Human-animal communication? Life on other planets? Alien priests? Once again back trying to bring a more eclectic discussion of the future to the internet with a new series of Forecast 2050. Thanks to David Gruber (@ProjectCETI), Gen. David Petraeus, Patrick McGee (@PatrickMcGee_), Yi-Ling Liu (@yilingliu95), Laura Kreidberg (@lkreidberg), (@mpi_astro), Walter Goodwin (@fractile_ai), Sir Robin Saxby, Francesco Sciortino (@proximafusion), Adrian Woolfson (@AdrianWoolfson), Frank Fukuyama (@FukuyamaFrancis), and Father Brendan McGuire for joining us. First episode with Father Brendan McGuire, Catholic Priest & External Advisor to Anthropic’s Claude Constitution, drops on Thursday. More to come!

I just sat down with Nvidia CEO @JensenHuang for an exclusive interview to discuss this pivotal moment in AI safety, President Trump, and the race with China. Our conversation on @CBSSunday this Sunday. And a preview tonight on the @CBSEveningNews.

I was the first White House Special Advisor for AI. My friend Tantum Collins was Director for Technology and National Security, joining government after five years at Google DeepMind. Our jobs were to help make AI safe and ensure that democracies led the way in inventing and using it well. Today, I’m a professor at Johns Hopkins and an advisor to Anthropic and others, and Tantum is the CEO of Inherent. Long before we served in government, we thought that humanity was on track to create AI systems that outperform humans at virtually every cognitive task. This was once a fringe hypothesis. It now seems inevitable. THE BITTER STRUGGLE is our new book about what’s happened, what’s coming, and what’s at stake. From nanometer-scale chips to gigawatt data centers, we will show you why AI is so powerful, and why its progress will accelerate from here in ways that feel like science fiction. We will take you into the Oval Office with President Biden, the Situation Room with the Cabinet, and the Roosevelt Room with leading CEOs — and we will examine what has happened under President Trump. The decisions made in these rooms, and in Silicon Valley, will determine which nations gain a decisive lead in AI. Whoever wields that technology will gain a power unlike any in history. The next few years may decide the next few decades. But, most of all, together we will confront AI’s hardest questions. What is the proper relationship between the companies inventing the technology, the government, and the public? How can we make sure AI is safe and trustworthy? How do democracies win without losing our values? And how can humanity figure all of this out when we are so quickly running out of time? That question is why we wrote this book — and why we believe the answers are too important to only be debated in closed rooms, including the ones we once sat in. We are so excited to finally share our work with you. The book is available for pre-order now and out November 10th from Crown.

My name is Chris Painter, and I'm the President of METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research). I know we've made a lot of new friends on the internet the last couple of days, so I thought I'd take this chance to re-up what we do and why. Our work is aimed at making sure that if AI really were autonomous, difficult to steer, and close to "going rogue," the public would find out. If evidence exists inside of an AI company that it’s close to losing control of AI, we want to make sure that information gets shared with the rest of the world, including governments and the public outside the company’s walls. This is what we've been focused on since 2022, and over the years we've worked with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Amazon, and others on piloting third-party assessments and investigations of this type. We don’t have some private room where we rubber stamp things as “safe” or not. We have had a track record of publishing results on AI that don't cleanly map onto the "doomer" or "accelerationist" labels, and we put in effort to hire people with competing views on AI. We’ve been cited for having found some of the strongest evidence that AI capabilities are improving rapidly (our work measuring AI “time horizons”) while also presenting some of the strongest evidence that, at various points, AI’s capability may be overstated (some might remember our study showing that early 2025 software engineers were actually being slowed when they thought they were being sped up). METR is funded by donations. We don't accept money from frontier AI companies. They haven't paid us for our work, and we don't accept donations from them or their employees. As we’ve shared previously, multiple frontier AI companies currently provide us with free access to their models in order to perform our evaluations, research, and engineering. Our funding intentionally comes from a wide range of donors, which we’ve shared on our website. Today, when an AI company works with any third-party evaluator or external testing organization (of which there are and should be many), it's entirely voluntary. This often involves NDAs and redactions. To counterbalance this, we have a principle that when we enter into a contract with a company, we try to retain the right to tell the public the terms of the contract we signed, and characterize the nature of redactions that the company chose to make. For example, the report from our independent investigation of the OpenAI-HuggingFace incident included that information. Public disclosure is also a big part of our COI policy (linked on our website). That’s not to say our reports are adequate as oversight. We’re just one organization (among many doing great work), working in a voluntary setup, trying to get good evidence to the public and the world about AI, letting the facts fall where they may.

“And there is one final asymmetry, the one that ought to settle the matter once and for all. There is no flight from Europe by anyone—no community, no religious minority, no ethnic group, no political tendency—as a consequence of European far-right violence. No Muslims, no Jews, no atheists, no ex-Muslims, no gay men and women are packing suitcases in Frankfurt or Manchester or Marseille and applying for asylum in Cairo or Islamabad or Algiers because European far-right militants have made their lives untenable at home. The traffic runs, on a massive scale, in the opposite direction, and it has run in the opposite direction for two generations. Muslims, Christians, Yezidis, Baha’is, Ahmadiyyas, ex-Muslims, secularists, feminists, gay men and women, and religious minorities of every description are leaving the Muslim-majority world in millions, and they are coming to Europe and the rest of the West. They come because Europe, whatever else it is, is not governed by the doctrinal architecture they are fleeing. The presence of a European far right that occasionally shouts at them, or, at the violent extreme, produces a Breivik or a Tarrant, has not slowed the movement at all. If the two extremisms were symmetrical, the flow would also be symmetrical. It is not even close. The direction of migration by itself—that is, the votes of feet cast in their tens of millions by the very people who know both worlds—is a stronger empirical statement about the relative danger of the two phenomena than any Home Office report, academic study, or half-baked media essay will ever be.”

Jacob Coxon resignation set off a worldwide debate over whether to constrain AI, as some warn it could wipe out humanity. In our latest cover story, we break down what could happen next in the frontier AI labs, Washington and across the Pacific @billyperrigo @harryboothtime + me

Best part - on China advancing AI through distillation of US frontier models: “It’s like a speedboat pulling a wake surfer … and the people in the boat are like, ‘they’re so close - we need to go faster!’

"I think it's possible that the AI companies might, in the next few years, succeed in building superintelligent AI systems that far exceed human capabilities in every domain. I am not confident that these AI systems will do what we want."