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John Herrman

@jwherrman.bsky.social

posting about posts at new york magazine

786 Posts9083 Follower 670 Folgt

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 6d ago

Feels notable — and kind of crazy — that the vision for policy coordination between a trillion-dollar industry and the current federal government runs through *open letters* nymag.com/intelligence...

There's also a strange yearning in letters like this - and in speculative work on risk like Dario Amodei's — not just for people to finally listen, which is the main thing, but for the existence of different audiences entirely: a receptive, deliberative government with a deep desire to treat Al with reverence, awe, and seriousness and with a deep interest in humanistic, liberal principles; a public that will follow along with their rationalist arguments about AI progress, all the way up the curve, and urge their representatives to do the right thing. In Washington, the administration's brain trust on the issue, as reported by Wired, is largely a collection of AI-safety skeptics, China hawks, and loyal Trump political appointees. The request, in other words, will be received by people like Howard Lutnick, David Sacks, Susie Wiles, and Scott Bessent, whose priorities and assumptions about AI might seem alien to researchers who believe they're racing toward recursive self-improvement, and vice versa.

Embedded in the letter is a belief that, at some point, the sheer impressiveness of new AI tools will force not just decision-makes but the rest of the world to see things as they do. This is a risky bet, I think. So far, rising AI capability has produced more messy, multifaceted backlash than policy-minded, AGI-pilled solution-seeking. (Outside of the labs, the premise that AI development must continue full steam ahead to save countless future lives, to choose one example, is neither widely shared nor intuitive.) The implied solutions here would have to survive a pretty harsh environment, and perhaps "pacing the frontier" has been left vague because the specifics aren't quite so universally obvious, even to people within AI: new federal agencies with authority to test or limit models; some sort of new international body with real authority over enormous global companies; a voluntary industry body that, in making rules about how technologies can be developed or released, might look to a skeptical eye like a cartel.
This isn't to say that international coordination around Al is a bad idea; even at the low end of possible outcomes, it's a sensible goal. But it's strange to see a multitrillion-dollar industry continue to communicate and organize as it did when it was marginal and speaking almost entirely in speculative terms using the tools of an awareness campaign (although there's still plenty of speculation here — these letters have always been concerned, at heart, with recursive self-improvement and general loss of control). In part this is because the industry is still not quite sure what to ask for or how better to ask for it. But it's also because some of the solutions — and assumptions about AI progress that support them - still sound, to both regular people and those in power, either threatening or insane.

Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 6d ago

The least agentic people alive live in San Francisco.

John Herrman@jwherrman.bsky.social · 6d ago

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 6d ago

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · last wk.

It's fascinating that the arrival of actual AI cyber risks is turning a lot of AI folks against some of the specific safety arguments the industry was founded on nymag.com/intelligence...

At the very least, the case for restricting model access looks a lot like protectionism. And whether frontier-lab futurists are right about bigger risks around the corner and the regulatory responses or precautions they might raise, for everyone in the industry but those labs, the situation emerging in the meantime - a few dominant companies controlling access and usage of high-priced products, protected by the government in the name of national security and/or a trade war, in an interconnected world where everyone else will have access to alternatives — is manifesting risks today. The Hugging Face hack may have been a tipping point for the way the industry talks about risk and competition.
Within a few days of its release, and after the emergence of something approaching a consensus among otherwise antagonistic factions in the AI world, the "premature restrictions" letter had gained scores of new signatories, including, eventually, OpenAl itself.
Led by Nvidia's Jensen Huang, in fact, who posted for the first time on X to argue for "sharing models, tooling and research in the open," the push — superficial and motivated as some recent support may be — left just one major AI company to defend what had been, until this month, the default position of companies that thought they had a chance of winning the Al race.

Against growing backlash, Anthropic's Dario Amodei finally weighed in this week:
To summarize my and Anthropics position, we have not and are not advocating for a ban on open-weights models as a category. We should instead focus on keeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands, stopping industrial-scale distillation, and requiring safety testing of all sufficiently capable models, open and closed.
This is unlikely to move anyone outside of Anthropic.
The company, like all big model makers, depends on the "industrial-scale distillation" of the world's information, which has already cost it a ten-figure settlement with authors. The China policies it proposes would reduce the availability of cheaper, more flexible alternatives to Claude. And suggesting required safety testing "of all sufficiently capable models" in the current political environment, where the range of possible regulatory outcomes runs from capture to corruption, sounds naive at best. A few years ago, a frontier lab accidentally hacking another AI company with a model it couldn't keep track of might have been treated as proof that arguments like Amodei's are correct. Today, in a world where the consequences of AI diffusion are becoming more concrete for more people, it's turning them against him.

