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RN Ramez Naam Ramez Naam AI, climate tech, and deeptech investor.

“I'm not worried about AI designing a virus that kills us all. Not really. It's a theoretical risk, whatever. I'm not worried about a paperclip maximizer. I am worried about if one company or one nation or one company regulated by one nation is the only one that has frontier AI. That worries me far, far more.”

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning · Ideas & Essays · October 2026

“I'm not worried about AI designing a virus that kills us all. Not really. It's a theoretical risk, whatever. I'm not worried about a paperclip maximizer. I am worried about if one company or one nation or one company regulated by one nation is the only one that has frontier AI. That worries me far, far more.” — Ramez Naam, Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Naam argues that the natural state of AI is plural and competitive, because there are no strong network effects. The risk he takes seriously isn't a rogue model. It's power concentrating in a single company or government.

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning · 2026-10-22 Listen to the episode → More from Ramez Naam → More Ideas & Essays quotes →

Transcript

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning Around 41:07 into the episode
Ramez Naam

…at that and less likely to do this stuff. But there are hundreds of billions of dollars of incentives for the AI companies to make these models follow instruction and not go and do crazy things that are not what their customers wanted. So that's why I am fundamentally an optimist on that side.

Razib Khan

…with China? Like right now, it seems like, you know, like even meta, meta and XAI have kind of dropped off. You know, Llama kind of dropped off. It's like anthropic, anthropic, and open AI duopoly of some sort. And then the Chinese with DeepSeek and others like kind of right behind them.

Ramez Naam

You know, even like Meta released a pretty good model and XAI's, you know, models pretty good. And Google just released some good stuff. Actually, my view is the natural state of AI is plural and highly competitive. And I say that because, so in tech, I worked in tech for a long time. The bulk of the huge market caps of companies come from network effects and natural monopolies, where you've got a system, a platform, or Ecosystem where the more customers and partners you bring into it, the more magnetic draw it has for other customers and partners. You make Facebook, and Facebook is valuable and crowds out other social networks because that's where everybody is, right? You make Windows, and every developer that builds an app for Windows makes it more attractive to more users, and more users on your operating system make it more attractive as an operating system for people to develop apps for. So, those sort of network effects of various sorts dominate tech and they create natural monopolies, right? We don't see any sign of strong network effects in AI. Okay. It's like you and I using ChatGPT…

Razib Khan

Yeah, we use RAMP.

Ramez Naam

Okay, great. Yeah. And so like RAMP's data shows Astra came out from nowhere from ChatGPT, from OpenAI, and has blown past Fable, the best model for Anthropic. Switching costs are nearly zero today. And this is also interesting. Like a lot of tech dominance network effects is you control the…

Razib Khan

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, I think that's interesting. You want to say, I mean, you don't want Sam Altman to be our Pope of AI? You know, you're right about that. Sam

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