One more thing… Apple’s first foldable iPhone, the iPhone Duo, is here.

Before becoming a scientist and startup founder, Demetri Maxim was a competitive skier.

He says pitching on stage can feel surprisingly similar to standing at the top of a downhill race: your brain tells you to be scared, and you have to turn that fear into excitement.

Hear more from Demetri and Dr. Eike Gerhardt on Build Mode.

AI companies have been talking about superintelligent AI like it’s inevitable, but recent safety incidents like OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach are demonstrating the potential dangers of deploying AI systems that are more capable than humans. So what happens when we can’t reliably control what these systems do?

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, entrepreneur, and now the U.S. Executive Director of nonprofit ControlAI, which is pushing for a far more radical approach to AI safety: stopping companies from developing superintelligence altogether. Leahy explains why he thinks the risks have become too great to manage through alignment and containment alone, and how what sounded far-fetched six months ago is now being backed by a wave of new legislation.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
1:23 From GPT-2 shock to founding Control AI
5:10 Why alignment isn’t working…and can’t be fixed with money
9:48 Defining superintelligence: not a tool, an adversary
11:15 Inside the Hugging Face incident
14:34 Market failure and the case for regulation
21:22 The point of no return and recursive self-improvement
30:15 Money, power, and the international stakes
35:17 Advice for investors, the odds, and a final note of hope
41:08 Outro