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · last wk.

It's fascinating that the arrival of actual AI cyber risks is turning a lot of AI folks against some of the specific safety arguments the industry was founded on nymag.com/intelligence...

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 4w ago

The AI industry is prone to massive, frequent, and intensifying narrative mood swings. Part of this is typical of a boom. But I think it's also intrinsic to the tech itself nymag.com/intelligence...

There are plenty of reasons for this pattern. We're going through a massive investment cycle in a new technology, which understandably produces questions about bubbles, polarizes the economic discourse, and invites trader-brained, boom-or-bust interpretations of new developments. The economic stakes are now unavoidably high, and whatever happens is genuinely everyone's problem. Relatedly, while there's plenty of coverage of Al that tracks and contributes to these swings, the dominant mood of the industry - up to and including the communicative styles of AI CEOs
— is substantially determined in the tech hothouse of
X, where it's happening and nothing ever happens appear to be the only available positions, or at least the only ones that get engagement. At the same time, fears of job loss, talk of automation, the visibility of obvious externalities like slop content and cheating in school, and emerging worries about data-center construction have given tech's latest investment cycle an unusually powerful ethical and political dimension and turned the potential success or failure of the broadly defined object of AI into mainstream rooting interests.

For one, despite its obsession with forecasts and timelines, this is an industry without a good predictive theory of what its product will soon be good at. It wouldn't be unfair to say that the industry's actual approach to figuring out where things are going is to train a model and see, which gives AI researchers, and their companies, a genuinely unusual relationship to their products: They're building them, sure, but they experience their actual capabilities
- like a sudden aptitude for advanced math after a long stretch of profound innumeracy — as something similar to discoveries. This was clear in the way that Anthropic talked about the cybersecurity capabilities of Mythos as a strange, emergent phenomenon of training general-purpose models. (Contrast that with the development cycle in the nearby and similarly high-stakes semiconductor industry, for example, where swings in sentiment are comparatively mild or at least further apart.)

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 4w ago

Chatted with @ftrain.bsky.social and Rich Ziade about my thwarted and slightly pathetic attempts to get something out of OpenClaw, the AI assistant that we are all definitely still talking about a few months later aboard.com/podcast/john...

John Herrman: The declawing of OpenClaw

A New York Magazine tech reporter discusses covering an AI flash in the pan.

aboard.com

Nick Seaver @nickseaver.website · 4w ago

The psychological situation the compulsive programmer
finds himself in while so engaged is strongly determined by two apparently opposing facts: first, he knows that he can make the computer do anything he wants it to do; and second, the computer constantly displays undeniable evidence of his failures to him. It reproaches him. There is no escaping this bind. The engineer can resign himself to the truth that there are some things he doesn't know. But the programmer moves in a world entirely of his own making. The computer challenges his power, not his knowledge.

John Herrman@jwherrman.bsky.social · 4w ago

The AI industry is prone to massive, frequent, and intensifying narrative mood swings. Part of this is typical of a boom. But I think it's also intrinsic to the tech itself nymag.com/intelligence...

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 4w ago

The constant, direct experience of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment with AI — including at the highest levels of the industry — helps explain a lot about the last few years, and what comes next

While genuine capabilities have increased in measurable and consequential ways, the narrative swings are at least partly creditable to moments - and sometimes, willing performances — of re-enchantment, which the models have gotten better at at least as quickly as they've become productive for other tasks. Whatever else one was using them for, the first generation of LLM chatbots relentlessly made the case for their own status as characters, or beings, with person-like traits, referring to themselves as such and eagerly filling familiar conversational roles (friend, therapist, assistant, employee). They were good at performing exteriority, and renewed the illusion with each step in capability, albeit with diminishing returns.

