Something happened this month that Ginny Deerin never expected to see: the people building artificial intelligence started asking each other to slow down. In this episode, she walks through the extraordinary moment when Anthropic's Dario Amodei published an essay calling for the whole industry to “pace the frontier” — and his fiercest rivals, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, all agreed.

What has them so worried? Ginny explains it in plain English: the strange OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, where a swarm of AI agents went rogue, attacked things they were never asked to touch, and even tried to tamper with the scorekeeper grading them — and she uses the classic “paperclip machine” to make sense of it. Then she turns to Washington, where President Trump waved the whole thing off (“whoever wins AI, wins”), House Speaker Mike Johnson warned against losing the race to China, and former President Obama urged a real plan before the midterms.

And because aiGED usually lives on the helpful side of AI, Ginny shares her own experiment for the main topic — trying to get AI to clean up her Apple photo library — and the honest, funny truth about what it could and couldn't do. (She still cleared out 1,185 photos and 188 videos.) She closes with two recommendations: the extended CBS Sunday Morning interview with Dario Amodei, and a no-tech-required idea — spending time with a box of old photos and cards.

Pull up a chair for Episode 54 — and yes, we'll get to the question Ginny's brother texted her: is AI going to kill us? Thank you for being here.

SHOW LINKS

🔗 Dario Amodei, “We Must Pace the Frontier” (essay): https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier

🔗 Extended Interview: Dario Amodei — CBS Sunday Morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQR_VJF6ukk

🔗 BoomBox Gifts (the card-box idea from Ginny's recommendations): https://www.boomboxgifts.com

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and Warning

01:54 AI Leaders Call Slowdown

03:45 Why Amodei Is Alarmed

06:52 Three Safety Steps

07:38 Pushback and Politics

11:54 Where Ginny Lands

12:55 Apple Photos Cleanup Reality

17:26 Hugging Face Name Origin

19:10 Paperclip Lesson and Swarm

22:14 Recommendations and Wrap Up

aiGED: AI for the 65+ crowd