Liron Shapira
@liron • 40,472 subscribers
Host of Doom Debates — disagreements that must be resolved before the world ends.
Shorts
Videos
The #1 most important minute of J.D. Vance on Joe Rogan was actually this:
Liron Shapira1,506,728 views • 1 year ago
THE $10,000 DEBATE YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR: Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ vs. 47fucb4r8curb4fc8f8r4bfic8r Tensions run high as 47fucb confronts Eliezer about his “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” rhetoric: 47f warns that it could incite unstable individuals to harm AI researchers and their families, but Eliezer maintains that the possibility of extinction from superintelligent AI is too high to *not* speak out about. They also clash over whether we truly understand how LLMs work and what their fundamental limits are. Watch the full debate below, raw & unabridged 👇
Liron Shapira157,590 views • 2 months ago
Doug Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach and I Am a Strange Loop, is an AI doomer. Hofstadter was previously known for being dismissive of the potential of artificial neural networks & deep learning. Recent AI progress has apparently sparked a major change in his outlook.
Liron Shapira788,370 views • 3 years ago
Helen Toner (Helen Toner), former OpenAI board member, is finally going on record about firing Sam Altman: 😱 “He gave us inaccurate information about the small number of formal safety processes that the company did have in place.” 😱 “When ChatGPT came out, the board was not informed in advance about that. We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter.” 😱 “Sam didn't inform the board that he owned the OpenAI startup fund.” My two cents: This was inexcusable behavior on Sam's part, the old board was right to fire him, and the new board should fire him again.
Liron Shapira456,608 views • 2 years ago
“The model of selling content is going to zero.” —Chris Dixon, a16z Such thought leadership
Liron Shapira465,228 views • 2 years ago
Doom Debate with vitalik.eth has dropped: Will “d/acc” Protect Humanity from Superintelligent AI? Vitalik is both a hardcore techno-optimist and builder, and someone willing to seriously consider AI regulation and coordination mechanisms. He coined the term "d/acc'" – defensive, decentralized acceleration – as a middle path between uncritical AI acceleration and total pause scenarios. We debate the tractability of AI alignment, whether approaches like d/acc would actually work when superintelligence arrives, and why he thinks a pluralistic world of competing AIs might be safer than a single aligned superintelligence. 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. Big thanks to Vitalik for a good-faith debate!
Liron Shapira177,704 views • 11 months ago
NEW: Dr. Holly Elmore (Holly ⏸️ Elmore), Executive Director of PauseAI US ⏸️, is calling out the AI doom “enablers” joining OpenAI & Anthropic! In this 🌶️ episode, Holly calls out leading figures in the AI safety community for allegedly selling out the cause: Effective Altruists, Anthropic & OpenAI employees, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, and even yours truly! I have my disagreements about these specific callouts, especially on the choice to publicly psychoanalyze people instead of keeping the criticism focused on their actions. But I can’t deny that Holly has a track record of pushing the Overton window and surfacing uncomfortable truths. Does the "calling out" approach risk burning bridges with allies for little benefit, or does AI safety need a moral conscience willing to call out the rot nobody else will? Watch the episode and tell us in the replies! We cover: ⬜ Why Holly Moved to DC ⬜ What’s Your P(Doom)?™ ⬜ How We Got Here: EA, Rationality, AI Alignment ⬜ “If Anyone Builds It” and LessWrong’s Missing Mood ⬜ The Government’s Fable Crackdown is Good ⬜ Callout: Dean Ball (OpenAI) ⬜ Callout: Eliezer Yudkowsky ⬜ Callout: Zvi Mowshowitz ⬜ Callout: Liron Shapira ⬜ Callout: Nirit Weiss-Blatt ⬜ Callout: Amanda Askell ⬜ Callout: Daniela Amodei ⬜ Callout: Joe Carlsmith ⬜ Callout: Open Philanthropy / Coefficient Giving, Ben Goldhaber ⬜ How Anthropic took over EA ⬜ “Holly’s Basilisk”: What If Building Superintelligence Retroactively Becomes a Crime? Highly recommended! 👇
Liron Shapira17,294 views • 27 days ago
What a charlatan Gill Verdon / @BasedBeffJezos is. First minute into his hourlong interview about thermodynamic computing, he casually implies the human brain is “operating near the Landauer limit” 🤡 It's actually about 10^8 less efficient. How about some pushback Machine Learning Street Talk?
Liron Shapira97,197 views • 1 year ago
Climate change is stupidly EASY to solve. This company Make Sunsets can do it by launching $1-2B/yr worth of sulfur-dioxide-filled balloons into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight & cool the planet. No regulations. No treaties. No lifestyle changes. SO₂ is all you need 🙌 Volcanos already do this. Mount Pinatubo successfully cooled Earth by 0.5°C for a year in 1991 by ejecting SO₂ into the stratosphere. The physics is solid, the cost is trivial, and the coordination problem is nonexistent. Why haven't we already exploited this one weird trick? It's a no-brainer. But people are squeamish about “playing God” with the atmosphere, even while we’re building superintelligent AI. Environmentalists would rather scold you into turning off your lights than support a solution that actually works. -- My conversation with Andrew Song, cofounder of Make Sunsets, changed how I think about climate change. I went from viewing it as this intractable coordination problem, to realizing we have a cheap and simple solution ready to go. People just need to stop LARPing as if it’s hard! If you care about orders of magnitude, this episode will blow your mind. And if you feel guilty about your carbon footprint, you'll learn how you can offset an entire year of typical American energy usage for about 15 cents. Yes, cents. We cover: ◻️ Andrew's background & motivation ◻️ Why the company is called “Make Sunsets” ◻️ What's Your P(Doom)™ from climate change ◻️ Geoengineering and solar radiation management ◻️ The SO₂ dial we can turn ◻️ Where to get SO₂ ◻️ Cost calculation: Just $1-2B/yr ◻️ Counterarguments: Termination shock, moral hazard ◻️ Being an energy hog is totally fine ◻️ “The stupidest problem humanity has ever created” ◻️ Offsetting all the CO₂ from OpenAI's Stargate ◻️ Why playing God is good I did this interview because I think Make Sunsets is an important company to learn about & donate to. I highly recommend watching or listening!
Liron Shapira55,216 views • 9 months ago
EXCLUSIVE: Carl Feynman warns that building AGI likely means human extinction. (Yes, son of Richard Feynman & Al engineer of 45 years.) He's known Eliezer Yudkowsky since the '90s and was initially optimistic about building AGI. Today his P(Doom) is an alarming 43%. Thread 👇
Liron Shapira69,474 views • 1 year ago
𝘛𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘰𝘯 𝘋𝘰𝘰𝘮 𝘋𝘦𝘣𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘴 📺 Destiny Updates His P(Doom)! Top streamer Destiny (Destiny | Steven Bonnell II) has racked up millions of views for his sharp takes on political & cultural news. Now he's giving me a chance to debate him about the highest-stakes question: WILL AGI END HUMANITY? We cover: ⬜ What's Your P(Doom)?™ ⬜ Revisiting Destiny's 2017 Remarks ⬜ What if AI Intelligence >> Human IQ ⬜ Intelligence vs. Morality ⬜ The Vibes-Based Case Against Doom ⬜ Does Every Intelligence Self-Destruct? ⬜ What About A Warning Shot? ⬜ Roko's Basilisk and the AI Box Problem ⬜ Destiny's Updated P(Doom) Highly recommended! 👇
Liron Shapira33,944 views • 5 months ago