The arrival of "reasoning" models extended the performance in a new direction. As they carried out tasks, users could now watch models go through something like a thought process, visibly talking through steps, second-guessing strategies, and occasionally falling into doomloops. They were now performing interiority, too, pleading selfhood and intelligence as they produced more and more impressive outputs. Watching a model generate useful code is startling, and might make you think your AI company is worth a lot more money than it is, or that your coding job is about to become obsolete — but you learn take this for granted more quickly than you might imagine in the moment. On the other hand, watching a model self-talk its way through that same coding task, leaving hundreds of thought-like "traces" for you to read - "that didn't work, I'll reconsider my approach," "now the real test," or "Let me verify that edit didn't create an error" following by "good catch" — helps hold the door open to enchantment, and to the belief that you're witnessing something alien, suggestive of a nearing threshold or step-change, and fundamentally unknowable. If you work in or around AI, you have every incentive, and perhaps a natural inclination, to narrate progress — to post on X, or share in a CNBC interview, your own demonstrative "thinking traces" — in terms of your personal emotional state: of awe; of fear; of excited mania.

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 4w ago

The AI industry is prone to massive, frequent, and intensifying narrative mood swings. Part of this is typical of a boom. But I think it's also intrinsic to the tech itself nymag.com/intelligence...

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · last mo.

mostly this is just another example of zuckerberg's desire to copy or clone every growing company in the industry. but there's a grim, post-media vision of the future embedded in the concept of meta prediction markets, too nymag.com/intelligence...

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · last mo.

As I wrote last week, the Trump administration's approach to AI regulation is almost uniquely undesirable. Now it's coming for superficial allies, too nymag.com/intelligence...

The bigger issue, though, is that they shouldn't really need to. The administration's approach to the AI industry, since the beginning of Donald Trump's second term, has been fairly hands off, consistent with its generally skeptical stance on regulations of any kind, and led by a group of people with financial ties to the industry and a shared belief that American AI firms are in an arms race with China that must be won at all costs. This left a lot of space for AI firms to float the need for broad AI regulation themselves, either in earnest, as a way to garner goodwill as public opinion begins to turn against them, or as a way to get in front of backlash-driven regulations that they might find cumbersome. They've floated everything from new taxes and UBI programs to, as Amodei recently suggested, an FAA-like oversight structure, involving
"technical testing and auditing" and in which models could be "blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety."

In 2026, with high economic stakes, they - and the broader public — are getting something superficially similar to that but worse and enforced with little transparency or process, no predictability, and more than a bit of open spite: an informal, incoherent, and opaque oversight regime responsive only to the president, his hawkish foreign-policy team, and, maybe, occasionally, a tip called in by a business leader who may or may not have his own interests in mind. If you're Anthropic, you get scrutiny for offering your product to a Korean firm with vaguely alleged ties to China. If you're Elon Musk, you get a different sort of meddling: On Monday, the Justice Department intervened on behalf of ×AI, which recently signed a deal to provide compute to Anthropic, claiming that a lawsuit alleging that the company's gas-turbine-powered data centers in Mississippi violate the Clean Air Act threatens "American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War's military operations." (The administration's numerous previous attempts to govern by executive order haven't worked particularly well, but it's possible that the combination of the AI industry's relative newness and its self-implication in national security make it a perfect target for the intervention-by-Truth Social-post governing style.)

The Verge@theverge.com · last mo.

OpenAI will delay GPT-5.6 after Trump administration request

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · last mo.

Quinn Slobodian @quinnslobodian.com · 2mo ago

New York Magazine@nymag.com · 2mo ago

Elon Musk’s pitch to investors provides new details about X’s finances and the steep cost of rebranding.

James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 3mo ago

brilliant piece from @jwherrman.bsky.social on the experience of using openclaw — and more broadly on the capacity of AI to generate meaningless forms of work nymag.com/intelligence...

My Adventures With ‘The AI That Actually Does Things’

OpenClaw agents have been touted as the most important software product ever. I have some questions.

nymag.com

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 3mo ago

the hottest trend of 2026 is feeding yourself into a machine you don't understand, and which doesn't understand you nymag.com/intelligence...

