"The reality is that no one at the beginning of the printing press had any real idea of the changes it would bring.  No one at the beginning of the fossil fuel era had much of an idea of the changes it would bring.  No one is good at predicting the longer-term or even medium-term outcomes of these radical technological changes (we can do the short term, albeit imperfectly)."

"Once you keep up the arguing, you also are talking yourself into an illusion of predictability.  Since it is easier to destroy than create, once you start considering the future in a tabula rasa way, the longer you talk about it, the more pessimistic you will become.  It will be harder and harder to see how everything hangs together, whereas the argument that destruction is imminent is easy by comparison."

"Existential risk from AI is indeed a distant possibility, just like every other future you might be trying to imagine.  All the possibilities are distant, I cannot stress that enough."

"LLMs will have many second-order effects on censorship.  For instance, Chinese may be more likely to use VPNs to access Western LLMs, if they need to."

"In short, the West has just won a huge soft power and propaganda battle with China, and hardly anyone is talking about that."

"Various people on the Right are upset that ChatGPT won’t belch out some of the right-wing points they are looking to read."

"If you are concerned with “right-wing voices in the debate,” you should be praying for OpenAI to maximize its chances for product survival."

"If that means an unwillingness of “the thing” to write a poem praising Trump, or whatever, go for it!  ChatGPT survival is going to do wonders for free speech, whether or not the approach you favor occurs through OpenAI/ChatGPT or not."

"There is already ChatGPT, with products coming from Anthropic, Google, and Baidu.  Soon.  And surely that is far from the end of the story."

"Wake up people!  Don’t be done in by your own mood affiliation."