, you know, maybe the leading AI company.

But it's begun, you know, OpenAI began its life as a nonprofit.

Co-founded by rest in peace nonprofits.

Yeah.

Co-founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

You know, look, Elon, he does an impressive array of things.

I know that's going to like really piss off half our audience, right?

But like the fact that this isn't even his main thing,

it's not Tesla or SpaceX and that he has Open AI and Neuralink and for some reason decides to invest his time on Twitter slash X instead.

But yeah,

so Open AI has been in various formal and informal ways moving further and further away from this notion of being a nonprofit.

You have had a great number of the alignment people, meaning people that are so alignment is an AI term for

is AI compatible with human values?

Now, whose values are these and what's it mean to be compatible are big open questions.

But basically, OpenAI is giving up on

much of the pretense, I suppose, of being an AI safety company.

And instead, you know, Sam Baltman is just saying the benefits outweigh the risks.

In a recent post, for example, he claims that

we will fix the climate, establish a space colony, and have the discovery of all physics.

And these will be commonplace things in the age of AI with nearly limitless intelligence and abundant energy, he claims.

You know,

when I talked to Sam in 2022, I guess it was, he's like, yeah, I think that AI will solve all of poverty.

So

he's kind of a DJ.

I think.

I don't mean that about his personal life.

I just mean that he is willing to make this big gamble, not because he thinks that it's completely safe.

He is clear that there are these risks, but he thinks that the rewards outstrip the risks.

And in the meantime, I mean, I'm not sure where all this limitless energy is coming from, because in the meantime, we've got Microsoft making plans to reopen Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant, because frankly, our power grid cannot keep up with the demands of OpenAI and ChatGPT and what is happening there.

So I think that people, you know, when we talk about existential risk,

talking about

a lot of different things, but like the energy demand is crazy.

Like I'm very pro-nuclear power.

Like I think that, you know, we should be building a lot of safe nuclear power plants.

Like I think that that's a great way of helping the world kind of

reach energy neutral status.

But it's crazy that the first time people have actually like

talked about and thought, okay, you know, maybe we can reopen this power plant that's been shut down.

Like, give it some corporate confinity or something.

Don't call it Three Mile Island.

Let's see.

Right.

No, that's a really bad name.

But yeah, the first time that they're actually like, they're like, okay, like before they're like, no, no, no, like Three Mile Island, horrible disaster, blah, blah, blah.

Then they're like, oh, OpenAI needs it.

You know, we need it for.

being able to do memes with ChatGPT.

Hey, everyone, ask ChatGPT this.

Okay, let's let's reopen this.

So it's just, you know, it's just absolutely backwards.

and um to me like a really perplexing state of affairs that he would say oh you know you know we're solving everything but so far what i see is that they haven't solved a lot and most of what they've done you know is is actually

things that have been both physically polluting the world and just polluting my head by creating an internet full of just absolute like hallucinatory bullshit that is really difficult to parse through.

By the way, Google results now.

I don't know about you, Nate, but like I'm looking for a new search engine because it's unusable.

I'm like, what the fuck?

You know, I try to search for something.

It's been my go-to search engine.

And it's just, I just want to, can I just rant about this for one second?

It seems like you want to join me.

Now, like, first we have this AI summary, which is usually wrong.

Like, it's actually given me like absolutely incorrect information in that summary.

And I'm like, wait, no, I know this is not true.

This is not at all.

And then it's all these, anyway, now it's just completely unusable.

I'll let you interrupt me because you look like you have something to say.

No, I don't.

I mean, so a lot of it's driven by ads, right?

But yeah, the AI overviews are often not very good.

And the whole point of a search engine is, I don't want your fucking summary of it.

I want to go to a website, right?

I want to choose which website.

I go to.

Just give me a list of good fucking websites, Google.

And instead, you have this like AI summary, which I think is a product that is, frankly, behind

both both ChatGPT and Claude, which is the Anthropic product.

And I think Google is

terrified because Google developed the Transformer algorithm, right?

Google has harnessed a lot of the talent, but they've had for years, they've had like a

brain drain.

And why that is for internal cultural reasons, I won't speculate, but like, but I wish that Google didn't like shove this mediocre version of AI for its once very wonderful search product in our face.

That really annoys me.

Yeah, but

it really annoys me too.

And, you know,

listeners, please recommend a good search engine that you actually trust that gives reliable results instead of Google, because

it's just killing me.

But this kind of drek, I mean, that's one of the things that we're seeing.