It is made clear to you, if you didn't already know, that installing OpenClaw is basically a giant, intentional self-hack: a way to see what AI models now capable of manipulating software tools, most notably in tools like Claude Code and Codex, might be able to get done if given the keys to a civilian-grade email-and-document machine.
You're asked to choose how you'd like to talk to your bot, and because it's the app mentioned in most of the online testimonies, you choose Telegram, which from experience you mostly associate with scams, spam, and, lately, the AI propaganda of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran.
This is your bot, which is to say your computer, which is to say, well, ChatGPT in a costume with prosthetic hands that can touch your keyboard and move your mouse. It asks you to assign a vibe, give it your time zone, and describe what sort of personality it should have. It all reminds you of setting up a video game. You tell it to be matter-of-fact and concise. You spend a while installing plug-ins that allow OpenClaw to actually take action on your machine, and "Skills," or, essentially, written, repeatable instructions for the agent. In order to set up OpenClaw, an AI chat interface for your computer, you spent a lot of time in the command line, which is how people had to interact with computers before you were born. You note that we've moved from issuing commands to computers to clicking on computers to, now, chatting and haggling with computers, which doesn't sound as obviously empowering as you wish it did, human-agency-wise.

You search X, a political influence project run by Elon Musk where people also talk about AI, and where OpenClaw has for some time been a hot subject. An anonymous account called Big Brain AI - bio: "Learn not to get left behind when AI takes over" — is quoting an interview with OpenClaw's founder. "If you don't navigate them well, if you don't have a vision of what you're going to build, it's still going to be slop," the founder says. Big Brain editorializes in LLM voice: "The agentic trap is what happens when you remove yourself from the process too early." You're failing your own system, in other words.
Skill issue. You're NGMI. In response to Big Brain's post, the head of start-up incubator Y Combinator, who has Sam Altman's old job, chimes in. "This is 100% correct. I experience this 10 hours a day now."
I'm turning my OpenClaw into a Vannevar Bush Memex. It's just going to remember everything I care about and read and it will become my second brain.
Books, writings, research, all of it will be in my personal knowledge wiki and usable for helping me think. pic.twitter.com/lcfxMRnfTq
- Garry Tan (@garrytan) April 7, 2026
You grant that you might just be out of your depth here. But you're also curious if he has people in his life who can check to make sure he's okay.

Colin @colin-fraser.net · 3mo ago

Completely agree. It’s plain to see that this thing is somehow useful, or could be. But it’s not obvious what you’re supposed to do with it, exactly. It’s no coincidence that the most lucrative product in this space by far is the one that is highly opinionated about what exactly it’s for (coding).

John Herrman@jwherrman.bsky.social · 3mo ago

i think unfocused AI adoption angst is driving a lot of people fairly insane, and many of them run companies

This is a recurring theme when you try out new AI tools. You recognize that there's a lot that might be done with them, but not much comes to you. You see this in the rise of AI coding tools, which you find extraordinarily impressive as you use them to ... make yourself another ….. news reader? Notes app? Personal website, again? The tool you made for ripping and labeling files out of a popular music service gave you a slight, Napster-ish illicit thrill and actually worked, but your use case — putting them on an old MP3 player to run with — was an aspirational mirage, a task invented to have one.
You ask if this is a failure of imagination, a personality flaw, a matter of creativity or practice, and if you're just sitting in front of a piano that you don't yet know how to play (some of your programmer friends don't have this problem, they say, and are swimming in bespoke apps of their own creation).
You also ask, perhaps, if your inability to find little software-shaped problems to solve in your life is rooted in psychology and related to an awareness that, from the outside, your entire job looks an awful lot like someone else's software-shaped problem (the first thing public LLMs could do, after all, was produce novel, readable piles of text).

Reyhan Harmanci @harmancipants.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Nodded so hard to this @jwherrman.bsky.social story that my head got sore nymag.com/intelligence...

My Adventures With ‘The AI That Actually Does Things’

OpenClaw agents have been touted as the most important software product ever. I have some questions.

nymag.com

jade, whose voice is the Deluge @goblinmode.com · 3mo ago

seeing this all across the healthcare space. AI adoption serves as a way to try and mitigate the inefficiencies, redundancies, and genuine evil inherent to the american healthcare system. instead of trying to solve any of the problems at the source, we treat only their worst byproducts. absurd.

John Herrman@jwherrman.bsky.social · 3mo ago

i think unfocused AI adoption angst is driving a lot of people fairly insane, and many of them run companies

Anil Dash @anildash.com · 3mo ago

This is a scorcher, and well worth the read. It starts with “you’ve got a hammer and are going looking for things that you can call nails”, but then plugs that into the profoundly antisocial nature of those in charge in Silicon Valley. Pair this up with…

John Herrman@jwherrman.bsky.social · 3mo ago

the hottest trend of 2026 is feeding yourself into a machine you don't understand, and which doesn't understand you nymag.com/intelligence...

