We’re now flooded with articles about the threat of AI. Here’s another one from the Times op-ed page by a tech journalist, Stephen Witt, who’s written a history of Nvidia, the chip maker powering a lot of the AI boom. Witt describes a few possible approaches to legal intervention. Interestingly, he points to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) as two legislators pitching new laws to get in control of the situation. Casar has a quote that captures it all and illustrates how absent “externalities” are to anything about how we regulate tech: “If the A.I. companies understood that their products have to be safe before they can advance, then they will make the kinds of investments that we need.” Of course, having two left-wing legislators from the party which isn’t even in power as the two guys on the case doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence that anything is going to happen any time soon.

You’ve probably seen these reports of an employee of the AI company Anthropic who quit his job and issued a warning on X that suggested AI could, in next few years, escape control and lead to the extinction of humanity. These sound like not just wild but science fiction-type claims. And they’ve lurked around frontier AI labs for years. It’s one of the many weirdnesses of the AI world and those who lead it. The basic pitch: AI is awesome. We need to built it as quickly as possible. Also it might lead to human extinction. Quite an attractive offer! There’s always been a strong sense among many observers that these claims or suggestions or warnings are part of the AI hype machine itself, albeit of a kind of contradictory or paradoxical variety.

But this warning by the ex-Anthropic employee, Jacob Coxon, seems different and is unquestionably being reacted to very differently. That’s the one part of this that is new and real – the reaction to this warning/comment etc is much bigger and operating in the tech, financial and general media. Wired has a good interview with him here. (I think you can read it as a free article if you haven’t read other Wired articles this month.) The gist is that Coxon says it’s imperative to create a regulatory structure, or at least an ad-hoc agreement that can slow the competition between OpenAI and Anthropic, the two most advanced AI engines and research entities. (The inflection point people are focusing on is something called “recursive self-improvement,” which is when this generation of AI model builds the next one.) The problem is that you really need an agreement that brings China into some common framework too. Because they’re in this same hunt, running these same risks, even though I think the common consensus is that Chinese companies are running at least somewhat behind the most advanced U.S. companies. China’s strength has been building models which are only a bit behind the U.S. models but at dramatically lowest costs.

I got a host of very interesting responses to yesterday’s post about the tech platforms force-feeding the mass consumer market AI. I learned a lot from your responses, which included both direct personal experiences and expert perspectives on different dimensions of the topic. What is important to me about this moment is distinguishing two or three different very real things happening at once.

The first is a genuine critical mass in the development of LLM-based machine learning. This is a much better description than “AI” to my thinking, since the latter contains a vast range of meanings from simple and accurate to triumphalist and grandiose. But machine learning is real, and in recent years it’s developed real capabilities that are at least transformative in various areas of work and technology. I’m skeptical of what we’ve developed beyond this at this point but really don’t know. It could be a lot. And it will increase. I think this is the best way to understand the technology itself at this moment now.

I just got a new iPhone. I didn’t need a newer version. But my old one was broken in a way that wasn’t easily fixed. So I submitted myself to the hard wheel of planned obsolescence. I’m always happy for ever-improved image quality. Otherwise, for me, it was just a need for a new, undamaged phone. But this is one of the models which Apple tells you very frequently has their AI bundled into the device. Which I’m told is awesome. Or that’s what they’re telling me. A lot. And my sense generally is that Apple is the least over-the-top of the big techs in this regard.

As I’ve been using the new phone, I’ve noticed that the Apple texting app now takes suggested phrases and completing your words to the next level — as in kind of an absurd level.