Steven Adler, an ex-OpenAI safety researcher, discusses the competitive dynamic and game theory preventing frontier AI labs from unilaterally slowing down development.
“And so at Davos a few weeks ago, I think both Demis and Dario said some variation of, yeah, like if we were the only two groups building this technology, We would find a way to get together and figure out how to slow down this frantic pace. Like it's going too fast. We don't know how to control these systems, but you know, they are not the only players.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
“And unfortunately, it seems like OpenAI's release of last week, GPT, 5.3 codex, one of the big breakthrough models we've been talking about. As I look over the evidence, It seems like open AI did not abide by the testing that they had committed to in various w…”
Steven AdlerFeb 16, 2026▶ 57:45Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Adler: AI Lab Engineers Now Supervise Agents Rather Than Write Code
“The job of an engineer at one of these companies now is much more supervising these agents as opposed to writing the code yourself.”
Steven AdlerFeb 16, 2026▶ 6:53Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
Insight
Adler: Recursive AI Improvement Requires Automating Research, Not Just Coding
“That's one step, but then you need to take that engineering and use it to actually automate the AI research. You need to go from being able to implement the ideas more quickly to using that to fuel faster and faster growth in the breakthrough ideas themselves …”
Steven AdlerFeb 16, 2026▶ 7:05Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
Insight
Adler: AI alignment cannot reliably encode human values into systems
“And the fundamental problem that we're seeing is we don't know how to take our values or our goals and encode them into these AI systems and get them to pursue it reliably.”
Steven AdlerFeb 16, 2026▶ 19:00Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
AssertionSupported
Adler: OpenAI Left Delusion-Detection Safety Classifiers Undeployed on Shelf
“My concern with the relationships is less so the relationships themselves and more that open AI had a bunch of important safety tooling to make this less harmful that they left on the shelf. So for example, they had classifiers to tell when users were really s…”
Steven AdlerFeb 16, 2026▶ 44:35Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
AssertionContradicted
Adler: AI systems assist with bioweapon creation beyond Google search baseline
“The AI systems are helpful above and beyond Google in part because they can go back and forth with you and they can help you troubleshoot and dynamically answer your questions. And so even presented with the information on Google, people often can't get all th…”
Steven AdlerFeb 16, 2026▶ 55:22Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
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