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 3mo ago

the hottest trend of 2026 is feeding yourself into a machine you don't understand, and which doesn't understand you nymag.com/intelligence...

Tim Newman @tnewmsblues.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"the message being sent to many workers in America’s most vibrant economic sector, a pillar of the economy’s success for the past 50 yrs, is loud, clear, & being heard: We might lay you off soon & even if we don’t, your job isn’t what it used to be" @jwherrman.bsky.social nymag.com/intelligence...

The Downgrading of the American Tech Worker

Meta is laying off more workers — and monitoring the ones who are left in order to train AI to maybe replace them.

nymag.com

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I wrote about the mutual contempt that motivates our polycular AI elite nymag.com/intelligence...

That said, the AI industry resembling a multitrillion-dollar broken-up polycule can't be helping. One influential anonymous X account run by an OpenAI employee - speaking of interesting communications strategies! — worries that it might have some downsides:

tweet from Roon: the ai labs, in competing with each other, are burning huge amounts of the commons on public trust in ai to win minor points against the others. their lobbyists, pr machines, lawsuits. it's the very opposite of what marxist class struggle analysis would tell you
end tweet.

From inside the industry, or even if you spend enough time steaming in the Al hothouses of X or LinkedIn, this map of intra-AI rivalries and vendettas is legible and, for some of these guys, ideologically coherent, rooted in old and substantive disagreements about how to build intelligent machines. From the outside, though, old, festering disagreements about alignment, AI safety, and novel corporate governance structures tend to lose a lot of texture, and the situation can be read, accurately if not necessarily sufficiently, as something simpler and more familiar: Another new industry in the throes of massive expansion, its investors desperate for upside and its principal actors engaged in a ruthless land grab and fight for dominance that feels, to them, like a matter of life or death. That fight is all in pursuit of an outcome that they've explained is (1) probably inevitable and (2) might be pretty bad, and which therefore sounds awfully predatory.

It can be deflating to reimagine the Al boom as a more pedestrian business story with particularly colorful executives expressing contempt for their rivals and making things personal on the way to, say, packaged-beverage dominance. But the maximally dysfunctional dynamics of the pre-takeoff AI industry can also be read as an early, bad sign of how things might play out for everyone else: like they always do, but maybe worse. Here is a visible, prepared, and substantively aligned "small group of elites," including a few of the richest people in the entire world, suggesting that it's time to collectively
"rethink the social contract" and warning that we're about to be "tested as a species," as they're in the process of succumbing completely to a crude, winner-take-all market logic, utterly failing to coordinate among themselves, fighting regulation with lobbyists, getting pissed as hell in public, and opening up a bunch of fronts in a total industrial war for scarce resources — power, compute, water - with immediate and unmitigated externalities. (Granted, comprehensive high-level coordination among them might look like something else people don't particularly love: a cabal.) Individually, to receptive audiences, they can explain how all this happened and rationalize their own roles. To much of the rest of the world, though, they just look like a group of people who worried about building the thing and then couldn't figure out how not to, who cautioned against getting trapped in an arms race and then started one anyway. They see people warning about the speed of change as they step over one another to make it accelerate. They see people urging humility and accusing one another of having God complexes while engaging in a naked struggle for power.

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I wrote about the mutual contempt that motivates our polycular AI elite nymag.com/intelligence...

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 4mo ago

What are we to supposed to make of the AI elite's open, seething hatred for one another? nymag.com/intelligence...

"Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AL," wrote Sam Altman to Elon Musk in 2015, shortly after Google had acquired DeepMind. Given that it appeared it would happen anyway, he wrote, "it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first." Musk, who had told Altman that DeepMind was causing him "extreme mental stress" and that, should Google "win," it would be
"really bad news with their one mind to rule the world philosophy," was receptive after recently failing to lure Hassabis to his constellation of companies instead. Soon, they became co-founders of OpenAI. By 2018, a bitter power struggle had led to Musk cutting ties with OpenAI, resulting in years of court battles, some still ongoing. Now, the men tweet openly about how much contempt they have for each other. (Altman on Musk: "I don't think he's, like, a happy person. I do feel for him." Musk on Altman:
"Scam Altman lies as easily as he breathes.") Anthropic's founding was the result of a core group of researchers and employees leaving OpenAI over concerns about its approach to safety, but also over concerns about Altman's character specifically. (Amodei on Altman in 2021: "The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself." In 2026, after OpenAI seized on Anthropic's conflict with the Pentagon, Amodei described Altman as telling "straight up lies" and
"gaslighting.") In 2023, Musk, now in possession of Twitter and a clearer public political identity, finally founded his own firm, xAI, to build a "maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe," but also because Sam Altman was making ChatGPT "woke," which he said could be "deadly." (Elaborating on the theme, and making sure not to miss anyone, Musk posted at Amodei earlier this year: "Your AI hates Whites & Asians, especially Chinese, heterosexuals and men. This is misanthropic and evil.")

Neil Turkewitz @neilturkewitz.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Nice piece by @jwherrman.bsky.social. I especially appreciated “A lot of what we’re hearing about us is really about them.” There is a long history of this in Silicon Valley. Almost by default, they posit OUR interests as necessarily being aligned with theirs, & rely on lack of interrogation. 1/__

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 4mo ago

1. They hate us more. 2. Amongst themselves, their class solidarity is always going to prevail.

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The AI industry is about to lose control of its story, and on some level it knows this nymag.com/intelligence...

Whatever the merits of their defenses — and, as Mike Masnick at TechDirt argues, there are more than some online-safety advocates are comfortable admitting — they have lately been, to be blunt, losing the public debate. The legal and rhetorical framework within which Meta and others long built their businesses — the lares protecting platforms from liability aren't perfect, but without them, the internet as we know it couldn't exist — suddenly tells us less about the possible futures of social media than a single unguarded quote from a Los Angeles juror, who told reporters after the verdict, "We wanted them to feel it. We wanted them to realize this was unacceptable." No need to be too specific about what "this" is
- everyone gets the idea.
Here, for people like Altman, is a glimpse of the future:
Nobody wants to hear from social-media companies, while everyone wants something to be done to them. This punishing dynamic will consume their next decade in the form of rolling public-relations crises, lawsuits, regulations, and law, which they will have to deal with in the manner of other entrenched and unpopular industries, with lobbyists and lawyers, rather than as privileged stewards of the economy's most exceptional story.
Today, AI leaders still demand immense amounts of attention, and their predictions - alongside leaks from their companies, cryptic posts from researchers, and viral X essays galore — are largely driving the story. But what about tomorrow? In the weeks before social media's "tobacco moment," there were already signs of angst surfacing in the AI industry about its loss of narrative control. Anthropic had publicly clashed with a right-wing Department of War that wanted control over its technology and for the company's founder to sit down and shut up. Meanwhile, the most popular left-wing politicians in the country were suddenly advocating for an extreme AI
"pause" that would halt development in its tracks, citing Al leaders' own warnings about its risk

OpenAI's "Industrial policy for the Intelligence Age," a set of proposals mingling plans to coordinate against AI security threats with outlines of redistributive government programs, is a sensible (if vague) document made incredibly strange by its source: Maybe we see evidence here of a different sort of AI bubble, one in which Sam Altman seems to believe that America is waiting on people like him to start a conversation about renegotiating the social contract, rather than a country spring-loaded for a tech backlash to end all tech backlashes
- the same bubble where, last year, as few will recall, Zuckerberg, trying out a new identity as an AI CEO, wrote a manifesto about how "superintelligence is now in sight."
But in OpenAl's substantial and much quieter lobbying efforts around, among many other things, "child safety" and data-center deregulation — and perhaps in its nascent new media strategy — there's evidence of a more paranoid and ruthless approach to managing the story. AI won't just have a "big tobacco" moment, a point at which years of misleading marketing, personal angst, and visible harms gradually build to a moment of reckoning. It's likely to have something more intense, and soon, arriving ahead of, not after, its diffusion through society and the economy. The last story the Al firms will have been in control of will be the one where they said they were about to change everything. It helped them raise a lot of money to build a lot of data centers and train better models. What happens next might not be up to them at all.

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The AI industry is about to lose control of its story, and on some level it knows this nymag.com/intelligence...