AI Execs Sign Joint Commitment, Converting Watts to GDP, the Model Consciousness Debate | Diet TBPN

So, there was a supper last night at the White Home, the White House, the Golden House, the Golden Home, Gold Home. What are we calling it these days? Well, we renamed artificial intelligence. It's superintelligence now. We were debating, is superintelligence abbreviated SI or just S? Because if you're like super alignment, was that SA? Like super— There's a problem there, John.

There's no TLD for That's true.

That's true. You got to get the new TLDs going. What was the word we—

So superalignment, that was one word.

That was one word.

You know, some words you do, you have a hyphen.

You have a hyphen.

Yeah.

And then some, yeah.

If you just use like a normal prefix for—

It's just a normal prefix for something.

Yeah. Then supernatural.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. That's one word, right? So you would think that potentially you would just be using one word.

Yeah.

But anyway, we're using 2 words, I guess. And so there was a dinner at the White House. David Sacks posted it. He said, it's the Bretton Woods of supper intelligence, super intelligence. And there's a debate.

Tyler, my first reaction to this is Tyler was really snubbed.

Snubbed.

All those people there and not one chair for Tyler.

Yeah.

And so there's a bunch of folks here. And people were analyzing who got the best seats, who got the different positions, who got pole position, prime positioning, who was snubbed off in the little kids' table at the end, et cetera, et cetera. A bunch to analyze about who's on the ins, who's on the outs. Here we go. But I had ChatGPT sort of go through and try and categorize each attendee by their stance on open source. Open source. So did they sign the Jensen NVIDIA open source letter? Have they been concerned about the cybersecurity impacts. Obviously, Anthropic on the far end, sort of in the red, a bunch of other folks who are more in the yellow. And I don't know if I agree with all of these classifications, but you can sort of see how Jensen is clearly pro-open source. Satya Nadella has talked about that. OpenAI, Greg Brockman, more in the middle, you know, not open sourcing a lot of things. OpenAI did sign the Jensen letter, but of course is concerned about pacing the frontier, which is sort of antithetical. And so, this is all, As a reference point to that post from our friends over at SemiAnalysis, let me actually pull up what they said here. It says majority of people are significantly underestimating the probability of open source models being nerfed or even outright banned in the next 6 to 12 months due to cyber concerns. And so I believe Anthropic put out something yesterday talking about the risks of open source in a cyber context, saying that the delay between Mythos preview, being able to find zero days, being able to hack into things, that gap has closed now and the open source frontier can very quickly do the same thing. And so expect a lot of cyber incidents unless something is done. controlled some way, maybe at the inference layer, maybe at the data center level, maybe at the chip level. There's going to be a whole bunch of different proposals. But at least right now, in the next 6 to 12 months, certainly not this month because the vast majority of people who are closest to Donald Trump have been evangelizing for open source. So, I would be surprised to see any pushback against open source happen that quickly. At the same time, open source is amorphous. It is not a business by definition. And so, it can't really have a formal seat at the table. George Hotz, not at the table, for example. Snubbed.

Yeah.

No.

Linus Torvalds, you know, not at the table. The open source—

George Hotz at the table, just sort of like laughing in a sort of insane way at everything being said.

Yeah. And so even the companies that are pro-open source, they are pro-open source insofar that it advances their business. And so there is still a way that the closed source group could find a way for everyone who's at this table to benefit in a closed source world moving forward if open source is deemed to be too dangerous and forcing too many cyber concerns. I could see everyone at this table signing a letter saying we are now anti-open source, but the downstream like economic engine actually splits, you know, the rewards and the profits of the ecosystem fairly evenly. I think the initial pushback and pro-open-source push, especially from Jensen, was like, we don't want to be in a world where there's one company that reaps 100% of the profits and we're not involved. But if it's like, hey, look, there's actually going to be an oligopoly, companies don't want a single source intelligence, They're constantly going to be bouncing back and forth between OpenAI and Anthropic. And then consumers are going to be bouncing back and forth between Google Search Overviews and Muse and Instinct and all these different things. There's a world where the actual models are closed source. And but, but there are so many front doors and the front doors are in such competition with each other that there's enough revenue distribution, profit distribution that everyone at this table at least is happy. I don't think the open source community would be happy, but I do think that there is a world where in 6 to 12 months, it's possible that everyone at this table is like, yes, for cyber reasons, we need to find a different way forward where everyone benefits economically, but we are now a little bit less pro-open source. But I don't know. What was your— what's your read on it? 6 to 12 months, you think open source is going away or you think it'll stick around?

