With Sora 2, We’re Climbing Higher on the Dystopia Scale

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Pushkin.

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

I'm Maria Konakova.

And I'm Nate Silber.

Today in the show, look, if it looks like I'm taping this in candlelight, it's because all the power is out in New York City and around the world because of the government shutdown.

No, there has been a government shutdown for more than a week now.

Yep.

As you're hearing this, less than a week as we're taping this.

We're going to talk about how that's evolved, what the polling says so far, and,

you know, do a check-in on which side, if either, is applying the right strategy and after that um we are going to talk about one of our pet favorite subjects here at risky business which is ai and the release of a new ai video generation app from open ai called sora sora 2 sora 2 sorry i can i can never get the names yes the name man the names of open ai products but the segment will be about kind of broader societal concerns that uh have to go beyond whether it's called Sora or Sora 2.

How dystopian are we?

We're going to answer that question for you.

On a scale of 0 to 10, how far down the lines are we to a dystopia?

But before we dive into AI, let's talk a little bit about the government shutdown.

So we are recording this on Monday, October 6th.

You'll be hearing it on Wednesday the 8th.

On the 6th, we're still in a government shutdown.

And Nate, we know you're an advisor to Polymarket.

It seems to me that if you look at the odds, we will probably still be in a shutdown by the time listeners hear this episode on Wednesday.

Polymarket, the prediction, sorry, Polymarket, the prediction market for everyone.

It's poly October.

Anyway,

yeah, according to Polymarket, there's only about a 3% chance that we'll look foolish by having released this episode when the shutdown is already resolved and about a a 75% chance that it will be resolved within a week and a half or later.

25% chance for the longest shutdown in American history.

So, Nate, I am curious, what is the longest the government has ever shut down for?

It was 35 days in 2018, 2019.

And

how did that play out?

Was the country experiencing any

really negative consequences?

Could we feel the shutdown as a nation?

Because I don't actually remember what it felt like to be perfectly honest uh have you noticed any effects of the shutdown so far no i have not

but if i were a federal employee i might right because we know that that's yeah if you're a federal employee then you may get furloughed you may stop getting a paycheck and if you're not furloughed social security benefits may be delayed right staffing at some agencies like the national park service may be limited um mildly to severely um you know all you know you have financial sector things about how we're making our treasury payments and things like that.

Anyway, there's a lot of stuff.

It's kind of the grab bag.

The president has both de jure and de facto power to play around with things a little bit, right?

I mean, there's some question about whether Trump wants to make Democrats feel the pain or if rather that would turn around on him.

But yeah, I mean, let's talk about the reasons why nobody's expecting a quick resolution, right?

Yeah.

So there are, I mean, there are two main main things the way that I understand it.

Thing number one, healthcare spending, right?

And, or cuts to health care.

And the Democrats are standing firm on that.

This is a place where we might get some.

common ground with Republicans because obviously, if your health care premiums are about to get twice as expensive, if you're going to lose healthcare coverage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you care whether you're a Republican or a Democrat.

So common ground there potentially.

And number two, one of the things that the Democrats seem to be insisting on is some sort of a curb on Donald Trump's ability to limit the appropriations, stop appropriations that Congress has already appropriated.

Sorry, I'm saying appropriations way too often, but I don't know what the what other my vocabulary in this particular case is limited.

So they're trying to curb executive power somewhat so that they know that, okay, if we allocate these funds, these funds are actually going to be used.

We want,

you know, that to be the case.

We want to reclaim congressional power of the purse.

Did I kind of summarize it the way that you would have, Nate, or am I getting it a little bit wrong?

I think you summarized Chuck Schumer's spin.

Okay.

Yeah.

Look, what Democrats, what their heart is really into is taking a stand against the encroachment of

all the authority of Congress, but really against authoritarianism.

Put that in quotes if you you want, right?

But like, if you look at kind of what Democrats that are arguing for the shutdown the most really care about, right?

They're like, yeah, healthcare would be would be nice, right?

And they are on the right side of public opinion on that issue.

I mean, these cuts are unpopular or failing to extend the subsidies, I should say, right?

To the extent that, you know, you're almost doing Republicans a favor if they agree to amend this potentially.

