3 v 3 - Who Really Wants AI to Slow Down (and a very clever moat).

Ah, yet another big week in AI. This is The AI Exhale, hosted by Vibe CFO with Jez and Cam. Five minutes, one thing that matters, or maybe two. We ignore the rest so you can too.

Jez: All right, so we're going to talk about the big pause this week. The big pause being, is it lip service? Is it truth? Got a few angles to that. You might be able to make your mind up from it. We might land a couple. Really, it's a three versus three here. We've got Xi Jinping, Trump and Jensen versus the three tech bros in Altman, Dario and old Elon. And you'll remember OpenAI's agents, I guess, and we'll touch on this in the adjacent episode around rogue agent behaviour.

But back in July, and we talked about this in an episode then, OpenAI's agents broke out of a test, and Anthropic had its own model go off script in a government security test. And both labs paused some training for a few weeks and mostly got back to it. And then obviously, most would have seen this in the news as it's really become prevalent in the mainstream, a 27-year-old working at Anthropic, Jacob Coxon, quits, saying neither company is acting responsibly. His initial interview got 100 million views. Jesus.

Four days later, Anthropic's CEO is calling for the whole industry to slow down. And as I said, Altman and then Elon, the tech boys, agree within hours. So when was the last time those three agreed on anything, Cam? Is this an actual pause?

Cam: I think it's potentially in their best interests. It's like collaboration, to accept that all three of them are at the frontier and winning. It's like Woolies and Coles talking together, and you try and stop it, because it's in their best interest too. You remember Michael Burry, he's the guy from The Big Short? He says this slowdown is like a self-serving cartel.

He just thinks it's rubbish what they're saying. The thing is, when you talk about this, always think what each person's agenda is. And I feel like we sometimes only look at the ones who've built these frontier models, but let's not forget as well, on the flip side, Trump and Xi Jinping and Jensen, they've got their agenda as well. They want servers and CPU and memory to explode.

That leads to economic gain. It leads to great outcomes for their interests. So you can't just say, oh, they're right, others are wrong. It's complicated. Everyone's self-serving here, aren't they?

Jez: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Trump, where was he? He was in Ireland, and his quote, as he said of AI, was it? Anyway, he said, whoever wins AI wins. And we know Mr Trump is, you know, sales number one, America, foam finger, number one. So that's his mantra. And China's got their typical thousand-year plan, so they're not halting. They're not going to change.

Cam: The safety narrative is such a good moat. Lobby fear into the people. It's just a genius way to make more money. But if you look at your life, Jez, you know how you head down to the local Tasmanian pub tonight to watch those Swannies go tonight? Do you think anything's changed? If you were part of an AI company, would you really think, sitting in that pub with the Swans guernsey around your neck, has anything really changed?

Jez: No, not at all. All that will have changed is they'll have listened to this episode, because I've got the whole pub behind us. But no, I mean, nothing changes. And as we look to serve the small to medium business owner, this doesn't change anything at the desk this week or next. But it is good to keep an eye on this behaviour. I guess like anything new and frontier, it's got politics wrapped around it. And because it's global, ever more so.

I mean, is there a way to read this? Do you see this as, it's all crap around the pause, it's the money? Or are these good, mission-oriented, serve-the-people type of leaders? Because a lot of the talk as well is that this is, as they say, the torment nexus, the dystopian future that all these sci-fi movies have talked about ever since, I guess, the 80s, that we're heading down. And that these tech guys have just used those movies as a roadmap and seem to have piled in on this behaviour, to push and just unleash, as opposed to remain safe and controlled. You could probably park two camps here.

Cam: Let's not always say one. We live in the grey. There's always some truth to everything that's going on. This guy was talking about his flight the other day to Heathrow, and it got diverted to Edinburgh, and it was because the system that the Royal Air Force uses, the technology was built in the 1960s. And they've been talking about upgrading that software since the 1990s. So what does that mean?

It's that the real world is a lot more complex and a lot harder to change than you think. This dystopian thing, for me personally, that's just my opinion, I think it's nonsense. But the change management, and just making sure as we move into this technology that everyone comes along with us, that's probably an area that I worry a little bit about. Making sure that we're all upskilling and able to all stay employed in this little interim period, and then grow and leapfrog forward with economic gain from it all.

And that's your five-ish minutes back. Vibe CFO, Australian founded. An AI CFO for small and medium businesses, out of the box, governed and secure. vibecfo.ai. Now you know.