EP 72: Jaan Tallinn (Co-Founder, Skype) on Lessons from Skype, Giving SBF $100M & Investing in AI
Jaan Tallinn is the Co-Founder of Skype and one of the most prominent voices in AI safety. After co-founding Skype he begun to delve into the world of AI safety and strongly holds the position that humans can not motivate AI and that action must be taken. Jaan initiated the 6-month pause on AI that was co-signed by Elon Musk. Nonetheless he's invested in some of the most influential AI companies like DeepMind and Anthropic.
On this episode he shares why he invests in AI despite his views on safety, the insights he gained from founding Skype and his first impression meeting SBF in the Bahamas.
(0:00) Intro
(0:54) Jaan's journey with crypto
(2:49) Investing in SBF
(8:08) Entrepreneurial journey to Skype
(15:11) Skype's immediate rise to popularity and mistakes along the way
(22:15) Meeting Eliezer Yudkowsky
(25:11) The Center for Existential Risk in the Future of Life Institute
(31:05) Having a seat at the table by investing in artificial intelligence
(37:24) Having an entrepreneur say no to you
(41:59) The process of the DeepMind sale and the ethics board
(45:58) The risk of artificial intelligence today
(1:04:43) What was that unnerving about GPT four versus GPT three?
(1:07:02) Jaan's memo on AI safety
(1:16:00) What percentage likelihood do you think we're on a path to extinction?
(1:22:18) What's a piece of conventional wisdom around startups or investing that you disagree with today?
Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky
Produced: Rashad Assir
Executive Producer: Josh Machiz
Music: Griff Lawson
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Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes.
Executive Producer: Rashad Assir
Producer: Leah Clapper
Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky
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About the Show
Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member.
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E16: Pausing the AI Revolution? With Technologist Jaan Tallinn
Nathan Labenz dives in with Jaan Tallinn, a technologist, entrepreneur (Kazaa, Skype), and investor (DeepMind and more) whose unique life journey has intersected with some of the most important social and technological events of our collective lifetime. Jaan has since invested in nearly 180 startups, including dozens of AI application layer companies and some half dozen startup labs that focus on fundamental AI research, all in an effort to support the teams that he believes most likely to lead us to AI safety, and to have a seat at the table at organizations that he worries might take on too much risk. He's also founded several philanthropic nonprofits, including the Future of Life Institute, which recently published the open letter calling for a six-month pause on training new AI systems. In this discussion, we focused on:
- the current state of AI development and safety
-Jan's expectations for possible economic transformation
- what catastrophic failure modes worry him most in the near term
- How big of a bullet we dodged with the training of GPT-4
- Which organizations really matter for immediate-term pause purposes
- How AI race dynamics are likely to evolve over the next couple of years
LINKS REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE:
Future of Life's open letter: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/
Eliezer Yudkowsky's TIME article: https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/
Podcast: Daniela and Dario Amodei on Anthropic- https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/daniela-and-dario-amodei-on-anthropic/id1170991978?i=1000552976406
Zvi on the pause: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-the-fli-ai-risk-open-letter
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We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.
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TIMESTAMPS:
(0:00) Episode Preview
(1:30) Jaan's impressive entrepreneurial career and his role in the recent AI Open Letter
(3:26) AI safety and Future of Life Institute
(6:55) Jaan's first meeting with Eliezer Yudkowsky and the founding of the Future of Life Institute
(13:00) Future of AI evolution
(15:55) Sponsor: Omneky
(17:20) Jaan's investments in AI companies
(24:22) The emerging danger paradigm
(33:48) AI supervising itself
(40:06) Evolution, useful heuristics, and lack of insight into selection process
(43:13) Current estimate for life-ending catastrophe
(54:20) Our luck given the softness of language models
(56:24) Future of Language Models
(1:01:00) The Moore’s law of mad science
(1:03:02) GPT-5 type project
(1:11:00) AI alignment with the latest models
(1:14:31) AI research investment and safety
(1:21:00) What a six month pause buys us
(1:27:01) AI’s Turing Test Passing
(1:33:18) Responsible AI development.
(1:41:20) Neuralink implant technology