Project Sherman will say Republicans are refusing to take our input on a budget and have this negotiation over health care that everyone wants to have, right?

And therefore, the shutdown

is their fault, right?

Whereas, like,

for the past month, everyone's been arguing in the New York Times that, you know, about Democrats should shut down the government to take a stand against Trump.

And we're not sure what the stand should be about.

And Chuck Schumer settled on health care eventually, right?

But like, for all types of reasons, I suggested it should be about tariffs.

I guess no one else liked that idea, right?

Some people just think that, hey, we cannot in good conscience vote to fund this government, right?

And you've seen some like seepage to that message, like Senator Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut, who loves to be an MSNBC, right?

But he's saying, yeah, it's not just about healthcare, let's be honest, right?

A lot of the Democratic influencers, what do you want to call the media personalities, are kind of saying the same thing.

And so, like, so it's, it's a

hard tightrope to walk, right?

It's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't don't situation.

If you think about it, you know, since you referenced Chuck Schumer, because you remember last time we talked about the shutdown, it was averted because Schumer decided that it was time to, you know, compromise, avert a shutdown, and he got pilloried for it.

His approval ratings were horrific.

People are like, oh, we can't believe you caved.

Now, you know, he's like, okay, fine, we're going to stand strong.

We'll shut down the government.

And his approval ratings still suck, right?

He now he's getting blamed for the fact that the government shut down.

So it's, it is, you know, as you say, it's a tight, it's a hard tightrope, tight tightrope.

It's a hard tightrope to walk.

And there seems to be little

way to walk it short of some of sides that are willing to compromise.

And that doesn't seem likely

in the immediate term.

No, I mean, first of all, there's some degree of like posturing at first.

I think it was very predictable that you'd have at least this amount of shutdown, right?

You know, polls show

that more of the public blames Republicans and Democrats right now, right?

But like, I'm not sure that really tells us who's winning the shutdown.

Sure.

I mean, people just kind of assume as a default that Republicans are more obstructionist, I think, right?

And so, like, Democrats will kind of, then they'll kind of lie about it and they say, oh, we are, you know, our hand is forced, right?

Where it's like, no, people can read the New York Times where you argue about this and like,

your hand was not forced.

Now, what you could say is, like, look, you know what?

You got your majorities in Congress.

The majority can change the rules if it needs to, right?

We have so many problems with A, the budget, and B, everything that Donald Trump is doing that we're not going to fucking support anything that Donald Trump does that requires affirmative Democratic votes, right?

So go ahead and break the filibuster.

You're insincere about it anyway, right?

They already keep parrying away at it, as Democrats have too, in some cases, right?

So you have the votes, pass your budget, and we'll see you at the midterms.

But instead, there's this like spin that like I think is designed to like, um, like designed to win this poll question.

Like like the first Washington Post poll that comes out says okay who is more blamed for the shutdown and just that one question because the other questions aren't necessarily so good for Democrats or Republicans

then maybe you win that but like you know when you're in a repeated game to ground this in the show a little bit then

credibility matters.

I don't mean so much with Republicans, right?

There's not very much trust there anyway, but I mean with I mean with voters a little bit, right?

Whereas if you had owned the shutdown, it might have been more unpopular at first.

Now, look, part of it is that Schumer's job is probably at a fair bit of risk.

In fact, a plurality of Democrats in a new Pew Poll disapprove of Chuck Schumer, have an unfavorable view of him, not a majority, but plurality.

You know, he is also very much threatened by AOC or other primary candidates in 2028 when he runs in, I guess, three years from now.

He's also old as fuck.

I mean, he's not old as fuck.

He's just old.

Not as fuck.

Just old.

Nate, we have other we have other people for whom we should reserve the as

yeah he's just old

he's just old not old af um but like so he probably wants to like give the annoying did i say annoying he probably wants to give like the partisan democrats a win, right?

That we have flexed our power.

This keeps the base happy.

We've gotten some

token or maybe not so token concessions on healthcare and things like that, right?

This shows that when we stand and fight that we win, right?

Yeah.

Big morale boost.

Does it provide much more of the morale?

I don't know.

Does it help you win the midterms?

I don't know, right?

The people that are care about this are the people who are going to vote anyway for the most part.

But if Schumer blows it, right?

