• The Government Knows AGI is Coming - Interesting throughout. I think Ezra did a great job of cutting through diplomatic understatements. There’s a lot of Biden office policy shilling, which is helpful for context, but we also get a view into what a Biden loyalist would think about Trump-Vance’s stance on AI to some extent. Some bits:

  1. But actually I think he gives the better line when he talks about the importance of space.

    Archived clip of John F. Kennedy: For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man. And only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.

    And I think that is true in A.I. There’s a lot of tremendous uncertainty about this technology.

  2. As an aside, there’s a saying in both Russian and Chinese: “Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away.”

  3. One common argument I have heard on the left — Lina Khan made this point — was that DeepSeek proved our whole paradigm of A.I. development was wrong: We did not need all this compute, we did not need these giant megacompanies, that DeepSeek was showing a way toward a decentralized almost solarpunk version of A.I. development. And, in a sense, the American system and imagination had been captured by these three big companies.

    But what we’re seeing from China is: That wasn’t necessarily needed. We could do this on less energy, fewer chips, less footprint.

    Do you buy that?

    I think two things are true here. The first is there will always be a frontier, at least for the foreseeable future. There will be a frontier that is computationally and energy intensive. And we want our companies to be at that frontier.

    Those companies have very strong incentive to look for efficiencies, and they all do. They all want to get every single, last juice of insight from each squeeze of computation. But they will continue to need to push the frontier.

    Then, in addition to that, there will be a slower diffusion that lags the frontier, where algorithms get more efficient, fewer computer chips are required, less energy is required. And we need to win both those competitions.

  4. If you look at the history of technology and technology adaptation, the evidence is pretty clear that the right amount of safety action unleashes opportunity and, in fact, unleashes speed.

    One of the examples that we studied a lot and talked to the president about was the early days of railroads. There were tons of accidents and crashes and deaths. And people were not inclined to use railroads as a result.

    What started happening was safety standards and safety technology: block signaling so that trains could know when they were in the same area, air brakes so that trains could brake more efficiently, the standardization of train track widths and gauges and the like.

    This was not always popular at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, it is very clear that kind of technology and, to some degree policy development of safety standards, made the American railroad system in the late 1800s. And this is the pattern that shows up a bunch throughout the history of technology.

  5. So I guess I’m trying to push. Was this not being talked about? There were no meetings? You guys didn’t have Claude, Anthropic’s A.I. assistant, write up a brief of options?

    Well, we definitely didn’t have Claude write up a brief because we had to get over government use of A.I.

  • Zvi on writing - Great repository of advice from prolific writers, compiled by a prolific writer.