AI also lost the election
Summary
This episode examines the political backlash against AI following the midterm elections, where voters rejected numerous data center initiatives. Host Sean Ramos interviews New York Assemblyman Alex Boras, who urges incoming Democrats to implement mandatory safety audits and ban recursive self-improvement. The show also features Chris Lehane from OpenAI, who discusses the company's strategy to rebrand facilities as "compute campuses" and supports national safety standards to maintain public trust.
Topics discussed
Bad week for AI: Midterms, data centers, and NVIDIA
Sponsors and show introduction
Introducing Alex Borras, AI safety advocate
Three buckets of AI policy: Guardrails and audits
Chip technology and buying time for safety research
Banning recursive self-improvement in the lame duck
Data centers, near-term harms, and voter priorities
Economic impact of AI regulation and the RAISE Act
State action and 2028 presidential candidates
2028 as the AI election and potential grand bargains
Sponsors: Ramp and ServiceNow
Introducing Chris Lehane and the Texas compute campus
Rebranding data centers to compute campuses
Why AI facilities are different from traditional data centers
Addressing the public relations problem of AI infrastructure
Calls for national mandatory safety standards
Speed limits for AI and controlling recursive self-improvement
The 2028 social contract and AI anxiety
Credits and NPR Machine Gods promotion
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