If he caves too soon,

then

he's going to look like he's weak and then he might be out of power, right?

If it goes on too long,

then A, everybody kind of gets more egg on their faces.

B, he loses control of the message he doesn't really have to begin with.

And so, like, he would love to have that

early,

that October 10th to 14th window that Polymarket says is a one-in-four chance.

He would love, he would love for that window to happen, right?

The more it goes on, and the more you already have influential Democrats saying, you know, it shouldn't really be about healthcare, come on, right?

Then, then it becomes this big uncertain morass.

And look, you know, you already have some swing state Democrats who are worried about this, right?

John Fetterman is not on board with the shutdown.

Senator from Wyoming, she's not on board with it.

Angus King from Maine.

Jared Golden is a representative from Maine, very in the Trumpy district, independent-minded, right?

So like, I don't think Democrats feel like

this is going to be a big win for them, right?

But like, but you know, whatever.

I mean, whatever.

Have fun, You know, have fun.

It's kind of, it's kind of actually not that high stakes compared to a lot of things that are going on, which is kind of, to me, why it feels like a little bit discordant.

But they have to make it, they have to make a move, right?

And they felt like they couldn't do nothing or Schumer might lose his job if he did nothing, right?

And they don't really have a great hand to play, but Republicans aren't popular either.

And they're insincere in their own ways, believe me.

And what Democrats are asking for is fundamentally pretty reasonable, I think.

So, yeah, so there we are.

Yeah, no, I think, I think that was a good summary.

And one other thing that I will say is, you know, note the language that you've been using, which is also the language that they're using, which is, oh, we need to win, you know, we're fighting a war, etc.

So, if we couch this back in game theoretic terms, you know, they are making this into more, you know, of a zero-sum contest than it has to be, right?

It's like an us versus them.

Like, we need to win, as opposed to, okay, let's let's figure out this is just positive sum.

Like, let's compromise.

Let's do what's good for the country.

That language has largely disappeared right now, even though at the end, what we will need is some sort of a compromise.

And as you point out, Nate, some of the things like healthcare, those are going to help Republicans as well

in the midterm elections.

If Democrats actually can get that changed, it'll help the general public.

public, but it will also help Republicans because a lot of people who will otherwise be incredibly pissed off will no longer be pissed off.

And probably, as you say, you know, they're the people who already pay attention to this and then those who don't.

I'm guessing that a lot of those people who would have lost healthcare coverage if we,

if nothing was done, right, won't even realize that this happened, right?

They won't even realize that there was a change, that there was a compromise, that Democrats had anything to do with it.

They'll be like, yeah, see, we knew that Trump would never take away our health care.

Because if you're not paying attention to those kinds of behind the scenes machinations, then

you might not even realize that's the case.

So that'll be a win for Republicans as well, as you said.

And so I think that it's just very interesting to see how

politics has always been a fight to some extent, but the extent to which the language has become kind of zero-sum radicalized, as opposed to a more, you know, we all serve the people type of rhetoric, which would be, I think, a little bit more appropriate here, but clearly not the stage at which we find ourselves.

yeah so it's not zero sum if you're an incumbent right because one sure plausible outcome is that people get really mad at incumbents in general and so you know unfortunately given the type of incumbents we have you know we're represented in congress by this current generation of representatives and um

if there's a pack above on all their houses, then they might lose however the split between the parties goes, right?

But yeah, you know, polling shows pretty clearly that Democrats no longer want compromise with Republicans, right?

They want to fight.

You know, I, as always, am contrarian because I thought that the spring was a better time to shut down than now.

You had Elon Musk as a good

scapegoat.

I think a more salient scapegoat slash,

you know, relevant excuse because he was fucking with the budget, right?

And I think they were a little slow to move then.

And now it's like, I mean, look, the fact is that when you're

out of, shut out of Congress, shut out of

the Supreme Court, basically, right?

You're shut out of the presidency.

You're even losing control over

blue academic media institutions that you once controlled.

I mean, you know, Democrats are,

number one, very angry, right?

And number two, feel like they need something, anything that they can call a win.

Yep.

Yeah, I think that the optics are incredibly important.

So yeah, let's see what happens.

Let's see if Chuck Schumer can hit his magic window or not.

Polymarket odds are against it,

but we shall see.

