"The last attempt to warn humanity" — that would be a good slogan, or a good headline, for a video about artificial intelligence and about the technologies that are happening right now. But it's not my phrase, and today is certainly not the last attempt to warn humanity. I'm definitely not going to hype this up. That said, I find the topic very interesting. Today I'll try to walk you through it from different angles. So what is this phrase? It's from the screenwriter of the film "Artificial," Simon Rich.
It's a film about the company OpenAI and, in particular, about Sam Altman, quite a lot about Ilya Sutskever, and about precisely the time when Sam Altman was removed as CEO. I think back then it was still a time when only geeks or people super-involved in artificial intelligence knew who Sam Altman even was. Not to mention Ilya Sutskever, right? Why is it notable, why do I want to connect this with the film right now? Because this film was shown, the premiere took place on October 5 in New York. And it's a kind of drama with humor, on the one hand.
And why is it the last attempt to warn humanity, anyway? Because originally, as Rich tells it, he was trying to draw the attention of journalists and the public, and the world to what's happening in the world in general in terms of creating artificial intelligence, and to where it's all heading. I don't know to what extent that's been achieved with this film. This film will become available to all viewers in December this year, at the end of December this year, in some US theaters, and from 2027 it will be widely distributed, and you'll all be able to watch it.
And today the goal isn't to give you some kind of film preview, but to look precisely at the story of why this is the last attempt to warn humanity, and about what. And one of the film's main concepts overall, the one laid out within this story, could be put like this: how far can we trust people who promise to solve humanity's problems and at the same time gain more and more power. That's a serious question, of course. A big question to reflect on. I know that most people these days don't want to reflect on this question as such, from their own point of view.
They either want to voice some kind of negativity, or a person wants to figure out, in the context of artificial intelligence, how to choose the right profession, how to make more money. There's such incredible hype around it. By the way, this past week I shot a whole three videos. There you could even… someone said it was clickbait or off-topic. I showed more than thirty points there, ten in each video, roughly — some of the most important ideas and knowledge in artificial intelligence this year.
What's happening right now, and the trends, and an understanding of those trends. And on the website we've rolled out a big section on this, so you can refer to it more, look at it more, study it more. It's an important topic for your own conscious understanding. Just today I was also shooting a video for my other channel, and I was asked a question there: artificial intelligence has come along. A person used to do, say, three tasks, then started doing fifteen tasks a day, but the result seemed to be the same — it stayed exactly the same as it was, in terms of, I don't know, money, or in terms of their own state.
But the same race is still on. Now you don't want to do fifteen tasks, you want to do fifty tasks. You don't want to do small tasks, you want to do big tasks, right? So the result seems to have stayed the same. That's also a very, very serious topic, yes, in terms of formulating this concept. It's built into this whole idea, I mean into the idea of how far we can trust people who promise to solve humanity's problems. And by the way, I'm connecting today's video with something interesting.
OpenAI recently put out — it was published at the end of September — a kind of proposal on the standards they see for the development of artificial intelligence, and they singled out three points about what future they're preparing for. And one of the points, what they're preparing for, was to give everyone a personal AGI — that is, a universal intelligence for a person's own tasks, and not just a tool for big companies, and for people not just a chat. So, to give every person something super serious. Can you imagine what AGI for every person means?
If you get to grips with these terms, a lot becomes clear too — I'll keep coming back to this. We have a lot of episodes coming out now, three or four episodes every week. And there was an episode about AGI, about ASI and about technological singularity. By the way, I really recommend watching that episode after this one, to get a bit deeper into it. And what is AGI, anyway? And if a person gets an AGI for themselves, you understand, it's not just that they've got some agent or got themselves a bot.
I mean, they've got themselves a serious company — or rather, not a company. It's as if they've got a government, economies, businesses, a huge number of people of their own who can work for the sake of their life. It's not just a situation where they'll help you choose a restaurant, or pay a bill correctly, or sort out your taxes. You understand, it's a completely different reality. There's a big difference, right? You have one café where you sell coffee, and you have Starbucks. Those are somewhat different lives for a company. And so you, as a person, end up with a somewhat different life.
And it's not just you — if it's AGI, your wife or husband has AGI, your parents have AGI, your children have AGI. So OpenAI is very clearly preparing for this… well, for this kind of approach. They keep declaring it, they keep talking about it. What's more, Sam Altman actually believes that, supposedly, by his understanding of technological singularity, we're already there. Today I liked one AI-generated video on X, where someone is sitting on a throne, "Game of Thrones" style. I hope our editorial team will find it and show it.
