Show notes
The US government banned Claude Fable like a clown show. But I’m happy about it.
Here’s my appearance on the AI in the AM livestream (recorded Tue, June 16) with Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan, where I explain why this was good for society. The government’s action shows that we can actually pause AI, a precedent that matters way more than the boneheaded rationale behind Fable’s ban.
We then get into a mini-AI doom debate where Prakash defends the AI optimist’s worldview. I push back on how much I expect superintelligence to reshape the planet.
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Why I’m Happy the Government Banned Fable
00:11:18 — Why We Lose Control of AI
00:20:27 — The Icarus Graph: Heaven, Then Hell
00:22:33 — Get Ready to Pause
00:25:51 — What Exactly Should We Ban?
00:27:42 — Wrapping Up
Links
The Cognitive Revolution podcast with Nathan Labenz —https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/
Nathan Labenz on X — https://x.com/labenz
Prakash Narayanan on X — https://x.com/8teapi
AI in the AM on X — https://x.com/AI_in_the_AM
Transcript
Why I’m Happy the Government Banned Fable
Nathan Labenz 00:00:08On that note, perhaps a fitting transition to our first guest of the day. Liron Shapira is the host of Doom Debates, a YouTube channel where he has found quite a bit of success in bringing people from really all walks of life on to discuss how scared we should be of AI and just how high our P(Doom)s should be.
So Liron, I’m excited to get your take on recent events. Obviously, never a dull moment in the AI space. The thing that caught my eye most from you over the last few days was when you said basically, “I want the government to be willing to take action on AI issues so badly that even if this whole Fable ban turns out to be totally boneheaded and unjustified in some local sense, you support it, or you’re at least happy to see it because it breaks the ice and now nobody can ever tell you again that it’s impossible to imagine the government doing anything.” So give me the double click into that story, and then I’m sure we’ll have plenty of interesting directions to go.
Liron Shapira 00:01:17Hey, Nate. Great to be here. That’s exactly right. I’m a simple man. I see AI getting paused. I feel good about breaking the Overton window. The government can do it. It’s that easy, guys. This is a precedent. Overall, I’m happy. You can talk about the nuances. It was done like a clown show. It was done for bad motives. It doesn’t really consider China or a treaty or anything. There’s a lot of problems, but I’m really happy about smashing the Overton window, where now tech folks don’t think that they’re in a bubble or they’re untouchable. It happened, guys. And we can only go from here.
Prakash Narayanan 00:01:53I actually agree with you, because I think it was a little bit delusional for tech to feel that it wasn’t gonna get touched. And the government just has so many small and large ways to effectuate its power. So it was not that surprising to me that they kind of went through left field and went with the export control rather than anything else.
But it also strikes me that as they exercise this, we start also to go into kind of what we wanted to avoid. It’s a little bit of a small tyranny. I think several people on the timeline have commented, Dean Ball has commented, this kind of unstructured regulation looks kind of selective and vengeful almost, and it starts putting you in this zone where tech people start to mistrust the government because you also see — I think there’s a lot of narratives on the timeline which are being leaked, “sources close to,” “sources familiar with,” and as they get leaked, it’s not very certain whether those things actually happened. Would someone actually attest to that in front of Congress? Very unclear.
And we’ve also seen this kind of behavior from the administration in other affairs as well, where you have multiple conflicting narratives. It’s happening with the Iran war right now, where it’s not even clear to Congress what the deal is. You have different people saying the deal is a different thing.
Prakash 00:03:46So where do you think that puts us?
Prakash 00:03:49It’s great that it’s happening. I understand you feel it’s great that it’s happening to AI right now, but does that put us in a position where it’s detrimental to the body public at large?
Liron 00:04:03Well, I think your analysis — you’re weaving together a few factors, but I think the elephant in the room, I hate to get political because when it comes to President Trump, he’s a mixed bag for me. I don’t have Trump derangement syndrome. I don’t love everything he does. I don’t hate everything he does. But I think the common thread with Trump is it’s just a mess. It’s not disciplined. And I think we’re definitely seeing that on display right now. I would argue we’re seeing that on display in the Iran war.
Previous administrations, there was just more pressure to have logical consistency, some kind of narrative. And this is another one of those cases where you see people in his administration saying all these justifications why something happened, but then the next day it’s, “Oh, it happened for this reason.” “Oh, Dario did this, he wasn’t responsive to us. That’s why we’re doing it.” And then Anthropic’s like, “Oh, no, he was responsive to us.”
And it’s still not clear exactly what did Fable do that was so dangerous, because Anthropic is like, “Oh, this jailbreak is nothing special.” And the Trump administration’s like, “Oh, well, our secret source,” Amazon or whatever, “they’re telling us that it is dangerous.” So I hate that it’s a clown show. I hate that this is how humanity’s operating. I’ll take the win that it’s a pause, but I also think it’s probably time for a new administration.
Nathan 00:05:19One thing I think you should share with folks who may not know you — I think, like many people that are worried about big picture AI safety issues, your background is one of being a, I would say, techno-optimist libertarian for the most part, right?
Liron 00:05:38Totally.
Nathan 00:05:39So how much are you personally missing Fable, and what was your kind of initial impression of it that I know is superseded by your big picture analysis? But how did your first few days of Fable unfold and how bad are your Fable withdrawals?
Liron 00:05:56My Fable withdrawal is not too bad because I’m not pushing it to the limit. I’m not doing hard research. My main use case for frontier AI is Claude Code on a regular production app that has thousands of daily users, but it’s not super hard to serve. So my experience using Claude Code is actually that Opus 4.8 or even going back to Opus 4.6, if I had to go back to Opus 4.6 fast mode, I’d actually still be pretty happy. That’s my threshold of where I’m happy.
So when Fable came out, they said it’s more powerful but it’s slower. But typically, when I give Opus 4.8 a big project, I am pretty happy with the results. I don’t mind giving it a few comments and letting it work again. If anything, I would actually prefer more speed to more quality for my use case at this time. But then again, I’m not on the frontier of computer security. I’m not trying to do anything super novel. So yeah, I’m not experiencing withdrawal right now.
Nathan 00:06:50Interesting. Did you notice — I mean, for me, it, I wouldn’t say it was so much coding, but in the more general purpose knowledge work type stuff that I do, I just found its outputs to be notably better, and I was kind of like, “Oh, this is gonna change how I work. I’m not gonna need to be so precious about my language anymore. I need to actually recalibrate how I think about authorship or shared authorship with AI.” Did you experience any of those kind of feelings?
Liron 00:07:21I can’t say I did firsthand, but I’ve been reading a lot of other people’s accounts, and my vague impression of what’s going on with Fable is, obviously the time horizon is blasting forward. If you talked to me a few months ago, I would’ve said the Achilles heel of all of t…
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