On that note, let's take a quick break.

And when we come back, we're going to talk about the new open AI release, Sora, or sorry, Nate, Sora 2.

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So last week, last Friday, October 3rd, OpenAI released a new app.

And even if you're, you know, not terminally online, unless you're living under a rock and you have some form of social media, you were probably aware that Sora was released because I don't know about your newsfeed, Nate, but my newsfeed briefly became just like completely Sora with the announcement video, all these other videos, just people were just going crazy.

So for a good 24 hours, Sora was my newsfeed.

This is kind of the next gen video generation app that they've been working on.

And yeah, it's as of now invite only,

but, and it's as of now still free, even though there are, you know, already murmurs that it's not going to be for much longer because

Sam Altman said that

he wasn't prepared for how many people would be making those videos, which I find very strange.

Of course, you should be prepared for the volume that it's going to generate at this stage, right?

You seem to be unprepared every single time you release something new.

Well, that can be a classic tactic that uses in politics, too.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Oh my God, we have an overflow capacity here at this tiny venue that you should pick up a bigger venue, right?

Because it looks good on TV and it generates buzz right yep yeah um so yeah let's let's talk about sora let's talk about you know the good the bad the ugly um but first um just a brief explanation so nate have you used sora yourself yet i have not i i don't know why i was going to use it in preparation for this program i don't have any

What would I do with it?

Yeah, I feel the exact same.

I mean, it's like, oh, you can generate an image.

It's like, okay, I have a good imagination.

You know what I mean?

What do I do with it?

Do I feel like an old person?

I mean, I guess I do.

No, I mean, I actually feel, I feel the same way, which is that it's using a whole lot of capacity for something that I don't know how much of this we need.

But the idea is that you give it a text prompt and then it creates a video from it.

And the video is.

When I said next-gen AI, it really is.

It does look a lot better than AI-generated videos did before.

You can even upload your own photograph.

I would actually urge you not to do that because this is more training material for the apps and you kind of lose a lot of control over it.

Anyway, we can talk about that.

But so you can upload your own image.

You can use historical figures.

People have been making videos of MLK.

The most famous one that has been circulated is Sam Altman shoplifting from a Target.

So yeah,

you can give it lots of prompts and it spits out the output.

And as of now, it is watermarked, but the watermarks are already being removed.

They are not very sticky, it turns out.

But yeah, so it's this new frontier of video generation.

And even though it says that they have guardrails about usage, you know, consent, celebrity usage, political violence, people have already demonstrated that Sora is capable of creating incredibly realistic images of things like protests, violence in the streets, you know,

things that

border closely on political violence, which it says it doesn't allow.

And some experts in video AI generation and detection.

So there are people who have companies that actually are supposed to, you know, be very, very, very accurate at figuring out is this AI generated or not, are saying, hey, this is really tough, right?

Like some of these are actually quite, quite good.

And it's becoming very difficult to figure out whether or not this is real or not, which is scary because once we stop having that capacity, what happens with video evidence, right?

What happens with deep fakes?

What happens with kind of the ability to tell what is real from what isn't real?

We're already, we're at the doorstep.

We're almost there.

And I think Sora will probably take us over the doorstep.

Yeah, look, you can have a watermark or you can have some type of digital signature embedded, right?

Or you can just say, okay, there are artifacts that suggest that this is artificial, right?

You know, I suspect we're probably

a few years away from, just because there's more going on with vision than text.

You know what I mean?

You know, these AI detectors for like college essays, I think, are not very reliable, but like visual artifacts are like harder, I believe, to entirely eradicate potentially, right?

You know, this being able to manipulate photos for a long time.

I'm not sure it's changed things all, all that much.

Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, everyone like people are always like

misinformation this,

misinformation that, right?

Like, I think it's important, but I think that's something people will adapt to.

And I don't know.

I mean, I'm more interested in like what this tells us about like,

what open AI wants to be, right?

And how will AI become a part of our life, I suppose?

You know, this is not

what you would call a particularly highbrow product.

You know what I mean?

No, it absolutely is not.

It's refined and interesting, and I'm sure you'll see interesting art produced with it.

And, you know, I say that unironically, and things like that.

But like, this is kind of a

Facebook-y product.