If they don't, you'll find it yourselves later. So, sitting there is Jensen Huang, the head of NVIDIA, and Sam Altman from the OpenAI clan comes up to him. And he says: "We seem to have reached AGI." And he says: "You've been saying that for three years now." There's this cake standing there, all prepared. The guard by the cake has fallen asleep, the cake has sort of rotted and gone gray. I mean, they really are releasing AGI every year now, or every month.
But still, if AGI has been released and it really has happened, then what should happen in the world? What kind of world will it even be? What's going to be happening? And that's why this idea shown in the film is, of course, shown narrowly, in the sense that it's still just a certain period, when Sam Altman was being fired from OpenAI, hired back — who was doing it, who makes the decisions. Whether Sam Altman makes the decisions or the team inside does. But do these people really understand at all what they're actually doing?
It seems to me the most sane-minded person, the one who understands best what's being done, is Elon Musk. Although I have a huge number of questions about the company's activities, its approaches, statements, details, and in general about what kind of soul-and-spirit system this is. But in any case, he puts trends out ahead, at least big trends, and people sometimes don't even pay attention to these trends. I mean, at least he's capable of talking about these trends, rather than tossing out some micro constructs and then fixing some micro constructs.
Because the heads of OpenAI and Anthropic, after all, are in micro zones of reasoning. Not to mention the head of, say, Google or Meta. They're in even more micro zones of reasoning. That doesn't mean they're bad people or not smart, and so on. They're all super-geniuses there, super-competent leaders, and so on. It's more a question of what people are able or willing to state openly at all, and what kind of thinking they have.
So, within this concept — how far can we trust people who promise to solve humanity's problems — you could single out several levels. And level one — a scientific dream collides with the will to win. Because there's a very important story here — it's about power. Because a month ago Sam Altman was saying that artificial intelligence needs to be held back. And right away he — I talked about this in my episode on Wednesday, the one we had on the channel — right away he says that humanity has to accept that bad things will happen.
True, nobody says what bad things will happen, but we have to accept that they will happen. Once again. My partner, during our conversation this morning, said — it's still morning for me, and even though I start work very early and I've already got a big workday behind me, it's still half past eleven in the morning. What he said today was: "You know, Sasha, the artificial intelligence that exists now — even those super things you yourself talk about, like me, what I do, and what they talk about, what mathematicians are doing everywhere in various systems — that's the simplest, dumbest artificial intelligence there will ever be in the future.
I mean, if you look into the future, this is absolutely the most basic thing. So what is it we're really expecting?" And so in this film, Sutskever believes in the enormous possibilities of technology, but gradually begins to see the danger. That's how it's shown there. And Altman ties the company's future more and more closely to his own leadership. And so that's where this conflict between Ilya Sutskever and Altman arises. And in general, of course, if you watch the market, it's an interesting market. I remember that moment in time when Altman was removed, Mira Murati took his place, then Altman came back, and Mira Murati left OpenAI, and everyone was saying: "OpenAI is done for.
The whole company has walked out on it." Basically, Zuckerberg poached the whole team, and lots of people were poached by, let's say, Zuckerberg and the whole rest of the market. So, in the end, where are we today? We're at a point where OpenAI has the largest number of weekly users — actually, daily users — in the world in terms of time spent, right, in terms of the time spent inside the system. These numbers aren't fully disclosed. The latest figure, announced at OpenAI's DevDay conference, which I attended ten days ago here in San Francisco, Sam Altman announced from the stage, I think, one point two or one point twenty-five billion — comma, right — one billion two hundred fifty, two hundred or so, or two hundred fifty million.
That's a serious number for a company that only has ChatGPT. Well, sure, there's ChatGPT Codex, but I mean, this is a company that has no search engines, a company that has no other systems for storing files, like Google Sheets or Google Docs, Drive, mail like Gmail, and so on. I mean, this is a company with terribly limited infrastructure, because even Microsoft, in particular, despite its big partnership with OpenAI, strongly holds back the individualized use of OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Same as Apple, which at one point let ChatGPT deep into its infrastructure. Then in the end we saw that they started using Gemini. In the end, in their latest update, the leader is still — Siri. Yes, Siri is what does the searching at Apple now. And it searches very badly. Honestly, I think this latest update is incredibly low-quality. And even though, in theory, it should all work more seriously, more impressively on the iPhone 18 Pro, I don't see that effect. How do you see it, by the way, as viewers, those of you who've used it? I've got no hope left for Apple. It's more of a story here.
