Mike McQuade

• Why Worry?

  The Editors

  In January, when we started commissioning the first essays for this issue, the public conversation about risks from artificial intelligence looked very different. We thought our biggest task would be to convince anyone outside of a small community of professional worriers to take the problem seriously.

• Growing Up Overnight

  A look at the past few years of LLM progress.

• forecast

  AI Isn’t Coming for Tech Jobs—Yet

  Jonathan Mann

  LLMs can make a developer’s job easier and faster. When might they make them obsolete?

• interview

  Crash Testing GPT-4

  Beth Barnes

  Can we tell if an AI model is safe before it’s released? The group that tested GPT–4 is trying to figure out how.

• interview

  What We Get Wrong About AI & China

  Jeffrey Ding

  Everyone’s afraid of what China can and will do with AI. On the ground, the picture looks a lot more complicated.

• A Field Guide to AI Safety

  Kelsey Piper

  AI safety is starting to go mainstream, but the researchers who’ve been immersed in it for over a decade still have strong disagreements.

• Through a Glass Darkly

  Scott Alexander

  Nobody predicted the AI revolution, except for the 352 experts who were asked to predict it.

• How Long Until Armageddon?

  Michael D. Gordin

  Scientists, generals, and politicians all failed to accurately predict when the Soviets would get the bomb. Could they have done any better?

• Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart AIs Are?

  Rob Long

  Scientists have repeatedly failed to recognize the complexity of animal cognition. Will we make the same mistakes with AI?

• How We Can Regulate AI

  Avital Balwit

  The chips used to train the most advanced AIs are scarce, expensive, and trackable — giving regulators a path forward.

• The Transistor Cliff

  Sarah Constantin

  Moore’s law may be coming to an end. What happens to AI progress if it does?

• The Puzzle of Non-Proliferation

  Carl Robichaud

  Today, only nine countries have nuclear weapons. That outcome was hardly inevitable, and the story of how we arrived there holds important lessons for AI.

• The Great Inflection? A Debate About AI and Explosive Growth

  Matt Clancy Tamay Besiroglu

  A conversation about what happens to the economy when intelligence becomes too cheap to meter.

• fiction

  Emotional Intelligence Amplification

  Jamie Wahls

  Love in the time of chatbots.