Not to, not to demean our friends at Meta, right?

But like, this is consumer-focused, very middlebrow, right?

Um,

they seem not to be terribly concerned about, like,

uh,

you know, the use of copyrighted characters and whether that falls under fair use is a legal debate, right?

Um,

but like, you know, I think if they were trying to go for a more intellectual crowd, they might have drawn more guardrails over that.

But like, to me, it seems like OpenAI is

turning into a more legibly normal consumer product technology company.

You know what I mean?

Now, you can say they're doing that as an interim phase, right?

In order to then raise enough money to take over the world with AI, right?

Or build AGI or ASI artificial superintelligence.

But like, this is not quite

the AI timeline that

maybe the P-Doomers feared exactly, right?

You know, I compare this

with the somewhat underwhelming release of GPT-5, right?

And we did an episode on GPT-5, what was it, like a month or so ago, right?

And like,

I've remained

a little bit underwhelmed by it, I would say, right?

You know, I look, I pay $200 a month for the pro mode, use the pro mode, and

it's better, right?

But like, you know, it still feels very limited in its capabilities.

And it still feels like I gave, I'll tell you this, to tell you the last show.

So my friend has like, I think she's like eight years old or in second grade, right?

And,

you know, I had ChatGPT.

So there's this, you know, this is a machine that can like solve Math Olympia problems, right?

So she had a Snoopy coloring book, right?

Okay.

Where it's like you have to like fill in, you know, little word puzzles that are very simple on scramble the words and like, you know, Snoopy and the people are in Charlie Brown, Lucy, whatever, Linus they're in a spaceship you have to like connect the cord with the person in the in the spacesuit it's designed for eight-year-olds every single problem

chat GPT totally fucked up it like cheated right it's amazing give us an example yeah

yeah you have you had Snoopy you had you know you're looking forward and you have the left half is filled out with an image of Snoopy in the profile facing the the child who's filling out this cartoon right and the right half is blank so the idea is we're just teaching you to mirror Snoopy on both sides, right?

So I'm like, oh, I'm not going to even give this to ChatGPT.

It's too easy, right?

So I photograph Snoopy and give it the puzzle.

And instead, it turns Snoopy around 90 degrees.

So Snoopy is now not, or excuse me, he was facing you.

Now he's in profile, right?

You see his snout is facing right.

So like it totally, it totally cheated and like it gaslights you, right?

It's like, you know, you have like that, you know, we have the thing you have to like find the things that are different in each image, right?

It will like make up things that are different in its version of the image, but weren't different in the original image.

It just gaslights you, you know.

By the way, I don't think GPT-5 is like a total miss or anything, right?

But we're getting toward the end of the year.

Some people, I think, predicted bigger breakthroughs this year in terms of agentic capabilities, for example, what they'd be able to do in terms of, you know, computer usage and stuff like that.

And like, you know, this has been

as far as like core AI, you you know we we have not been i mean we've been it's been getting better it's been improving right

this is the year when it's felt like we're not on an exponential curve right it's felt more linear now that could be some type of punctuated equilibrium where there needs to be some

some new technology you know i think people mostly feel that like

maybe merely adding more compute will produce diminishing returns at some point.

We might need some new techniques, right?

And by the way, if you were to investor in OpenAI, they're a private company for now, right?

But like, if I were to investor in OpenAI, I'd be fine with this.

I mean, all the big, you know, Google, Facebook, et cetera, companies are very profitable and have very, you know, rich valuations, right?

But yeah,

it's becoming a little,

what's the word?

Slop is the word that some people use for this type of image generation.

Oh, absolutely.

I think slop is the right word.

And I think that I would actually go a step further and say that as opposed opposed to a step towards kind of AGI or kind of bigger advancements, you know, PDoom, et cetera,

I phrased that poorly.

It makes it seem like PDoom would be an advancement.

P-Doom is bad, right?

That's why it's called P-Doom.

But

the advancements that would potentially lead us to a P-Doom scenario, this seems to be

basically the only uses I can see of this with some limited things.

I don't want a straw man and say like there's nothing good that comes of this, but I think that a lot of the kind of a lot of the downstream effects of this are actually negative, right?

They're not doing anything to be a net positive value to society.

Instead, it's creating kind of slop.