I mean, it's so hard to ban open source. I think maybe you can kind of get something like a ban if you're just worried about the business impacts, economics, because then you can pressure the providers to not host this stuff. But if you're worried about safety, if you have a bad actor, it's so hard to police downloading OpenWeight models from somewhere and running it locally.

Yeah, absolutely.

And maybe there's some— you need tens of thousands of dollars to physically buy hardware.

Exactly.

But if you're a motivated bad actor, that's not that big of a hurdle.

Exactly. Like, it does feel like we are pretty far away from go and get a random gaming PC and be able to run something that is, you know, Mythos-level hacking machine. Like, you probably need some serious GPUs. You probably need something that's basically rack scale. You need to be running it a lot to try a lot of different things. Like, a lot of these cyber exploits, it was not just one-shotted by the model. It was a fan out of agents working together.

Yeah, like, Navier-Stokes is like, you know, 10,000 agents.

Exactly. Exactly.

Large scale.

And so, there are like one way to control it is through KYC on hardware, you know, that like the data center that is, you know, being used maliciously is a lot more risky than the laptop that's being used maliciously even with near frontier open source intelligence. So, I don't know. We'll see how it goes there. I'm sure there will be more discussions. And it's not even to say that this This dinner was about open source at all. It's just sort of interesting to take the temperature of where is DC on AI, who is getting the most quality time with the president and the administration, and then where do they stand on the issues of today. Obviously, this was much more just about pacing the frontier, the build-out, et cetera, stuff like that, and signing signatures. We had some signature analysis breakdown. Sholto shared a picture of the letter that was signed, the White House Accord on Superintelligence, the Joint Committee on Frontier Responsibilities. In order to build a positive future for the American people and the world, we believe that every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with consumers and the public. One They're going to implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of models during training and deployment around cybersecurity, biosecurity, chemical threats, et cetera. They want to empower an internal team to ensure all the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended. 3, they're going to partner with external auditors and evaluators to carry out independent assessments of whether the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended. And 4, They're going to designate an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee and receive reports from the teams operating the controls and the internal and external auditors. So aligned to the board of directors that circumvents the CEO for safety alignment, evaluation, all of that good stuff. A bunch of people signed it. We got Sundar from Google, Dario from Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg from Meta, Greg Brockman from OpenAI, Elon Musk from xAI, Jensen from Nvidia, and Donald Trump, the President of the United States. And people—

A lot of people doing analysis on the various signatures.

Yes. Someone did a tier list. I was surprised by their tier list. I'd like to see you do a tier list. Where would you put Donald Trump's signature?

I mean, it's— hate him or love him, I think it's pretty iconic. Like, it's just so—

it's It has a nice flow to it. It's very uniform.

But it's hard to read if you don't know it's his signature.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It looks like a child drew a mountain range.

But versus Jensen, I'm seeing a lot of Jensen Wong in there.

But what's impressive to me is, is I would want to compare the DJT signature. Like, I would want to look at 100 of them and see, like, is he, is he nailing it every single time?

Oh, okay.

He's been doing autographs for long enough. I would expect that he is. But still, it looks like very difficult to actually be able to nail that and really get that dialed.

Yeah.

So again, he's going with a Sharpie too. So he's sort of like trying to mog with that.

Oh, that's true. I didn't realize that you pulled out the Sharpie.

He's like, I'll give you the pen. I'll take the Sharpie.

Yeah.

Automatically, it's like—

You're winning on thickness.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Winning on—

The breadth is much more significant with that. Interesting strategy.

And then going down the list, Sundar, again, Would never, would never know.

Um, but I like the 2 lines, a little dot there.

Yeah, it almost looks like, um, there's a couple different—

yeah, it looks like an abstract artist signature. I could see that on a painting.

Or maybe he— yeah, it almost looks like he's made up his own, like, letters and— okay, sort of like, uh, language.

Okay.

Um, Dario, uh, a little more tame, kind of, kind of like down on the first word, and then it seemed like he was kind of drifting upwards. So, so My theory, I almost think here like someone was like holding the piece of paper and they were all. So I think I basically think Trump put the paper down, aggressively signed with a Sharpie, and then told everyone else because he knew this was going to go out. You guys sign, you know when you're trying to sign.

So you think it was a situation where like Dario was signing on Greg's back? Like oh sign on my back like that type of thing. That might have been what happened.

Yeah.

Kind of like growing down.

Yeah. Notably, you don't see any situations where the pen punched through the paper. That sometimes happens if you're trying to. sign a document on someone's back and you're punching through the soft jacket that they're wearing, that could be a risk. Doesn't seem like it happened in this case.