So far, it hasn't revolutionized humanity.

It's created a lot of drek or slop, as some writers have called it.

And, you know, the internet is,

it's more difficult to use.

And

when I go to look for answers to things, oftentimes I can't figure out unless I go to like, you know, Bloomberg, right?

Or the New York Times or just a site that I know to be trustworthy.

I can't even figure it out.

And even then, if I go to ESPN, they have articles that have been written by chatbots, right?

By ChatGPT, by other AI kind of large language models.

And they often create fake names and fake photographs.

And I'm singling out ESPN because I know it does it.

I don't know, you know, what other sites do it, but

it's a problem where I, you know, before I was thinking of p-doom in terms of like, the world's going to hell and we're going to not survive.

But also there's like a p-doom of my brain and of the usability of the internet.

And I'm like, what the hell is happening?

Right.

Like, this is really cognitive load is going up.

It's overtaxing me and like i don't want to have to deal with this like just give me real articles real information real people like things i can trust um and don't give me don't force me to have to like figure out you know two paragraphs in wait this is definitely not written by a human and i can't trust anything it says

you know look when sam altman says we're going to solve all of physics, I mean, that, that to me,

I'm a little skeptical about that, right?

I think we kind of end up in like there are many universes where AI is a highly useful product, maybe not good for society, maybe not, but like, I don't know.

I don't really think that

we're going to solve all of physics through deep learning, right?

I mean, I, you know, I like to extrapolate out to these superhuman accomplishments from doing human things.

Well, I think it's, I think the jury is still out on whether that will occur or not.

I mean, look,

should your pay doom be going up as a result of this?

I suppose, although for me, it kind of seems like the inevitable

game theory optimal outcome anyway, right?

Is that people pursue profit in a capitalist system and that, you know, and that it's the role of the public sector to decide if, how, and when we want to regulate AI companies.

Gavin Newsom

vetoed an AI regulation bill actually that had passed the California Congress.

So yeah, that was that was kind of crazy.

And his justification for doing it was kind of crazy.

He said that, oh, it's only targeting certain companies.

That's fine.

Okay.

Pass it.

And then do another one to target other companies.

But yeah,

I think that this is a really kind of interesting situation that we're in right now.

I'm curious to see how it evolves, but

I wish that we weren't taking such a toll on collective brain power.

environment, on other things as we wait to see what regulation will happen and what will actually happen.

Do you have have a percentage for your new P doom or

we're not going to put numbers on?

I've given enough percentages today, I feel.

If I gave the exact number of turnout and I'd

yes, I now have two p-dooms.

I have my p-doom with the capital D, which is kind of the world destroying, and I have a lowercase p-doom, which is my brain blowing up because of all of the bullshit that's happening on the internet.

So this is just my plea.

Like, let's try to reverse some of this and let's try to make the internet back into a usable experience because otherwise we're going to have to, I was about to say, otherwise, we're going to have to just keep go to libraries again and like just rely on paper, but we can't even do that because libraries have become inundated with fake books that have been written by AIs.

And librarians have to now try to figure out what the hell to do with this.

So it's a problem that's just permeating everywhere.

And I'm not happy about it.

And on that note, I think, I think we've talked a lot lot today about

some interesting trends.

And I'm very curious to see how all of these different things will develop.

And I would like to be an optimist and say that things will get better, but I don't know.

I used to think I was an I think I'm an optimist.

I mean, think about how neurotic most people are, right?

Compared to most people, I'm an optimist.

All right.

And these are two optimists signing off on this week's risky business.

Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Kanakova, and me, Nate Silver.

The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

Our associate producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang.

Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

And if you want to listen to an ad-free version, sign up for Pushkin Plus for $6.99 a month.

You get access to Ad-Free Listening.

Thanks for tuning in.

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Hi, I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

When something important is happening in the Bay Area, I want to know what it actually means for the people who live here.

In every episode of The Bay, we ask deeper questions, cut through the noise, and keep you connected to the community that you and I love.

Find new episodes of KQED's The Bay every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

Kevin and Rachel and Peanut M's and an eight-hour road trip.

And Rachel's new favorite audiobook, The Cerulean Empress, Scoundrel's Inferno.

And Florian, the reckless yet charming scoundrel from said audiobook.

And his pecs glistened in the moonlight.

And Kevin feeling weird because of all the talk about pecs.

And Rachel handing him peanut MMs to keep him quiet.

Kevin, I can't hear.

Yellow, we're keeping it PG-13.

MMs, it's more fun together.

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