Our publisher Joe Ragazzo is going to be hosting biweekly YouTube lives with members of our team, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Join him at 1 p.m. ET today for a conversation with editor Nicole LaFond and reporter Kate Riga on the 25th anniversary of 9/11; the start of the NFL season; President Trump’s bribe offer/proposal to give Americans $5,000 if Republicans win the midterms; and Vivek Ramaswamy’s widely-mocked batting cage campaign video.

We’ll see you then!

David Kurtz has a good run-down of the overnight Joe diGenova story in today’s Morning Memo. DiGenova went rogue, then resigned or got fired, then publicly went rogue (essentially claimed that Trump Main Justice wanted to bring evidence-less indictments) and then tried to sort of un-rogue, I guess so as not lose his seat on the Trump gravy/TV hit train. DiGenova is no innocent; he’s a GOP partisan knife-fighter going back to the early ’90s. He made the still-significant shift to team Trump basically at the first opportunity. And here we are.

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.

Following up on my previous post, I want to point your attention to this post by Gary Marcus, a highly respected and knowledgable critic/skeptic of AI. You should read it just to get a range of views on this question. The gist is this. He points to two recent warnings. One is the one I describe below in the previous post. The other recently came from a leading mathematician named Terence Tao, who was recently interviewed by Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. Tao warns that the evolution and use of AI is creating a new dynamic in which AI is in the process of shutting down collaboration and information sharing in mathematics and, Tao suspects, soon in the sciences as well. (This part isn’t just asserted. It’s detailed and interesting.) That’s not human extinction, but it’s not great, to put it mildly.

Marcus then turns to the Coxon story. I’ll quote his overview reaction in full.

I happen to disagree with him around timing, and I would argue that Coxon is exaggerating what AI is likely to do anytime soon. But it is nonetheless overall a disconcerting (and plausible) firsthand perspective on the transparently self-indulgent and dangerous thought processes in two of the leading frontier labs

So too alarmist as to time horizons but not implausible and not something to laugh off, either.