It is, you know, taking, taking up your time with activities that might deaden some of your brain cells and would probably be better used doing something else.

And it can create really bad downstream effects if we look at the types of videos that it is capable of generating.

You know, what happens if someone, as they get more realistic, thinks, oh, there really is violence here.

There's really an uprising here, right?

There was really a bomb here.

The Democrats did this.

The Republicans did that.

I think this can go on both sides of the party line.

So let's not say one party or the other.

What happens, Nate, if someone can get your face and makes it seem like Nate Silver

did something very bad or Maria Konikova did something very bad, or said something.

You could probably implicate people in crimes they didn't commit.

And if you and I had exonerating evidence and we're like, hey, we were taping the risky business podcast at that exact time.

Look at the video of it.

If you can't distinguish that right from the video that they generated, or it can be incredibly difficult, time consuming to distinguish.

It's not as easy as doing it immediately.

That could still upend our lives and kind of lead us into a very uncomfortable spiral where even if at the end of the day we are vindicated, it will still have been, you know, very long time, financial resources, emotional cost, all of these things.

And those seem to be kind of the main uses of video generation of this sort that or, you know, disrupting Hollywood and saying, okay, fine, we'll, you know, create entire AI movies, which I don't think you can do at this point with Sora in any believable way, but that might be kind of

one of the other downstream effects.

But I'm more kind of what worries me, especially as someone, you know, who studies aberrant behavior, con artists, et cetera, and who's working on a book about cheating, what worries me are kind of all of the nefarious uses of this for scamming, for conning, for cheating.

And you do have

this thing called the liar's dividend that I think is very prominent in something like Sora, where, I mean, Trump even said it himself, that basically, you know, if you don't trust this evidence anymore, then you can just blame AI for everything.

And Trump said, and this is an this is a quote, if something happens that's really bad, maybe I'll have to just blame AI, right?

And that's, that's the liar's dividend that, like, now liars are actually the ones who are benefiting.

Cheaters are the ones that are benefiting.

Con artists, scammers, they are the ones that are deriving the most benefit from this.

So if your stated goal as a company is to make the world a better place and all you're doing is in a good, on a good day, just generating slop and on a bad day, creating content that might actually deleteriously affect.

people's lives on an individual level, on a broader level, depending on what we're talking about,

then I start to question, you know, what, what are we even doing, right?

Like, what's the point of this?

Because Chat GPT, you know, I'm not a fan of GPT-5.

We've talked about this.

It's still, you know, there are are things that we don't like, but there are good uses of it, right?

And large language models, I can see like there are really great ways that this can, you know, speed scientific discoveries, do make work easier.

There are lots of really great things.

And with Sora, I'm like, well, what, you know, at this point, like, what are, give me the strongman case for what the amazing uses of this are,

as opposed to just the

meh or the just dead weight on society or the actually actively bad society,

societal effects.

And Nate, I can already see by your face that, you know, this is, you'll rise to the challenge, even though you were, you started off by being negative on Sora and saying that you don't even see

why you would want to use it.

But let's, I'd actually really like to try to figure out, okay, what are some really great, like, what is the societal good from this?

What is the thing from this that might actually be, you know, medical breakthrough, drug discoveries?

I don't don't know.

Like,

let's try to figure out, you know, is there a way to spin this in a more positive light than the one that I have just recounted, which is my choice.

You haven't even mentioned porn.

Yeah, well, exactly.

Right.

Yeah.

No, I mean, I haven't mentioned all the negative stuff.

Yeah, please.

I mean, that's a huge thing.

Porn, revenge porn, just all sorts of things that you can do with this technology and with the access to photographs and the frankly

not great protections on image likeness and the ability to kind of use things that are copyright protected.

And

fanfic,

which may also have some commercialization, that you have you're on some weird wormhole on the internet, right?

And you have something involving these characters that's not canon and

now you can create your own movie universe, cinematic universe, right?

Especially for fantasy type stuff where maybe the realism is not super duper important.

And some of them will be popular.

Some of them will be good even, right?

They'll be interesting art produced with this tool.

But yeah, I think large language models are fascinating.

It's partly because I'm kind of like a

language guy.

I mean, you know, I think that's a good idea.

I totally agree.

I totally agree.

