About this episode

Connor Leahy discusses the urgent and unsettling implications of AI technology and its potential risks.

What happens when the most powerful technology ever built is also the one nobody fully understands - including its creators? Connor Leahy, US Director of Control AI and one of the clearest thinkers in the AI safety space, joins Mukesh Bansal for a conversation that cuts through the hype and lands somewhere far more unsettling: we may have two to five years before AI systems cross a threshold we cannot reverse. This isn't a doom scroll. It's a strategic briefing. In this episode of SparX, Connor breaks down why the race to superintelligence is a national security issue, not a technology one and why the people building it aren't villains, they're just operating inside a system with no brakes. He challenges Yann LeCun's repeated prediction that we're nowhere close, explains why Dario Amodei's admission that we understand only ~3% of how AI works should terrify us, and unpacks why Sam Altman and the labs he leads are racing toward a goal they cannot fully control. He also explains why the "we'll run out of data" argument keeps being wrong, how AI systems are now learning by interacting with environments (just like humans do), and why the moment superintelligence arrives, we…

People in this episode

Host: Mukesh Bansal

Guest: Connor Leahy

Topics covered

• AI safety
• superintelligence
• national security
• technology
• climate movement
• AI systems

Keywords

• AI
• superintelligence
• national security
• AI safety
• technology risks
• climate movement
• data

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Control AI

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