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The Ezra Klein Show

A Lot Has Happened in A.I. Let’s Catch Up.

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.611K Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2023

⏱️ 70 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of the release of ChatGPT. A lot has happened since. OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, recently dominated headlines again after the nonprofit board of directors fired C.E.O. Sam Altman, only for him to return several days later. But that drama isn’t actually the most important thing going on in the A.I. world, which hasn’t slowed down over the past year, even as people are still discovering ChatGPT for the first time and reckoning with all of its implications. Tech journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are hosts of the weekly podcast “Hard Fork.” Roose is my colleague at The Times, where he writes a tech column called “The Shift.” Newton is the founder and editor of Platformer, a newsletter about the intersection of technology and democracy. They’ve been closely tracking developments in the field since well before ChatGPT launched. I invited them on the show to catch up on the state of A.I. We discuss: who is — and isn’t — integrating ChatGPT into their daily lives, the ripe market for A.I. social companions, why so many companies are hesitant to dive in, progress in the field of A.I. “interpretability” research, and America’s “fecklessness” that cedes major A.I. benefits to the private sector, and much more. Recommendations: Electrifying America by David E. Nye Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill “Intro to Large Language Models” by Andrej Karpathy (video) Import AI by Jack Clark. AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor Pragmatic Engineer by Gergely Orosz 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, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. 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. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Transcript

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0:00.0

From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. Before we get into the episode today we are doing or getting ready to do our end of

0:27.4

the year ask me anything so if you have questions you want to hear me answer on

0:31.3

the show I suspect a lot of them are going to be about Israel Palestine and AI, but they don't have to be about Israel Palestine and AI. Send them to Ezra Klein show at nytimes.com with AMA in the headline. Again to ezer Klein show at ny times. y times. times. If you're follow business or tech or artificial intelligence news at all, in recent weeks

0:59.9

you certainly were following Sam Altman being unexpectedly fired a CEO of open AI and then a

1:06.3

huge staff revolt at open AI where more than 95% of the company said it would resign

1:11.6

if he was not reinstated and then he was reinstated and

1:16.2

so this whole thing seemed to have happened for nothing.

1:20.1

I spent a lot of time reporting on this and I talked to people on the

1:23.0

Alman side of things I talked to people on the board side of things and the

1:27.1

thing I am now convinced of truly convinced of is that there was less to it

1:31.4

than met the eye.

1:33.0

People saw, I saw, Altman fired by this nonprofit board

1:38.0

meant to ensure that AI is built to serve humanity.

1:42.0

And I assumed, and I think many assumed, there was some

1:46.4

disagreement here over what Open AI was doing, over how much safety was

1:51.2

building into the systems,

1:52.8

over the pace of commercialization,

1:55.2

over the contracts it was signing,

1:58.2

over what it was gonna be building next year,

2:00.5

over something.

2:01.2

And that, I think I can say conclusively and has been

2:04.1

cooperated by other reporting that was not what this was about the open AI board

...

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