Look, there's also one new thing we have now. At ToTheMoon we specifically want to select a few people, perhaps ones who are currently viewers of the channel, and who would like to become speakers for ToTheMoon and for the whole ToTheMoon media, to talk about artificial intelligence, to share it. For many people that's a very interesting thing to do. We've made a special page for filling out an application, and it'll be in the channel description. Plus, you'll find it on the website in the ToTheMoon section, in the project description.
And don't forget that we have a big website about ToTheMoon with all kinds of information. Let's continue. That said, of course, in artificial intelligence and in terms of new things in general, they're in total trouble.
And this story is very telling for everyone, to understand that building serious, cool systems — it's not just having money, technology, cool teams, it's something else, and something else that happens inside. And not just these people, not just this team. That's why, of course, this conflict shown between Sutskever and Sam Altman — what else makes it interesting? Just imagine if Sutskever had stayed at OpenAI and Mira Murati had stayed at OpenAI, then what would we all end up seeing? What would OpenAI be like today, what do you think?
What would OpenAI even be like? If Anthropic hadn't left, hadn't split off from that OpenAI team on the Google one, then what would OpenAI really be like today? What would really be happening with it if Elon Musk had managed to integrate OpenAI, as he generally wanted to, right — integrate it into his own projects, like SpaceX, like Tesla — what would OpenAI really be like today? I wonder what would be happening with it together with him. Although I haven't discussed these topics with Elon Musk, right?
I haven't talked to him, and I haven't asked what he actually wanted originally, really, and how it really was. Because we hear different opinions, and these people often voice what they think in some places, and in other places information that other people are supposed to hear. And of course, to understand this whole structure, you have to be inside it for a long time and want to figure it out, this structure, really figure out what's going on. For example, being at DevDay and watching Sam Altman, I have a big question: why doesn't Altman himself, for example, speak… why does he read all the information off a monitor?
I mean, why, at a conference like DevDay for developers, where developers are sitting, why doesn't he speak his mind, talk to them openly, reflect openly on lots of topics? It's a pretty good area for observation, not to give some answer or throw down some kind of challenge. Although I'd love to read what comments you write and what conclusions you draw on this topic. And what does the person actually think? And the second level, which lies in this concept of the film and which, overall, I want to draw your attention to today, because I do want to discuss this film too, even in advance.
That doesn't mean I'm telling you the plot. I'm not telling you the plot. The plot is actually clear. We're all following… well, many are only just starting here on the channel, those who are new to the channel, by the way, they're only starting to follow what's happening with artificial intelligence. And for many, Sam Altman — he's just some guy. They don't even fully understand who he is. Just as for most of humanity Elon Musk and Sam Altman aren't such well-known figures at all.
And by the way, in general, to understand how famous a person is, let's look at followers. On X, Elon Musk has more than two hundred million followers. Well, that's serious, right? In terms of how famous he ought to be. But we all understand that most of humanity still doesn't know him. I mean, when we talk about the majority of humanity. This, by the way, is a question that's always very debatable. I remember, I'm from Minsk myself, from Belarus, and this thing used to amaze me, when you'd come somewhere, for example, to the United States, I do live here now, of course, in California, in the Valley, but I remember, back fifteen years ago, you'd arrive and people didn't know what Belarus was. And that always amazed me.
But when you figure it out later, the longer, obviously, I was here, especially once we started living here as a family, I came to understand this circumstance very calmly, because a huge number of people didn't even know what Belarus was. People may well not know where Portugal is, right? And you start to understand: why would they need to know that? Exactly the same way that we often know about certain conflicts connected with our family or with the city we're in. And other people don't even know about these conflicts and don't understand what's actually going on there, what's really going on there.
And this conflict that's really happening in another country may be ten thousand times more complex than in your own country, the one you live in. And it's the same here, in terms of names and circumstances. And that's why at ToTheMoon we've even started explaining a bit less who Sam Altman is or what systems exist on the market, as if people are supposed to understand and know this. Although obviously most people don't understand it. So, if we look at the second level the film talks about, it's that talk about safety can also serve business interests.