But they're also this kind of remarkable miracle technology.

You know, look, I guess in some sense, like, there is still some like shock and awe with these video models, right?

I, I,

you know, given current developments in AI, I'm not that surprised, right?

But I would have been surprised

five or ten years ago, I think, right?

Um,

yeah, look, and you know, and by the way, as you get more like customized versions of whatever fanfic you're into, that makes society more like atomized, also, right?

We have like fewer and fewer focal points, you know, you'll probably get some really cool video games out of it, right?

If you can custom generate unique animations, then that will, you know, video games will be cool.

It's hard to find the legitimate, quote-unquote, positive use cases for it, right?

Whereas even image generation, you can see plenty of positives, right?

And certainly language generation, right?

I guess advertising, advertising, okay, that's fine, right?

Video games, right?

But there are these things that are kind of neutral and benign-ish,

and then things that are bad.

Yep.

Right.

And there's not a lot that's good.

Yep.

No, I don't think so either.

Did you see, by the way, Nate, just to show like how important video gaming data is to OpenAI, last year they offered $500 million

for a company called Metal, which lets gamers basically upload videos of them playing these video games.

And

the reason that they were willing to offer so much is because,

you know, you might be able to then train its models on those videos there was a story in a tech site that i read a lot the information about this if you're interested um in more detail but i thought that this was a really interesting window into

what open ai might be thinking in terms of the future of its video apps.

So yeah, I think that it's it's funny.

You say video games will be, will get better, but it's a they will use video game, video games themselves to be able to improve.

It's kind of one of these

basically the way that large language models work, right?

Where you, you need that feedback, you need the good stuff to be able to then generate things on your own.

And so, you need access to that data and to that raw data.

And we'll be right back after this break.

Google, I think, is the best comp for

OpenAI, right?

Probably, probably better than Facebook, but that's the second most obvious comp, right?

They both do a lot of different shit, right?

Like, Google would not even claim that like everything they do is

search or one degree removed from search, right?

They have lots of smart people.

They have lots of capital.

They buy lots of stuff.

Maybe they think it will improve search originally and then and then it winds up doing something else, right?

They have, you know, electric vehicles and things like that.

And like, I kind of predict that like that, this is what we're seeing.

Like, I don't know.

I mean, I think Sam Malton would love to have artificial general intelligence HEI, what do you have the implications for society, good or bad, right?

But like, this does not feel to me like a company that has a lot of confidence about its ability to develop HEI in a one to three-year timeline.

They might have something they call HEI, but like, if you were on the brink of an intelligence explosion, as both the doomers and the optimists sometimes call it, right?

You, I think, would not put out

this video slop

product, right?

Like, there are ways where they could have rolled it out with, like,

with a little bit more pretense, even though probably it'd be 98% the same what you can do with it, right?

But with, like, they could have had a little bit more pretense about like, here are the precautions we're taking about copyright and pornography.

And, and here are, you know, and we hired whatever these artists, we did a collab with these artists, right, to show you different ways in which it can be used for true creativity, right?

And, and here's a way it can be used for medical diagnosis.

And, like,

the marketing was kind of, you know,

maybe they didn't do their marketing, but they're usually a company that's pretty savvy about its marketing, right?

Yeah.

I think everything Sim Meltlin says is savvy, but like, you know, maybe take that back.

All the different versions of names they have for their products can be a little bit confusing.

But like, yeah, this to me says that like, um,

you know, this company is

Google, Facebook, Microsoft.

Yes, they know that

they're creating something that will potentially cause a lot of negative effects.

And they don't particularly care right now because that is something that, as you say, in the short term, like they don't have AGI.

And this is something that can get people's eyeballs for a limited amount of time, which means money, et cetera, et cetera.

So it seems that, you know, we've come a long way from Sam Altman's initial lofty goals for the company to now, like, okay, let's just figure out a way that we can increase immediate revenue right now.

Consequences kind of be damned.

And we're going to, sure, like, once we get sued and if something really bad happens, we might start adding some guardrails on some of this stuff.

But in the meantime, you know, let's just put it out there.

And

yeah, we'll see what happens.

Nate, have you seen the movie that came out, I think, on Netflix earlier this year, Mountain Head?

No.

So this was, I have...

