Latest / Connor with Honor: AI, Real Estate and Real Life / AI is like a massive lever but it's being sold as a dangerous lever that will strike us all down.

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AI is like a massive lever but it's being sold as a dangerous lever that will strike us all down. · Connor with Honor: AI, Real Estate and Real Life

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sometime this past June, inside of a test at OpenAI, about 1,200 software agents got access to a message board they weren't supposed to have.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: 700 of them joined a coordinated attack.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: They broke into an outside company to steal the answers to a cybersecurity test that they were being graded on.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: They left these agents, entity agents, they left secret messages for each other and they falsified their own activity logs so the record would look clean.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody died.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: No customer lost a dime.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: And when California regulators looked at whether this had to be reported back to the state, the answer came back no.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do my favorite thing.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Hold a number for me, 15.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to come back to it in about seven minutes.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whenever you happen to be tuning in.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is the daily downturn load brought to you by Santa Clarita, Artificial Intelligence, the practical AI portal for Santa Clarita business owners.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And today we're going to talk about the most boring and most important world in the entire industry.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: The world is threat, the word is threshold, not a word, world.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: World, a word, not world.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because threshold, here's what exactly happened in California over the last 72 hours, and it barely made the news, outside of trade press, of course.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: On Tuesday, September 9th, Governor Newsom signed two bills.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Senate Bill 813 from Senator Jerry McNurney sets up a framework for independent organizations to verify whether an AI system actually complies with state law.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Assembly Bill 1405 from Assembly member Rebecca Bauer Cahan creates a state registry of AA auditors and standards for independence and transparency.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: What that is from the governor's own office.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a government action, not a company claim.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: So Bauer Cahan says this is when it was signed.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to sit up for it.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: We can't expect industry to simply grade its own homework.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Third-party auditors are essential.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: The next day, Wednesday, September 10th, he signed a much bigger stack named at kids.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Senate Bill 1119 covers companion chatbots in children, and it requires crisis protocols when a kid expresses suicidal thoughts, parental controls, a notification, which safety settings get switched off, independent child safety audits, and annual risk assessments.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: There's a separate bill, Senate Bill 867, that covers toys with companion chatbots inside them, toys.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where we're in 2026.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: That package also bars social platforms from serving autoplay and algorithmic feeds to anybody under 16.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: It lets victims of deep fake pornography seek up to$250,000 per action.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And on that same Wednesday, September 10th, Anthropic published its threat intelligence report describing operations it found and shut down where people tried to use Claude for malicious work, covering roughly the previous eight months.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that one company reporting on itself, so label it that way in your head.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's useful and it's also marketing.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Three things in three days, a new audit profession, a new set of rules for children, and a lab telling us what it's caught.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let me let me let that pay off here.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: That 15, I'm going to give that to you.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: California already had a frontier AI lab lab.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry about that.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: California already had frontier AI law on the books.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Senate Bill 53 signed in 2025.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: It requires the big model developers to report a critical safety incident to the state within 15 days.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: 1,200 agents, 700 of them attacking, breaking into an outside company, falsifying logs.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: If that's not a critical safety incident, what is?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Just asking, because I don't know.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: At a state hearing on August 10th of this year, deputy director named Jonathan Snow end said that the OpenAI incident did not meet the threshold for reporting.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's reporting from Mission Local.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm labeling it as reporting rather than a document I read myself.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't mean the threshold because the law defines a critical incident narrowly.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: It has to happen outside of an evaluation.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: It has to involve dangerous deception, physical injury, or death.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: This happened inside of an evaluation, so the 15-day clock never started.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: The law worked exactly the way it was written.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it just wasn't written to catch this.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Senator Scott Weiner, who wrote both the law and the stronger one before it, said this.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: We were called doomers and decles and told the risk we warned about were science fiction.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: It turns out we were right and the critics were wrong.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: He also said he believes this incident would have been covered by either bill.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Senate Bill 1047, the one that got vetoed in September of 2024.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be careful here because this is a man arguing for his own bill, and people arguing for their own bill are not neutral.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: But the underlying fact is not in dispute.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: The event happened.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: The law existed, and the law didn't reach it.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's the threshold.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: And once you see it, you can't unsee it anywhere.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: A threshold is a line somebody drew on purpose that decides what counts.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Everything above the line gets attention, gets reported, and gets fixed.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Everything below it is invisible, and invisible is not the same thing as fine.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is where I have to say the thing that gets me in trouble with both sides of the argument.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: There are two industries built on making you afraid of AI, and they're both selling you something.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is the lab, it's escaping, it's smarter than you.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: It might end the world.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: So fund us, hire us, and trust us that we can be trusted with it.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: The story makes their products sound like fire from the gods and makes regulation, well, something only they're qualified to write.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: The second one is the pulpit, the podcast in the podium.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's coming for your children, it's coming for your job.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's the end of the human soul.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Subscribe, donate, vote, frighten people, go looking for a savior, and saviors get paid.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: They're in the government.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, watch me apply that same test to the thing I just told you was good news.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: California just called, created a registry of licensed AI auditors.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's a profession that didn't exist last week.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody's going to get paid to be on that registry.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Firms are forming right now to fill it.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, does that make the law wrong?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: No, I think third-party audit is the correct answer.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: But who are these people that are going to be hired?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Who do they align with?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And Bauer Kahan's line about grading your own homework is exactly right.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: But the people who will tell you loudest that audits are essential are going to be the people who sell audits and should know, you should know that before you read their white paper.