Sebastian Mallaby is a Washington Post columnist, among other things. I found this too-long-didn’t listen podcast had some interesting things (I skimmed the transcript – thank you to all podcasters who choose to post a transcript!). Here’s just one quote, but there is a lot in the article.

So the case for believing that getting first to artificial general intelligence or AGI is the key metric is that once you get there, you have such a powerful model that nobody will ever catch you up. And there’s this notion, the singularity idea, that when you get to a position where the model is strong enough to write all of the code for the next model and then that next model will create the one after that, the power of the frontier goes vertical and at that point it’s game over. And this is a view held, I think, particularly strongly at Anthropic.

And that’s an argument. There’s another argument, though, which is, the frictions associated with getting the model into deployment, whether that’s in a military setting, in a government setting, in a corporate setting, are going to be significant. And so just having the best possible frontier model in your server inside a frontier lab isn’t the whole enchilada.

I’ve had this same thought – that some industries (like tech companies with intangible products and very short product cycles) will adopt AI very quickly and it will be very disruptive, while in others (particularly government) friction will be enormous. I suspect traditional professions like engineering and medicine will be somewhere in between.

He also talks about government and international regulation of AI. His point is that we have structures, like the Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Nonproliferation Treaty to emulate. It’s complex but it has been done and can be done. It requires some moral leadership and political will, which seem to be in short supply in today’s world at the moment.