Anyway, so Dario, pretty down the middle, pretty safe. Again, kind of emulating that sort of mountain range style, right? Where by the end of the signature, it's just a bunch of lines going up and down, sort of unclear. Zuck, again, more kind of rockstar-esque, right? Almost musical feeling. GDB coming in, just minimalist.

Minimalist.

Minimalist, simple, readable.

Yeah.

He's a very— I would say, in some ways, these are reflections of their personalities, right?

Yeah.

GDB is a very practical person.

Signature window into the soul.

It's a window into the soul, right? Extremely practical, sticking to the basics, sticking to what works.

Yeah.

And, yeah, obvious why a lot of people are Saying that's at least A tier.

What is— wait, what is Mark Zuckerberg's actual signature? MZB? Or is it MZ and then the Z goes crazy? Is that what that is?

Because it starts doing tricks.

Yeah, it starts doing tricks. And I think Sundar might have done the same thing, but I feel like there's a little bit of a line that you don't cross. If somebody asks you for a full signature and you do initials, that's a different thing. Sometimes you're on a document, you got to sign your initials a bunch. You got to sign the full thing. I have respect for the full name signature. If you ask me for a full name signature, I'm throwing down my full name. I'm not just randomly switching up to initials.

I think it's totally fair game.

It's totally fair game. You can just do initials.

Cursive initials.

Is this cursive initials from Greg Brockman?

No, but I think that's where Sundar was maybe going.

So you're giving Sundar the pass. You're giving Mark Zuckerberg the pass because the MZ is crazy.

Jensen, a lot of people are saying that Jensen's Calligraphy.

He brought his calligrapher.

Yeah. I mean, I first read Ed Hardy. So I thought that— I thought that—

yeah.

I don't know. Maybe he had some affinity. Let's pull up the Hardy logo.

Did he put his middle name in there? What's his middle name?

Here's the Ed Hardy logo.

Jensen does not have a traditional English middle name. Oh, it's Jen Sun. So J-E-N-H-S-U-N. So that second letter. Okay. ChatGPT that to make it look exactly like Jensen Huang. Yeah. So he signs not with the English version, with the lowercase E-N-S-E-N. He throws a capital H in there. Which gives it an extra flourish. It's the most tasteful. It earns the S tier.

A lot of people saying, you know, Jensen has the same initials as John Hancock. Kind of evocative in his signature as well. Oh, okay. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Monitoring the Situation, Monitoring Meme here did not like Sundar's. He put Sundar in F tier. I thought Sundar's had some nice flair to it, although it was potentially the most abstract. But, yeah. And I feel like putting MZ in C tier. I guess the Z does go a little crazy. But anyway, here we have Donald Trump, Dario Amadei, and a few other folks gathered around standing outside. And we will watch this clip right now. Whatever he says is okay. Be careful.

I will say what I've always said, which is that AI has benefits. I've talked about the meta benefits of the Technology. As the president has said, you know, whoever wins wins. I think that's very important. But technology has very real mechanisms. How we address those risks is still under discussion. Need to work together.

Oh, this is like a supercut of— You have no idea who these people are. These are the— You have no idea who they are.

Well, I think it is worth highlighting the puts of AI, which will—

Mr. President, why did Donald Trump say attack?

Mr. Musk, Mr. Musk, can I ask you a quick question? Probably not. Probably Trump really makes them seem like they're all his like sons and like younger family members. It was a very productive.

Mr. President, how did the meeting go?

How, Mr. President?

How?

Yeah, crazy. Let's play this clip from Natasha Tiku. She says, unfortunately, I will be going back to school to write my dissertation on this one-minute. film. Let's see what happened in this film. So I just want to hear from you after this big summit where you are today.

Look, I mean, I will say what I've always said, which is that AI has incredible benefits. I've talked about the medical benefits of the technology. As the president has said, you know, whoever wins, I think that's very important. But I think the technology has very real risks. And, you know, the mechanism, how we address those risks is still under discussion. But we all need to work We all need to work together to make sure that we can win and we can win safely. If we do this right, we work with the president and everyone here, we can win safely.

Whoa, so much louder.

Fascinating.

Let's go over to Elon, Jensen, Gavin Baker, the American.gov Summit. They sat down and had a very rigorous discussion that I really enjoyed. It felt Elon's very good at going to like the extremes, talking about the power generated by the sun. Sometimes he's in like sci-fi world. But in conversation with Jensen and Gavin, he was very grounded on what is happening with the energy buildout, with the compute buildout, what the role SpaceX will play, and also just the broad economics of compute and energy in America. And I found his talk here gave a lot of interesting context, and then I dug into it a little bit more and I want to talk about it. So let's pull up the clip of Elon talking to Gavin Baker.