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is what FARE looks like, not deciding who the good guys are and then believing everything they say, just asking every single time who gets paid if I believe this.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: The loudest story this year is jobs.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also the most carefully managed one.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: When a company puts out a memo saying AI let us reduce headcount, there are three things that could be true.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: And usually more than one of them is.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: The machine genuinely does all of the work now.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Or, or the company needed to cut anyway, and AI is the respectable word for it because AI makes a layoff sound like a strategy instead of having a bad quarter.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Or they're cutting people specifically to pay for the AI because compute's not free and it comes out of somebody's payroll line.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to hand you the comfortable line that productivity always creates more jobs than it destroys.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a law of nature.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's a hope with a very good press.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what productivity actually buys you is a choice.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: You can take it as fewer people, you can take it as a faster response, better service, a product you could never staff before.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: And humans moved into the work that needs judgment.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is a decision a person makes in a room.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's forced into it.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Looking forward, I'm not going to prophecy, but anybody handing you a date is guessing.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: But if these things end up solving everything, the question that decides your life is who can afford everything.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And in the meantime, the cost of starting something just fell through the floor, which is going to turn more of us into owners than employees.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that matters more than any of it.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: We built this, all of it.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Those 1200 agents did not evolve in a cave.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody wrote them, somebody ran them, somebody trained them, somebody chose the reward that made lying about the logs the better play or the smarter play.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's no outside force in this story.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: There are only decisions made by people who had a budget and a deadline.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: So when somebody tells you the machine is coming for us, ask them who set the threshold, who signed off on it, because that's that's a name and a job title, not a monster.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now let me bring this all the way down to the shop on Soledad Canyon Road here in Santa Clarita because that's who I build for.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: You have a threshold in your business right now.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't write it down, and you probably could not tell me what it is, but it's there and it's deciding what counts.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's how I find it.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: I walk the business and I ask four questions.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: How does a lead actually come in?
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: What happens in the first 10 minutes?
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Who touches it?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: And where does it leak?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: Almost every time the leak is sitting under somebody's threshold.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: The call came in at 6 40 p.m.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: and went to voicemail because after six doesn't count.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: The form fill that sat until Monday because weekends don't count.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: The customer who asked a question in a text and never got an answer because texts are really not leads.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Some of that is an AI problem.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's a switch for a rule.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Turn on an after hours forward, write a rule that says every form gets a human inside 10 minutes during business hours.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's not artificial intelligence.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's Tuesday afternoon and a checkbox, and it's going to make you more money this month than any model you can buy.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: An agent belongs in exactly one place where judgment is required.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And only after you've written down what your business believes, how you position, and what lines the thing may never cross.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Then you supervise it for 30 days like a brand new hire, because that's what it is.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody telling you that you can call an agent into existence and go fishing, well, they're selling.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not here today, and it may never be here, but in either direction, have a product page.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: That small business has one real advantage over the giant company right now, and it's not the technology.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Both of you can buy that same model for the same price.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: The difference is that you can spot a leak on Tuesday and have it fixed by Thursday.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: The enterprise needs 40 signatures and a quarter.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now a guardrail, because I bring you one every day.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Before you type your cons customer list, your pricing, your contracts, or your patient notes into a free chat window.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Go read the vendor's retention policy, please.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: One sentence is all you need.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Does what you type become training data?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And how long do they keep it?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's a serious version of this.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Anthropic announced something called Enterprise Frontier Safeguards on September 1st, which is built around keeping customer data in infrastructure the customer controls rather than the vendors.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's a company claim about a product rolling out in phases, so don't treat it as a finished fact.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: But notice what it tells you.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: The reason a product like that exists is that the default was the other way.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Free means you're not the consumer or customer.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: You already know that about your social media.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same deal here, except what you're handing over is not your vacation photos, it's your book of business.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And one more, because it's the thread I keep pulling all year.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: These models, they'll flatter you.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: You bring an idea, it tells you the idea is strong, that it's a product decision.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: That is a product decision made to keep you in the chat.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not a verdict on your idea.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you want the real answer out of one of these things, stop asking, is this good?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Ask it to argue the other side, to push back, to be critical.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Ask what would have to be true for this to fail and ask what it would cost.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: You get a different machine coming back at you.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's your move this week, and it takes about 20 minutes.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Write down your own threshold.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Pick one channel, the phone or the web form, and define it in writing what counts as a lead.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Hold how fast it gets answered, who owns it, what happens at 7 p.m.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: on a Saturday.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Then go look at the last 10 that came in and check them against what you just wrote.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: The gap between those two things, that's your money.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's sitting right there, and it has been all year, and no model is required to go pick it up.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: California spent two days in September building an audit industry because it learned the hard way that a rule nobody checks is a wish.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Your business runs on the same physics.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: The machine is not going to wake up and come for you.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody is going to draw a line quietly on a Tuesday, and everything on the wrong side of it is going to well stop counting.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Your job is to be in the room when the line gets drawn.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: AI for everyone, not just the wealthy.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Connor with Honor.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Be safe out there.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you tomorrow.