⏩ FP! Week In Review #43
Also: Key Up Wing and Down Wing news from the week that was
In Case You Missed It ...
🔄️✨ Yes, fear of self-improving AI might actually lead to a slowdown (Wednesday, 881 words)
Yes, I’m in favor of continued AI progress. Second, I’ve been deeply skeptical that government will do much to delay it through regulation, much less create some global governance regime. This is based on (a) my experience tracking social media regulation, (b) AI’s transformative upside, (c) political polarization, (d) the Trump administration’s inability to pull off a major governance effort, and (e) competition with China. And without government taking the lead, I don’t expect profit-seeking companies to act on their own. That said, the companies seem to recognize the collective action problem, as evidenced by a letter with more than a thousand industry signatories that’s Washington to help “deliberately pace the frontier.” (One observer’s warning is apt: Normies will hear industry complaining about “competitive pressure” to hit the gas as “we don’t want to stop making money,” and the normies won’t love that.) So might the CEO warnings, data-center backlash, the OpenAI hack, and more collective letters actually produce an intentional slowdown? Hmm. That might explain an ongoing mystery: why AGI timelines on Metaculus and Kalshi keep lengthening despite the flood of rapid-progress news. Maybe “paced development” has been in the price all along. It’s theory worth considering.
📈 The business of AI: My interview with technology analyst and investor Azeem Azhar (Thursday, 34 minutes)
On this episode of Faster, Please!—The Podcast, I was joined by Azeem Azhar, a Digital Fellow at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, the founder of Exponential View, a research platform focused on helping leaders understand emerging technologies and their impact on society. He is also the author of The Exponential Age and the co-author of The State of the AI Economy, one of the first serious attempts to measure the size and trajectory of the AI economy from the demand side and know what customers are actually paying for. We discussed where the AI economy stands today, why businesses are still struggling to realize AI’s full potential, who stands to capture the greatest gains from the technology, and the roles different countries could play in the “AI Race” between the United States and China.
Please check out the full transcript of this insightful chat, below at the end of this issue. One favorite exchange:
On whether we know who will win the AI race…
If you’d asked me two years ago, the winner was OpenAI, and Anthropic was really just playing around doing God knows what. So I don’t think we necessarily know who the biggest winners are. Does Anthropic or OpenAI have a significant role to play in several years time? I’m absolutely sure that will be the case. That doesn’t preclude there being other, bigger winners.
🗺️ AI frontier models as America’s new frontier (Saturday, 1380 words)