This topic, by the way, is very cool, incredibly important, right? I mean, the film itself shows the paradox of a warning about the system's incredible danger that at the same time underlines its incredible power. So even alarm can work in favor of the company's influence. And you can see this overall in what's happening on the market. I mean, we're constantly told that artificial intelligence is very, very, very powerful and that it kind of needs to be restricted. They talk about it all the time, they broadcast it.
And meanwhile the system itself doesn't stop developing, that is, it keeps moving forward. Nobody has ever stopped anything yet. Well, I mean, in reality nobody is slowing down current AI, because we constantly see how this same AI or what's happening along with AI happens outside of what those same creators of AI are saying. Their predictions keep getting overturned. And these people also have a probability: as Elon Musk says, there's a probability of tens of percent that artificial intelligence will lead to the collapse of humanity.
Well, tens of percent, guys, that's not zero point one percent, that's not even one percent. Actually, in theory, a system that could lead to the collapse of humanity should be launched at, well, probably a one-in-a-million probability, or a one-in-a-thousand probability, but not at a probability like that. It's impossible to allow something like that. How can that be? What even is that? That's the worst of all, it turns out. I mean, that's an astronomical probability. And of course, these companies that use this narrative, this narrative is very interesting and important. And by the way, look, the Chinese narrative, what is it?
The Chinese openly state that the Americans deliberately create this narrative so that they themselves can keep developing, and so that many companies, governments, economies slow down the opening of and access to this artificial intelligence. And we've seen this. When ChatGPT first appeared, Italy, for example, blocked the use of ChatGPT in its country. Can you imagine the absurdity! But this same absurdity happened in a developed country, where, well, there are people in office, where there's a government. Can you imagine? They made that decision.
I mean, they made that decision for the short term. That's how little anyone understands what's going on. And now who can stop anything at all, and who can ban anything at all? Because today the models have penetrated everywhere, they've penetrated, simply, not just every breach in an information system, not just every device, they've penetrated everywhere.
And the third level, which the film examines very closely within the overall concept we're talking about today, is that truth becomes a tool of control. Inside, the film's director contrasts the characters' attitudes to truth. I mean, for Sutskever truth — it's a principle; for Altman — something that can adapt to the circumstances at hand. And here the film moves closer to a drama about political power, which is what we're talking about. And by the way, in that video I mentioned, the one I had on X, where Jensen Huang is sitting on the throne, that's exactly where the president of the United States shows up, pushes everyone aside and says what will happen and how it will be.
And everyone who resisted still ends up buying compute, right? We see this with the example of Anthropic. I remember how Ilnar was incredibly strongly on Anthropic's side even before Anthropic got this fame, right? And I stayed very firmly on OpenAI's side. And now, of course, I myself fully, very seriously use both OpenAI and Anthropic. I use other models too, of course, but OpenAI and Anthropic are kind of my leading systems. And I remember him saying: "Listen, Anthropic has started to back down."
Yeah, meaning that it had said it wouldn't, you know, work with these countries, and it's already taking money from them. It won't do this, and it's already doing it. So Anthropic kept doing it anyway. And by the way, notice that Mythos-class systems, for those who don't know, that's what Fable in Claude is, it's Anthropic's artificial intelligence model. This is precisely the system that started carrying out the first serious hacks in the world. And they released this system into the world, and Anthropic gave certain companies access to the Mythos systems in agreement with the United States government.
And to this day nobody has access to these. Ordinary citizens don't have access to the Mythos systems. There's a bit of access to Fable, and beyond that the bulk of people use everything else. And what's more, the bulk of people, using free systems or, like, a cheap subscription, don't even come close to having access to serious models. What I want to say is that today all the models, like, I have a ChatGPT Pro subscription for five hundred dollars, right? Look, all the very top models, except Pro, answer instantly in the chat. I mean, Extra High mode answers instantly. That wasn't the case before.
I mean, now it answers… and it's smarter than a huge number of previous systems. I mean, in Extra High there's, I think, 5.6 Sol. And even though I don't know, right, what's actually inside there as of today, these are serious models, and on top of that they answer me super fast. And these models are available, essentially, only on the expensive plan. Well, on the cheap plans they either get eaten up very quickly, or the modes there are actually, in reality, unavailable. For example, Ultra mode and the like, or Ultra Code modes, many of them aren't available, the ones that are in there.
And let's remember one of the main points I often talk about: that you really do need to invest, for you, for your company, for yourselves, in buying paid, expensive models, yes, that need is there.
