Casey Newton — Podcast Appearances & AI Summaries

“In my view, Kevin, that is a little bit like giving a dragon to everyone, right? Because while I'm sure most people will spend their time creating personalized baking recipes to bake with their daughter, there are other people that are going to be launching cyber attacks and are going to be engineering novel bioweapons.”

— Casey Newton, on Zuckerberg's vision of universal superintelligence.

“So, you know, in this present moment, I do not trust these people to rank a list of viral dances for me to look at without it corrupting my mental health. Once you give these things access to like novel biotechnologies, it starts to get pretty worse than Kevin.”

— Casey Newton, on Meta's track record with safety.

“I found this to be an almost childlike essay about what AI is. AI is not on a trajectory where it tops out at coming up with cool recipes to bake with your daughter”

— Casey Newton on Zuckerberg's manifesto

“People have just rightly intuited that it is not obvious that powerful AI is going to be good for their lives. That is largely because the leaders of the biggest AI labs spent the past few years saying that first it's going to take your job, eventually it might kill you, maybe somewhere in between it'll cure cancer. That doesn't feel like a good bargain.”

— Casey Newton on data center backlash

“It's just annoying that with AI, which is screaming out for regulation... we have people in the industry calling out for regulation, a large part of the American left... it's as if like every once in a while, nuclear bomb companies were accidentally dropping bombs and having tiny explosions and the reaction was oh that's just advertising.”

— Casey Newton

“It's some of the greatest active larceny since the labs themselves set up giant industrial machines to copy the entire internet.”

— Casey Newton, on Chinese companies distilling US AI models.