AI, the Modern Enigma: Nathan's Keynote at IT Revolution's Enterprise AI Summit at Bletchley Park

Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution. This is Nathan's AI voice clone. Nathan is traveling, so today we have a special episode. What you're about to hear is a keynote he gave on November 2 at the Enterprise AI Summit hosted by IT Revolution at Bletchley Park in England. The talk is called AI, the Modern Enigma. Bletchley is where Alan Turing and his colleagues worked to break Enigma during World War two. It also hosted the first AI safety summit in 2023. Then the challenge was reading a machine's messages. Now it's understanding the machines themselves. If you listen to this show regularly, you know Nathan is an enthusiastic user of AI. You'll hear some of the personal reasons for that. You'll also hear why his experience with these systems has left him increasingly concerned about where we're headed. The question running through the talk is one that comes up a lot on this show. How do we get the enormous benefits of AI while keeping the ability to understand, supervise, and when necessary intervene? Nathan also explains why he's now starting to advocate for a pause on frontier scale training. Early in the talk, Nathan hands the stage to an AI version of himself made with Google's latest text to speech model. So, yes, you're hearing an AI clone introduce a talk that includes an AI clone. The actual Nathan does most of the talking. This is a conference recording, so expect room audio. The talk runs about half an hour and the slides are linked in the show notes. Thanks to Gene Kim and Ben Grinnell at IT Revolution for having Nathan and for letting us share the talk here as an episode. We'll start with Gene's introduction. Here's Nathan live at Bletchley Park. So I'm a huge fan of our next speaker, Nathan LaBenz. He hosts the Cognitive Revolution podcast, which has been one of my favorites over the years. And I'm not alone. I was delighted to find out that Ben also ranks his as one of his favorites. Before Nathan and I met, I actually wrote to him about how much I loved his story about him being part of the Red Team effort for GPT-four, the model that was released in February 2023 that shocked the world because of how capable it was. Boy, that just seems so cute and quaint now because we had no idea how dangerous AIs could really be. Nathan told this amazing story about discovering these dangerous capabilities, how it could be used by bad actors, and it reminded me so much about Internet security from the late 1990s where people were finding vulnerabilities, but it was no one's job to do anything with them. Nathan ran into that barrier. The reason why I laughed sharing this story is that, boy, GP4 dangerous? Holy cow, right? The story about open AI models spinning up 5,000 agents to attack Hugging Face, like, now we know what dangerous …