The Race to Build God: AI's Existential Gamble — Yoshua Bengio & Tristan Harris at Davos
Your Undivided Attention
Feb 19
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
Feb 19
Unprocessed episode, you can be the first!
Shownote
Shownote
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
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UPINK7zeek&list=PLkfXGKkp7xBJ-8zMiCZ3VLADRjtTT9Vcf]
LawZero: Safe AI for Humanity [https://lawzero.org/en]
Anthropic’s internal research on ‘agentic misalignment’
[https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment]
RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis
[https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/attachment-hacking-and-the-rise-of-ai-psychosis]
How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death
[https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/how-openai-s-chatgpt-guided-a-teen-to-his-death]
What if we had fixed social media?
[https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/what-if-we-had-fixed-social-media]
What Can We Do About Abusive Chatbots? With Meetali Jain and Camille Carlton
[https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/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
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/07/grok-ai-child-safety-csam/]
in August 2024 that Grok generated sexualized images involving minors and had
weaker content moderation than competitors.
Meta: The Wall Street Journal reported
[https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-chatbot-safety-restrictions-e9e8ce3f] 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.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com
[https://pcm.adswizz.com] for information about our collection and use of
personal data for advertising.
Highlights
Highlights
Chapters
Chapters
Transcript
Transcript