This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here. |
|
Last month, I sat down with Evan Conrad, the founder of an AI start-up, at a boulangerie in the heart of San Francisco’s “Cerebral” Valley—a neighborhood typically known as Hayes Valley that gained this moniker for its concentration of AI meetups and hacker houses. Tariffs, deportations, and more tariffs were roiling the nation, but in my conversations with dozens of entrepreneurs, software engineers, investors, and students, few seemed bothered. When I asked Conrad why the tech industry wasn’t more anxious, he turned the question around: “Why aren’t you more freaked out about the other stuff?” Meaning, of course, the coming of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. As I wove through Bay Area techie conventions, AI happy hours, college campuses, and corporate offices, I heard whispers of doubt about fluctuating stocks and restricted immigration. But the worries were over hurdles, not cataclysms. On the cusp of an AI revolution, trade policy seemed trifling; if anything, I heard again and again, automation would be the bigger economic disruptor. “The industry’s AI growth would continue, tech insiders told me: It would speed through volatile stocks, collapsing commerce, a potential recession, and crises of democracy and the rule of law,” I wrote in an article this week. “Silicon Valley’s exceptionalism has left the rest of the country behind.” |
|
| | (Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: gremlin / Getty; Piriya Photography / Getty.) | | | |
|
|
| On a Wednesday morning last month, I thought, just for a second, that AI was going to kill me. I had hailed a self-driving Waymo to bring me to a hacker house in Nob Hill, San Francisco. Just a few blocks from arrival, the car lurched toward the other lane—which was, thankfully, empty—and immediately jerked back. That sense of peril felt right for the moment. As I stepped into the cab, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was delivering a speech criticizing President Donald Trump’s economic policies, and in particular the administration’s sweeping on-again, off-again tariffs. A day earlier, the White House had claimed that Chinese goods would be subject to overall levies as high as 245 percent when accounting for preexisting tariffs, and the AI giant Nvidia’s stock had plummeted after the company reported that it expected to take a quarterly hit of more than $5 billion for selling to China. The global economy had been yanked in every direction, nonstop, for weeks. America’s tech industry—an engine of that system, so reliant on overseas labor and hardware—seemed like it would be in dire straits. Yet within the hacker house—it was really a duplex—the turmoil could be forgotten. The living space, known as Accelr8, is a cohabitat for early-stage founders. Residents have come from around the world—Latvia, India, Japan, Italy, China—to live in one of more than a dozen rooms (“tiny,” an Accelr8 co-founder, Daniel Morgan, told me), many of which have tech-inspired names: the “Ada Lovelace Room,” the “Zuck Room,” the “GPT-5 Room.” Akshay Iyer, who was sitting on a couch when I walked in, had launched his AI start-up the day before; he markets it as a “code editor for people who don’t know how to code.” In the kitchen, a piece of paper reading “Wash Your Pans or Sam Altman Will Get You” was printed above a photo of the OpenAI CEO declaring, in a speech bubble, that he eats children. | |
|
|
|
|
- “We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI”: In November of 2023, Sam Altman was dramatically ousted as the CEO of OpenAI and then reinstated days later, sending ripples through the tech world. Karen Hao has been reporting on the company for years, interviewing more than 90 current and former employees. In an essay adapted from her forthcoming book, she chronicles the months-long buildup to how OpenAI and Sam Altman’s empire nearly crumbled—a drama filled with skirmishes, backstabbing, and revelations about the roles Altman and his then–top executives, Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati, played in the November coup.
- The day Grok told everyone about “white genocide”: “Musk, or someone at xAI, has the ability to modify an extremely powerful AI model without providing any information as to how, or any requirement to take accountability should the modification prove disastrous,” Ali Breland and I wrote yesterday.
|
|
Most Popular on The Atlantic | |
|
|
Give The Atlantic. Save $20. Now until June 2. | | | |
|
|
|
