Roman Yampolskiy vs Emad Mostaque: I Was The Only Optimist - #569

About this episode

A debate between AI safety expert Roman Yampolskiy and AI CEO Emad Mostaque on the risks of superintelligence and the implications for civilization.

The man who open-sourced the most-used AI image model in history sat down with the man who has spent a decade proving superintelligence cannot be controlled. Brian set up a debate. What emerged was something more unsettling than any debate. Roman Yampolskiy is the computer scientist who coined the term AI safety and author of AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. Emad Mostaque is the co-founder of Stable Diffusion and the only AI CEO who signed the pause letter. He now says he doesn’t know how a pause could work. Yampolskiy thinks that is the only option left. The question underneath everything is simple: if you have a 50% chance of wiping out civilization and you build it anyway, what are you actually doing? We cover what AI safety researchers actually think the danger is, why nobody has published a paper, filed a patent, or shipped a prototype for controlling a superintelligence, what the Qwen weights being out means for the pause argument, and why Mostaque thinks swarm intelligence is the most dangerous and most unpredictable risk vector we have. What you’ll hear: -Why both guests think P(doom) tells you less than you’d hope -What it means that no company, no lab…

People in this episode

Host: Brian Keating

Guests: Roman Yampolskiy, Emad Mostaque

Topics covered

• AI safety
• superintelligence
• debate
• civilization risk
• machine learning
• swarm intelligence

Keywords

• AI
• superintelligence
• safety
• civilization
• debate
• machine learning
• swarm intelligence
• risk

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Stable Diffusion

Books & works: AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable

More episodes of Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

• OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes Claim: Is This What AGI Looks Like? with Emad Mostaque · September 9, 2026 · 1h 19m
• The Universe Didn’t Come From Nothing | The Peter McCormack Show · August 28, 2026 · 1h 46m
• The Physics Reason AI Works When It Shouldn’t - #568 · August 25, 2026 · 1h 18m
• Engineering Chair: Most People Should Not Go To College - #567 · August 18, 2026 · 1h 0m
• John Martinis: The Nobel Physicist Behind Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling - #566 · August 11, 2026 · 49 min
• Fermilab’s Scott Dodelson on Cosmology’s Crisis - #565 · August 4, 2026 · 41 min