The Government Knows AGI is Coming
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What is the urgency around AGI development?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. For the past couple of months, I've been having this strange experience where person after person, independent of each other from AI labs, from government has been coming to me and saying, it's really about to happen. We're really about to get to artificial general intelligence. And What they mean is that they have believed for a long time that we are on a path to creating transformational artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence capable of doing basically anything a human being can do behind a computer, but better than most human beings can do it. And before they thought, you know, maybe take five or 10 years, 10 or 15 years.
But now they believe it's coming inside of two to three years inside Donald Trump's second term. And they believe it because of the products they're releasing right now. They believe because of what they're seeing inside the places they work. And I think they're right. If you've been telling yourself this isn't coming, I really think you need to question that. It's not Web3. It's not Vaporware. A lot of what we're talking about is already here right now. And I think we are on the cusp of an era in human history that is unlike any of the eras we have had before. And we're not prepared in part because it's not clear what it would mean to prepare. We don't know what this will look like, what it will feel like. We don't know how labor markets will respond.
We don't know which country is going to get there first. We don't know what it will mean for war. We don't know what it'll mean for peace. And as much as there is so much else going on in the world to cover, I do think there's a good chance that when we look back on this era in human history, this will have been the thing that matters. This will have been the event horizon, the thing that the world before it and the world after it were just different worlds. One of the people who reached out to me is Ben Buchanan, who was the former special advisor for artificial intelligence in the Biden White House. And I thought it'd kind of be interesting to bring on for a couple of reasons. One is that this is not a guy working for an AI lab. So he's not being paid by the big AI labs to tell you this technology is coming. The second is that he was at the nerve center of what policy we have been making in recent years. And we have been doing things. And in particular, we've been doing things to try to stay ahead of China.
And he's been at the center of that working on the national security side. And three, because there's now been a profound changeover in administrations. And the new administration between Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and David Sachs and JD Vance has a lot of people with very, very, very strong views on AI. It's not something that they're going in without having thought about. So we're at this moment of a big transition in the policymakers, and they are probably going to be in power when a GEI or something like it hits the world. So what are they going to do? What kinds of decisions are going to need to be made?
Why is the U.S. government concerned about AI advancements?
And what kinds of thinking do we need to start doing now to be prepared for something that virtually everybody who works in this area is trying to tell us as loudly as they possibly can is coming. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Ben Buchanan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So you gave me a call after the end of the Biden administration, and I got a call from a lot of people in the Biden administration who wanted to tell me about all the great work they did. And you sort of seemed to want to warn people about what you now thought was coming. What's coming?
I think we are going to see extraordinarily capable AI systems. I don't love the term artificial general intelligence, but I think that will fit in the next couple of years, quite likely during Donald Trump's presidency. And I think there's a view that this has always been something of corporate hype or speculation.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the urgency around AGI development?
0:05–3:18
2
Why is the U.S. government concerned about AI advancements?
3:18–8:38
3
How would AGI impact national security and global dominance?
8:38–13:53
4
What are the cybersecurity implications of advanced AI?
13:53–24:12
5
What are the political tensions between the U.S. and China regarding AI?
24:12–40:07
6
How are AI safety and competition being debated in Washington?
40:07–45:12
7
What are the potential impacts of AI on democracy and surveillance?
45:12–49:59
8
What is the role of big tech companies in AI development?
49:59–1:05:46