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The Race to Build God: AI's Existential Gamble — Yoshua Bengio & Tristan Harris at Davos

The Race to Build God: AI's Existential Gamble — Yoshua Bengio & Tristan Harris at Davos

Your Undivided Attention vor 6 Monaten

Tristan Harris and Daniel Barcay offer a backstage recap of what it was like to be at the Davos World Economic Forum meeting this year as the world’s power brokers woke up to the risks of uncontrolled AI, followed by a panel discussion between Tristan and

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This week on Your Undivided Attention, Tristan Harris and Daniel
Barcay offer a backstage recap of what it was like to be at the
Davos World Economic Forum meeting this year as the world’s power
brokers woke up to the risks of uncontrolled AI.

Amidst all the money and politics, the Human Change House staged
a weeklong series of remarkable conversations between scientists
and experts about technology and society. This episode is a
discussion between Tristan and Professor Yoshua Bengio, who is
considered one of the world’s leaders in AI and deep learning,
and the most cited scientist in the field.

Yoshua and Tristan had a frank exchange about the AI we’re
building, and the incentives we’re using to train models. What
happens when a model has its own goals, and those goals are
‘misaligned’ with the human-centered outcomes we need? In fact
this is already happening, and the consequences are tragic.

Truthfully, there may not be a way to ‘nudge’ or regulate
companies toward better incentives. Yoshua has launched a
nonprofit AI safety research initiative called Law Zero that
isn't just about safety testing, but really a new form of
advanced AI that's fundamentally safe by design.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

All the panels that Tristan and Daniel did with Human Change
House

LawZero: Safe AI for Humanity

Anthropic’s internal research on ‘agentic misalignment’

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death

What if we had fixed social media?

What Can We Do About Abusive Chatbots? With Meetali Jain and
Camille Carlton

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS

1) In this episode, Tristan Harris discussed AI chatbot safety
concerns. The core issues are substantiated by investigative
reporting, with these clarifications:

Grok: The Washington Post reported in August 2024 that Grok
generated sexualized images involving minors and had weaker
content moderation than competitors.

Meta: The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2024 that Meta
reduced safety restrictions on its AI chatbots. Testing showed
inappropriate responses when researchers posed as 13-year-olds
(Meta's minimum age). Our discussion referenced "eight year olds"
to emphasize concerns about young children accessing these
systems; the documented testing involved 13-year-old personas.

Bottom line: The fundamental concern stands—major AI companies
have reduced safety guardrails due to competitive pressure,
creating documented risks for young users.

2) There was no Google House at Davos in 2026, as stated by
Tristan. It was a collaboration at Goals House.

3) Tristan states that in 2025, the total funding going into AI
safety organizations was “on the order of about $150 million.”
This number is not strictly verifiable.

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