The Government Knows AGI is Coming

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2025

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trump’s term, they tell me. We’re not ready. One of the people who reached out to me was Ben Buchanan, the top adviser on A.I. in the Biden White House. And I thought it would be interesting to have him on the show for a couple reasons: He’s not connected to an A.I. lab, and he was at the nerve center of policymaking on A.I. for years. So what does he see coming? What keeps him up at night? And what does he think the Trump administration needs to do to get ready for the AGI — or something like AGI — he believes is right on the horizon? This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “Machines of Loving Grace” by Dario Amodei “Ninety-five theses on AI” by Samuel Hammond “What It Means to be Kind in a Cruel World” by The Ezra Klein Show with George Saunders Book recommendations: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn Rise of the Machines by Thomas Rid A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. For the past couple of months, I've been having this strange experience where person after person, independent of each other,
0:40.2	from AI labs, from government, has been coming to me and saying, it's really about to happen.
0:46.8	We're really about to get to artificial general intelligence. And what they mean is that they
0:52.8	have believed for a long time that we are on a path to creating transformational artificial intelligence.
0:57.8	Artificial intelligence capable of doing basically anything a human being can do behind a computer, but better than most human beings can do it.
1:05.9	And before they thought, you know, maybe it take five or ten years, ten or fifteen years.
1:09.6	But now they believe it's
1:11.1	coming inside of two to three years inside Donald Trump's second term. And they believe it
1:16.2	because of the products they're releasing right now. They believe because of what they're seeing
1:20.3	inside the places they work. And I think they're right. If you've been telling yourself this
1:26.6	isn't coming, I really think you need to question that. It's not Web 3. It's not vaporware. A lot of what we're talking about is already here right now. And I think we're on the cusp of an era in human history that is unlike any of the eras we have had before. And we're not prepared in part because
1:46.2	it's not clear what it would mean to prepare. We don't know what this will look like, what it will
1:51.0	feel like. We don't know how labor markets will respond. We don't know which country is going to
1:54.6	get there first. We don't know what it will mean for war. We don't know what it will mean for peace.
1:58.7	And as much as there is so much else going on in the world to cover,
2:02.6	I do think there's a good chance that when we look back on this era in human history,
2:05.6	this will have been the thing that matters.
2:07.6	This will have been the event horizon, the thing that the world before it and the world after it were just different worlds.
2:13.6	One of the people reached out to me is Ben Buchanan, who was the former special advisor for artificial intelligence in the Biden White House.
2:21.8	And I thought Buchanan would be interesting to bring on for a couple of reasons.
2:25.1	One is that this is not a guy working for an AI lab.
2:28.2	So he's not being paid by the big AI labs to tell you this technology is coming.
	...

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