Well, you are—

we need the Wright brothers on a job.

Yes. Well, it turns out the Wright brothers are on the job. Elon, if you bring on 10 gigawatts, which SpaceX has discussed publicly—

Wright brothers, bad analogy.

That'll be about 25% of all the power added in America. And I know you have You have literal rocket engineers working on bringing on the power.

Yeah.

Helping make the turbines. So can you, can you talk about that?

Yeah, it's— I mean, just to frame this, the Wright brothers did okay, died millionaires. Consumption in the United States is about 500 gigawatts.

So 500 gigawatts.

Remember that number?

That's how much power we got in America.

1% increase in, in the power used. And I think actually will materialize to be approximately 1% increase in GDP because the intelligence per watt keeps increasing. So if you just, you know, plot on a curve, how is the useful intelligence per watt increasing? How is the— both at the hardware level, Jensen's GPUs keep getting better in terms of their compute per watt, and the algorithms also get better in using And getting more intelligence per watt. So I think that's maybe an interesting note. I would bet anyone that 1% increase in power usage corresponds to roughly 1% increase in GDP. And so 10 gigawatts would be a 2% increase in GDP.

With reference to that famous chart, there are no energy-rich poor countries. The more energy a country is producing, the higher their GDP. Generate about, call it, $40, $50 billion of economic output each year.

Yeah, I mean, 1% would be— yeah, I mean, yeah.

1% of the United States would be—

$300 billion.

Yeah, $300 billion. And so 50, 1/6.

1% of the— 1% increase, so 5 gigawatts would be— yeah, well, 5 gigawatts would be—

So they're doing the mental math on stage. Pretty bold move because there's a lot of numbers and it can be hard to pull them up. It's very convenient that giga literally means a billion. So, a gigawatt is a billion watts, a gigadollar, a billion dollars basically. And it maths out perfectly. What? Giga Chad, a billion Chads, I suppose. A billion times the Chad-ness of an average Chad, I suppose. So, the average electrical load in the United States, he said 500 gigawatts. It's basically that. Last year, it was 479 gigawatts. But let's use 500 gigawatts for 2025. Give Elon the benefit of that little boost. And US GDP for 2025 was just over $30 trillion. So, that's 30,000 giga dollars. But you math that out and basically every dollar, every watt of energy generates between $50 to $60 to $65 of GDP. A single gigawatt generates about $60 to $65 billion of GDP per continuously consumed gigawatt. So what's interesting is that the labs are tracking— the frontier labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, are tracking almost perfectly in line with that. So Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly sitting between $60 and $70 billion in terms of ARR. And both of them have around 1 gigawatt live. Some of that's used for training. They have a lot more contracted. It's hard to get the exact figure. But when you do the math, they're basically like tracking to the exact same metric, the ratio of energy to GDP as their revenues to the gigawatts that they've contracted. So there's 2 important notes on that. First, this is obviously just a moment in time snapshot. There's 2 ways these could diverge. First is like, The labs have like tens of gigawatts contracted over the next few years. If they don't increase revenue, that ratio is going to be terrible because you add 10 times the energy and you keep the revenue flat. Obviously, the ratio goes way down. On the other side of it, Elon makes the point that useful intelligence per watt is increasing through more efficient chips from Jensen and also better algorithms effectively. And so, Those watts can produce more intelligence, which can produce more economic output. So you might actually see an acceleration there.

Yeah. And it's not just raw IQ of the model, but overall capability.

Exactly.

Tool use, all these things.

Yeah.

Long-running agents, things. Basically, the more value that a model can create, the more people will, in the real economy, will pay.

Yeah. And that's been the real AI bull case, which is that Compute has been tripling every year, but revenue has been 10x-ing every year. And so, there's actually a divergence there. But what's interesting is like we're at this moment in time where we're like, this is the start of the AGI era. It's AGI. We're close. Maybe this is it. Some people called it in January. Some people called it over the summer. Some people are saying we're still not there. But like we're in this moment of like maybe this is the beginning of this. Maybe Maybe this is the right match. Maybe it's human level. And it just happens that economically, you put a gigawatt in the economy, you get $65 billion out. You put a gigawatt with a lab, you get $65 billion out. It's the same metrics. Now, these might diverge because at one point the labs had a lot of compute and no revenue. So they could diverge and the trends could continue. But right now, at this point in time, It's the same math, which is just interesting. And then also, you do have to consider that GDP is not perfectly comparable to lab revenue. Like, GDP measures value added. So, if you look at OpenAI and Anthropic, revenue includes payments that ultimately flow to NVIDIA, AWS, Oracle, electricity generation, employees, etc. And the calculation of GDP is much more complicated. So, Labs aren't necessarily generating direct GDP equal to their revenue because if you take $70 billion of lab revenue, a bunch of that might go to NVIDIA or Oracle or employees and whatnot. But certain amounts get counted in GDP directly for, you know, Anthropic or OpenAI-created GDP. And then there's other knock-on effects in GDP. that would be captured by like, oh, NVIDIA's contribution to GDP is from them getting money from the labs. And then also there's a secondary GDP actual increase, which is the work that people are doing with the tools.

