Congratulations on an extraordinary career, Warren. I’m lucky to call you my friend and mentor. nyti.ms/475x4OZ

I agree. They're either being leaches, weasals, snakes or all of the above.

I was encouraged this week to see the leaders of the frontier labs agree on the need for them to slow down the pace of AI development. Given the stakes, it’s a good and necessary first step.   But I’m even more encouraged by the growing recognition that how this powerful new technology develops should be at the center of our public debate.   I’ve been watching the progress on AI for over a decade now, and one thing that’s clear to me is that the potential impact of this technology is not overhyped. It’s also moving at lightning speed – and even faster than those who are engineering it can keep up with.   I’m not an AI accelerationist who believes it will lead to some techno-utopia, and I’m not a doomer who thinks it will inevitably lead to humanity’s destruction. But whether this technology results in amazing breakthroughs in medicine, energy and education or unleashes huge economic disruptions, greater inequality, and potential catastrophe will depend on the choices that we make right now – choices that should be made not just by the companies involved, but by all of us.

People keep misunderstanding this. I CONTRIBUTED to Bostrom’s Superintelligence book and he thanks me by name in the foreword. I was thinking about AI safety long before 2014.

A welfare state and free immigration will obviously bankrupt any country. AI + robotics is the only path to universal high income for everyone on Earth.

President Trump's truth social post on Anthropic, Dario Amodei and a "sick conspiracy" against AI and data centers.

I hope the proposals by frontier labs to pace AI research stem from a genuine concern for safety and a recognition of the potential risks posed by future models, rather than a strategic effort to consolidate power and permanently solidify the market dominance of a few top players. If these efforts are genuine, then oversight must take a more democratic and accountable form, with both national and international components, similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency internationally. If there is only one organization responsible for safety monitoring, and it happens to be staffed by the same people as the frontier labs, and it is perfectly aligned with them both by incentives and by ideology, then it would be indistinguishable from letting frontier labs self-regulate and self-certify their own safety standards. Two potential warning signs of regulatory capture to watch out for: 1. Calls to ban open-source AI. Open-source development currently serves as the only real counterweight to the dominance of frontier labs. 2. Attempts to hinder non-frontier research. Models that are one or two generations behind the frontier -- whose level of capability has already been deployed at scale -- are empirically known not to pose safety risks. As long as we don't see 1 & 2, and we see real international coordination efforts, then I will optimistically believe that the proposals are benevolent.