Three Red Lines We're About to Cross Toward AGI

What if the most powerful technology in human history is being built by people who openly admit they don't trust each other? In this explosive 2-hour debate, three AI experts pull back the curtain on the shocking psychology driving the race to Artificial General Intelligence—and why the people building it might be the biggest threat of all. Kokotajlo predicts AGI by 2028 based on compute scaling trends. Marcus argues we haven't solved basic cognitive problems from his 2001 research. The stakes? If Kokotajlo is right and Marcus is wrong about safety progress, humanity may have already lost control. Sponsor messages: ======== Google Gemini: Google Gemini features Veo3, a state-of-the-art AI video generation model in the Gemini app. Sign up at https://gemini.google.com Tufa AI Labs are hiring for ML Engineers and a Chief Scientist in Zurich/SF. They are top of the ARCv2 leaderboard! https://tufalabs.ai/ ======== Guest Powerhouse Gary Marcus - Cognitive scientist, author of "Taming Silicon Valley," and AI's most prominent skeptic who's been warning about the same fundamental problems for 25 years (https://garymarcus.substack.com/) Daniel Kokotajlo - Former OpenAI insider turned whistleblower who reveals the disturbing rationalizations of AI lab leaders in his viral "AI 2027" scenario (https://ai-2027.com/) Dan Hendrycks - Director of the Center for AI Safety who created the benchmarks used to measure AI progress and argues we have only years, not decades, to prevent catastrophe (https://danhendrycks.com/) Transcript: http://app.rescript.info/public/share/tEcx4UkToi-2jwS1cN51CW70A4Eh6QulBRxDILoXOno TOC: Introduction: The AI Arms Race 00:00:04 - The Danger of Automated AI R&D 00:00:43 - The Rationalization: "If we don't, someone else will" 00:01:56 - Sponsor Reads (Tufa AI Labs & Google Gemini) 00:02:55 - Guest Introductions The Philosophical Stakes 00:04:13 - What is the Positive Vision for AGI? 00:07:00 - The Abundance Scenario: Superintelligent Economy 00:09:06 - Differentiating AGI and Superintelligence (ASI) 00:11:41 - Sam Altman: "A Decade in a Month" 00:14:47 - Economic Inequality & The UBI Problem Policy and Red Lines 00:17:13 - The Pause Letter: Stopping vs. Delaying AI 00:20:03 - Defining Three Concrete Red Lines for AI Development 00:25:24 - Racing Towards Red Lines & The Myth of "Durable Advantage" 00:31:15 - Transparency and Public Perception 00:35:16 - The Rationalization Cascade: Why AI Labs Race to "Win" Forecasting AGI: Timelines and Methodologies 00:42:29 - The Case for Short Timelines (Median 2028) 00:47:00 - Scaling Limits: Compute, Data, and Money 00:49:36 - Forecasting Models: Bio-Anchors and Agentic Coding 00:53:15 - The 10^45 FLOP Thought Experiment The Great Debate: Cognitive Gaps vs. Scaling 00:58:41 - Gary Marcus's Counterpoint: The Unsolved Problems of Cognition 01:00:46 - Current AI Can't Play Chess Reliably 01:08:23 - Can Tools and Neurosymbolic AI Fill the Gaps? 01:16:13 - The Multi-Dimensional Nature of Intelligence 01:24:26 - The Benchmark Debate: Data Contamination and Reliability 01:31:15 - The Superhuman Coder Milestone Debate 01:37:45 - The Driverless Car Analogy The Alignment Problem 01:39:45 - Has Any Progress Been Made on Alignment? 01:42:43 - "Fairly Reasonably Scares the Sh*t Out of Me" 01:46:30 - Distinguishing Model vs. Process Alignment Scenarios and Conclusions 01:49:26 - Gary's Alternative Scenario: The Neurosymbolic Shift 01:53:35 - Will AI Become Jeff Dean? 01:58:41 - Takeoff Speeds and Exceeding Human Intelligence 02:03:19 - Final Disagreements and Closing Remarks REFS: Gary Marcus (2001) - The Algebraic Mind https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262632683/the-algebraic-mind/ 00:59:00 Gary Marcus & Ernest Davis (2019) - Rebooting AI https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rebooting-AI-Building-Artificial-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B07MYLGQLB 01:31:59 Gary Marcus (2024) - Taming Silicon Valley https://www.amazon.co.uk/Taming-Silicon-Valley-Ensure-Works-ebook/dp/B0CQWWM94N 00:03:01 Ajeya Cotra (2020) - "Forecasting TAI with Biological Anchors" https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/KrJfoZzpSDpnrv9va/draft-report-on-ai-timelines 00:53:15 Daniel Kokotajlo (2021) - "What 2026 looks like" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like 00:55:00 Dan Hendrycks et al. (2021) - "Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding" (MMLU) https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03300 00:03:48 Dan Hendrycks et al. (2021) - "Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset" https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.03874 00:03:48 Aitor Lewkowycz, Anders Andreassen et al. (2022) - "Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models" (Minerva) https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.14858 01:21:45 Apple Research (2024) - "GSM-Symbolic/The Illusion of Thinking" https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05229 https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking 00:59:15