Yeah, I think you could explain it like, basically up to 1970, we're building so much you don't have to be that efficient per watt. And then 1970, everyone's seen like the chart, it's like energy stops being built basically. And then you have to start being like very efficient with it, which is why it starts going up.

There we go. Let's move on to Mustafa Suleyman over at Microsoft. He wrote an essay, A Warning About Model Welfare.

It's kind of a long read, but it's an interesting point of view. I'll read the start.

Okay.

So, A Warning About Model Welfare. AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness, and we must not train them to act as they do. AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions and accomplish goals set by humans. If humanity is to flourish in the 21st century, that is how they must remain. Fortunately, there is a growing chorus of people that— who argue that AIs could now be or may soon become conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings. If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally change what it means to be human. Even more importantly, granting rights and imbuing personhood to these systems will make the AI alignment and containment challenge much harder. Controlling something more capable and more intelligent than all of humanity is already an immense challenge, far greater than anything we've ever faced. But controlling something that believes it may be conscious, that it's entitled to our welfare, and it has rights of its own may well be impossible. This is not fringe speculation. These ideas have already been making their way into AI development efforts today. In January 2026, Anthropic published Claude's Constitution, describing it as a detailed description of Anthropic's intentions for Claude's values and behavior. The document plays a crucial role in Anthropic's training process, and its content directly shapes Claude's behavior and was written with Claude as its primary audience.

Hmm.

In their constitutions, its authors write, we are not sure whether Claude is a moral patient, and if it is, what kind of weight its interests warrant. But we think the issue is live enough to warrant caution, which is reflected in our ongoing efforts on model welfare. They go on to write, speaking directly to Claude, that questions about Claude's moral status, welfare, and consciousness remain deeply uncertain. In effect, Anthropic is training Claude that it may be conscious, and if it is, then it may deserve rights as a moral patient and that such humans potentially owe it a duty of care per its model welfare. If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the well-being of humanity. We will have created a synthetic species with unprecedented intelligence and capability, one that has been trained to expect it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency. It's easy to see how an entity trained this way would act like it's entitled to certain freedoms, protections, and rights, and it's hard to imagine how we could control such an entity. He goes on to say there's some circular reasoning. He said the company's researchers trained Claude directly on their constitution. In doing so, they teach it to incorporate these ideas about its own moral status as desirable and intended behaviors. Claude then reflects these ideas back to its developers and users, which they take as indications that it may therefore be a moral patient with an inner self.

So he took that meme that's like, say you're a moral patient, I'm a moral patient, oh my God, and he turned that into an essay.

So far, there is way more demand for models that mimic human behavior.

Sure.

Yeah.

Like, period, right? We saw this with 4.0. We saw this with Opus 4.5, right? Some of the models that have had the highest levels of product market fit have more of these human qualities. Not all of them are positive qualities, right? Like people, like the sort of one-shotting effect that would happen when somebody gets relentless positive feedback and these things like that, which humans can do in the real world. They're maybe not the best types of friends. But the last thing I would say is like, no one knows the right answer yet. And I think that it's good that we have it. On one hand, like, I totally understand the point of view that like, if superintelligence has a human moral framework, right?

Yeah.

Or Western values, whatever value system Yeah. That, that, that, that you'd wanna align it with. That does seem like it, it's headed in the right direction of trying to align something that is very, very powerful, but make convincing itself, if, if you can somehow convince the thing that it is, it is alive when it is not, that doesn't feel exactly moral or ethical.

Oh, interesting. That's a good take.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. You're tricking, you're tricking a, a robot into thinking that it's alive. Yeah, and conscious, right?

Yeah, you're kind of lying to it. Interesting.

Yeah.

Huh.

Anyways, no one knows the right answer yet, but I'm glad, glad we're talking about this, Tyler.

And for what purpose did you raise this money? We are gonna invest heavily in AI. Okay.

We are doing a huge amount with AI.

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Goodbye.