AI policy debate on this site really does feel stuck in an endlessly repeating first principles debate about “whether” we should “regulate AI.” The conversation here has not meaningfully evolved since the battle lines hardened with SB 1047 (or maybe the Biden EO). But meanwhile the world has moved on. Laws have passed, EOs signed, and both are now in their implementation stages rather than the planning. People are figuring out how it’s all going to work, bit by bit, imperfectly, and with deep ambiguity at every corner. Nonetheless, a legal regime of AI governance is gradually emerging from both the state and federal level. It can’t not emerge; the risks are too real, it’s too obvious to too many of the adults who remain in the room. It’s still very nascent, yet it is clearly happening, and it is clearly not being shaped very much by discourse on this website. Twitter is said to be “the global town square,” the place to be for relevance. Not so for AI policy. There used to be niche policy nerd communities here who would talk among themselves, and while that does exist in AI policy, the real conversations in this community occur off the feed. I don’t like this state of affairs. I wish it weren’t so. It’d be better if there was a robustly informed public debate on these issues. And to be clear, you can still keep track; there are public events, podcasts, papers, Substacks, etc. Most of the interesting ideas are out there being discussed and debated, just mostly in niche forums. But right now, here in the “global town square,” the impression one gets about what is going on in AI policy is about as good of the impression of the world you’d have gotten from reading Slate in 2017, or the New York Times opinion page in the summer of 2020 (and indeed, as Joe has observed, the woke mafia has returned; same tactics, different people and issues. These are probably related phenomena). For young writers and policy entrepreneurs, this website is still probably important to get your name out there, at least for now. And it’s still important, for policy purposes, to track sentiment around particular models, companies, people etc. on the timeline. There is still some signal to be extracted, though you may be able to automate much of that extraction now. This, of course, ends with AIs mining for signal from other AIs, which, if we’re being honest, is probably already a huge part of what this site has become.