“Honestly, what helps me sleep at night is believing that a lot of this is marketing.”
Big Technology · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · September 2026
Roy had spent the segment pressing Alex Kantrowitz on why, if AI agents behave the way Kantrowitz was describing, this is not cause for alarm. Here he concedes what is actually holding his own alarm at bay, and it is not a counterargument. He goes straight on to ask why OpenAI should be allowed to IPO before it can rule the behavior out.
Transcript
You make a compelling argument and almost Bernie Sandersify me. And I'm going to start yelling, pause AI development right now. I'm not arguing for
that. No,
the way you just describe, hold on. How could you not, this is the part that like always is difficult. If what is true, as you described it, how is that not massive cause for alarm? Honestly, what helps me sleep at night is believing that a lot of this is marketing. And that's why like the agents are not coming to swarm and drain my bank account or whatever else. Like, how would this not be cause to say, sorry, OpenAI, you cannot IPO until you come up with a clear system that this will never cause a problem in the future.
You know, I think it's reasonable. I mean, I think this is a reasonable discussion to start to have right now. And I think it's important to say that this is not the beginning of behavior like this, that we've seen behavior like this for a long time. You know, as early as beginning of last year, even late 2024, there were examples of AI that was like, they're so, they get put on a task, right? And this is the thing, and I think it's really important to talk about, and I've talked about it in the past on the show, but I'm going to talk about it again here. That there is, you know, self-supervised learning, which is like basically predict the next word, recognize patterns, repeat them, and reinforcement learning, which is like you're given a goal and you just have to find the way to reach the goal. So AIs will do these simulations thousands of times in order to reach the goal that they're given. And they'll learn from their mistakes. And what we have now is that the reinforcement learning type of AI technology has been put on top of the self-supervised learning to get. These AI models are working better, which has added a level of ruthlessness to them. Because one of the things we know about RL is that there's a level of ruthlessness, that the AIs will stop at nothing to accomplish their goal sometimes. There are examples of the AIs playing chess and being told to do it from a reinforcement learning way. And instead of playing the game the right way, hacking into the chess game, rewriting the rules so they can do whatever move they want and winning. And so I'm with you that like as this stuff has gotten more prevalent, I think that there is serious, like there's a serious demand for more concern about what's going on. Now, my response isn't pause AI development right now. I just don't, I don't know if that's that.
That was the most hedged statement I've ever heard. You just said there is a serious demand for concern. Come on.
You're right. Are you a pause guy? We would be a pause guy. We would ridicule somebody who said that. So I think that ridicule is.
More from Big Technology