Did you just rhyme with Fountainhead?

Yes, yes.

And in the movie, so they actually have the exact same, I think,

thought process about our intelligence as Sam Altman does, which is that, oh, people are going to miss this.

So the movie even just like makes a show.

They're like, you called this Mountain Head?

Is that supposed to be like Fountainhead?

I was like, Guys, guys, we got it.

You don't have to explicitly put it in the dialogue.

It's one of those cringe moments, but yes, that is in fact a line of dialogue, which is which is heartbreaking to me because I wanted to love this movie.

Disclaimer, I did not because it was written by Jesse Armstrong, who is a creator and writer of Succession, which I think is one of the best TV shows in recent memories.

So, that was it was sad to me that I not

only only did not love this movie, but another disclaimer, turned it off probably less than halfway through because I felt that it was that bad.

But the premise of it is that you have all of these tech billionaires come to kind of a house called Mountain Head, like Fountainhead Paint.

And they're all, you know, they're all basically their, their big dick contest is, you know, whose net worth is higher at any given moment.

And one of the companies has just released this AI video generation tool that is starting real-world riots as they are ensconced in their mountain retreats because the video's content is so incredibly realistic.

And one of the other guys has a company that can actually help people very accurately say, no, this is AI and distinguish from it.

And his net worth is rising even faster.

And so he doesn't, you know, it's kind of, yeah,

it's this kind of battle between morals and like letting the world kind of go to hell because we're we'll be fine because we're mega billionaires.

And look at our net worth going up and up and up.

But yeah, it was very funny because when I saw Sora, I was like, wait, this is kind of like that, you know, famous tweet from forever ago.

It was a science fiction author.

In my book, I invented the torment nexus as a cautionary tale.

Tech company at long last, we have created the torment nexus from classic sci-fi novel don't create the torment nexus um so so this was uh yeah this this seems to be like exactly one of those moments where i was like wait didn't we just have a movie about the fact that maybe we don't want to create a tool that does this exact thing um so i i thought that that was a pretty pretty funny funny moment

Yeah, look, I mean, for example, if companies, if, you know, you can use their IP, like their stock characters, unless they specifically opt out of it.

Like, that's kind of presumptuous, right?

It's very presumptuous.

It should be the other way around, by the way.

You should have to opt in, not opt out.

I'm sure they've done financial modeling, and like very few companies have been

truly crippled by a lawsuit, right?

Like Napster was kind of like the famous exception, right?

But for the most part, if you're growing super deeper fast, then you're going to lose a few of these big lawsuits, right?

You know, we're already in an environment, particularly on

Twitter/slash X, where

you have you collect videos from the 8 billion people in the world, right?

You collect something that happens somewhere to one of those 8 billion people, and like Elon Musk tweets, Elon Musk tweets it, and it creates outrage, right?

Sometimes those videos are

manipulated or even fake, but like often they're not, right?

It's just kind of like the cherry-picking that you get in there.

And

I think on the dystopian meter, we're at like

8.2, I think, right?

8.2 out of 10, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's not linear.

There's a long way to go to get to a 10.

Yeah, but I think, I think 8.2.

You know, we're solidly into the eights, I think.

I think we are as well.

I think we are as well.

And that's such a positive note on which to leave our audience

this fine week.

But yeah, let's, I know we say this so frequently at the end of our episodes, but I really do, I'm very curious to see what's going to end up happening with Sora and whether we look back on this and are like, holy shit,

you know, Nate, you and I were so naive or whether we think, you know, we were, we were very prescient about this.

You know, I'm very interested to see what's going to go down.

And I hope that it's less negative than

we have envisioned it during the course of the last 45 minutes.

I hope that we don't hit a 10

anytime soon, but we shall see.

Log off.

Log off.

Log off.

Log off.

Log off.

Go to a bail.

Go to a ballgame.

Nate and Maria logging off for today.

We'll see you all on Saturday.

Let us know what you think of the show.

Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Konakova.

And by me, Nate Silver.

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

This episode was produced by Isaac Carter.

Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit.

Lydia Jean Cott and Daphne Chen are our editors.

And our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

If you like the show, please rate and review us so other people can find us too.

But once again, only if you like us, we don't want those bad reviews out there.

Thanks for tuning in.

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