So, the fourth level, which the film shows very strongly and talks about a lot, is that the title has an additional meaning. 'Artificial' can also be read as Altman's carefully crafted public image, right, his persuasiveness, his attitude, this ability to shape consensus in society, the way he talks to those around him. And that reading is suggested precisely in an interview with the director about this film. It's not that it's my conclusion or what this film wanted to get across, but it's one of the things that are said about what happens in this storyline, right?
Well, I don't want to retell the film. As for what happened there, actually this story begins back in 2003, when Ilya Sutskever comes to study at the University of Toronto under Geoffrey Hinton. And then Altman, Musk, OpenAI and everything else appear, right, various research ambitions. And it's precisely this 2023 conflict, when Sam Altman was fired, that they examine. The question of artificiality, it's a very interesting one in general. After all, people in the world generally want to listen to some other person about, for example, artificial intelligence or technology, feeling that this person can, say, speak about it.
I mean, like how someone recently took an episode of mine, which got a lot of views, about ten trends you need to know in artificial intelligence. And they say: "I fed it into an AI and asked the AI, though it's unclear which version, whether Alexander Volchek, you know, has the right to speak on this topic. And so the AI told me, like, he has no damn right, or, like, he does have the right." Well, the person wrote something like that. And, well, I joked, of course, wrote in the comments: "What model was that?
And how did you study it all? And which videos did you study? And what does it know about the person, and so on. What, did you live with me, spend time with me, interview me, take sensor readings off me? How did you do all that? Or did you say, in the abstract: he has a virus, give him antibiotics." The rules were broken, right, inside. So people in the world trust certain individuals who stand, for example, behind the money, believing that they're the ones who understand how to develop artificial intelligence.
But in fact, if we look, these very same people had no idea at all five years ago where we'd be now. And they keep changing the timelines. And of course I'd like, I'd really like for every person in the world to… it's impossible, it's impossible to achieve that, right. But it would be great if we saw and understood the truth. I urge everyone to dig into the truth, to look at causes and effects, to look at what's really happening, to learn more details. Essentially, that's what the ToTheMoon channel was created for, on the AI side. So that people understand more and truly grasp what artificial intelligence is, what the technological world is.
Obviously, I still convey things here from a certain position, or other authors on this channel do, we put forward certain positions. That doesn't mean they're guaranteed to be reliable. We talk about what's happening across a broad layer, rather than just saying in every episode: "Look at the hype there. So, someone released something." Or agreeing with some smart person, because if you don't agree with him, then supposedly he won't, for example, talk to you afterwards. Or you can't speak out like that about some place, about someone. And here, of course, this theme, in terms of the artificial, is very important.
And it's interesting why a trend started in America where they decided to drop the word "artificial". Look, something like that never happens for no reason. Indeed, by the way, Elon Musk used the term "superintelligence" a long time ago. I've talked about this a lot on ToTheMoon. For me, artificial intelligence — it's what's shown in films like Oblivion, for example, right. I mean, those are serious things after all. I mean, of course, we haven't come anywhere near that. At the same time, I categorically disagree with people who claim that artificial intelligence — it's an absolutely dumb system, some simple code, some simple dumb mathematical model that, today, well, does something there at the edge, counts some numbers somewhere, because after all it's already a huge infrastructure, it's part of society's consciousness as of today.
And indeed, it's not a person, indeed, it's not a person's physical body and it never will be. There's absolutely no soul-and-spirit system there, the kind a person has. But still, it's a fairly serious part of our current world, and not just some little app. It's not a little app in the Apple Store, it's not the company Apple. This is very important, right. It's not the government of some country, it's not even some country, it's something more serious. Interesting, by the way, what would you compare what's happening now to? What actually is it, really?
By the way, when I say that companies like OpenAI should become operating systems, I'm being a bit disingenuous, because in fact that's clear. They're far more serious than an operating system, because an operating system didn't become part of society. That's very plain to see. By the way, at one time an operating system like Windows held much greater importance in the technological world than it does now. This is incredibly important to hear, right. And just because Apple sells fifty percent of phones, or of its infrastructure, to Americans, for example, and holds a serious position in the world overall, that doesn't mean Apple can't be replaced.
Apple can be replaced. But the way artificial intelligence has merged into people's lives, that's a big question. What do we do with it? Really, what do we do with it? And what do you think can be done about it? Please don't forget to leave your comments today and support our video. Likes and subscriptions really help us grow. And really, why not leave them and do it? And we look forward to seeing you in our new episodes. Bye, everyone.