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AI X-Risk Goes Mainstream?
Jacob Coxon:
116,400,000 views, 634,000 likes.
Evan Hubinger (head of alignment at Anthropic):
34,000,000 views, 51,000 likes.
None of this is substantially different from what certain AI industry insiders have been saying for 5-ish years now, but it's clear from the replies, quote-tweets, and engagement statistics that most people are hearing about this for the first time. Yes, there was clearly some coordination with friendly media prior to the announcement given the almost simultaneous WSJ article (whereas news outlets were initially reluctant to publish anything on the unexpected news of OpenAI solving a Millennium Prize Problem). One can take the maximally conspiratorial position that this is a 4D bankshot by Democrats to end tech innovation forever, but it was going to break through eventually.
In other words, Coffeezilla is now on the case.
Thank goodness for China, who has the freedom from bougie liberal moralizing, no Mouse-fueled Suffocating IP-law, and no social friction about power usage of datacenters (Building datacenters is actually a convenience for their powergrid because they produce so much excess power)
Is China not worried about X-risk? At least to prevent the US reaching ASI 6 months early, I believe they’d agree to a pause with a convincing plan to enforce it without unnoticed defectors, like nuclear treaties.
Given how they're far behind and the US is already at AGI (I think OAI's internal model that solved Navier-Stokes qualifies), what does the pause buy them? There are no monitoring systems in place, so they can't even tell if Americans are advancing further beyond, it wouldn't take a lot of compute to make large absolute gains. Even if the situation is legitimately paused here, stronger and more widely deployed American AI buys larger productivity gains, eating into their competitiveness.
I guess the talk about mutual pause assumes that they're coerced with some threat, eg of a cyberattack, because it's fundamentally an unequal treaty.
What would be your ballpark estimate for GDP growth for the United States in 2028?
For reference, GDP growth was 2.1% in 2025 and was 1.5% annualized in Q2 2026.
I don't think GDP growth adequately captures AI benefits, especially if it also displaces labor. Actually, China itself is a good example, just runs on humans. They have low GDP per capita and Americans endlessly gloat about this, but somehow they're super competitive and it's not "cheap labor", they are very productive, eg Tesla Shanghai produces 2x more cars per worker. Imagine China-fication of the US. Wages stagnate, services revenues don't grow much, and yet there are more and better EVs, chips have higher density, Starship is debugged that much faster, domestic robots are everywhere, and the US begins to recapture global markets.
This is still a very mild scenario, China would maybe accept it; national security is a harder discussion.
By definition this scenario would lead to a massive increase in GDP growth, if your thesis is that growth in investment and exports spikes while growth in consumer spending and government spending is held roughly even.
I do think a more realistic scenario under your basic premises is that American consumer spending spikes, driven by consumer surplus and redistribution, even as wages stagnate and net exports rise moderately; there are simply no other markets in the world that would be able to absorb American production overcapacity, in the way that America allows the Chinese strategy of suppressing domestic consumption to function by absorbing Chinese overcapacity.
In either case, I don't see how GDP growth would be unable to capture these benefits. I think if this is the modal scenario you expect, you should be expecting fairly high GDP growth.
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Not based on that datum alone. IMHO solving INS blowup may qualify as superintelligence, depending on how much of the herculean effort it expended turns out to be necessary vs how much turns out to have been brute-forcing an excessively complicated solution to a problem that actually has a still-unknown simpler solution. But it's not quite general intelligence. With proof verification, math ends up being in the same category as Chess and Go: a system solving problems with automatically verifiable rules and outcomes can be trained to learn from "self-play" indefinitely, which makes the efficiency with which it learns much less relevant, which makes the inefficiency of modern AI training ("we're going to start with every bit of recorded human text, then try to generate more because that's not enough") much less of a handicap. General intelligence isn't "a billion man-years of training on math can make you able to do advanced mathematics", it's "a billion man-years of training on hunting and gathering plus twenty years of training on math can make you able to do advanced mathematics".
You may be right anyway. We're at the point where we're having difficulty just coming up with metrics where humans still beat the top AIs, despite the remaining deficit of transfer learning for the latter. Either they're passing all the important tests, or we're failing a big test ourselves.
Are we? It seems like the major problem is that every attempt to create a metric just creates a recursive Goodhart's law problem. The metric now becomes a target for training of further model capabilities because there are billions of dollars of incentives to do so. One would need to create a metric where there is no or a very restricted set of training data such that it is impossible for AI labs to actually finetune on said data.
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I bet they’ll agree to a pause if the US agrees to share OpenAI and Anthropic with them.
Of course right now it sounds far fetched, but that’s every pause proposal. To the doomers, ASI is an alien invasion, and at least in fiction, those seem to unite most of humanity.
Trump loves Deals, of course, but with how much the US is ahead in AI, I don't see such generosity. Besides, API access can be revoked at a whim, and the Chinese hate when you do that to them in a strategically significant domain.
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