AI Summer

Lennart Heim is an information scientist and researcher in AI governance at the RAND Corporation and a leading scholar on AI export controls. We asked him about the Biden administration’s “ diffusion framework ,” which aims to regulate the global diffusion of advanced AI chips and models. We get into all the specifics as well as the broader geopolitical implications of the framework—and whether or...

Sam Hammond is senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning tech policy think tank based in Washington DC. Hammond is a Trump supporter who expects AI to improve rapidly in the next few years, and he believes that will have profound implications for the public policy. In this interview, Hammond explains how he’d like to see the Trump administration tackle the new pol...

Ajeya Cotra works at Open Philanthropy, a leading funder of efforts to combat existential risks from AI. She has led the foundation’s grantmaking on technical research to understand and reduce catastrophic risks from advanced AI. She is co-author of Planned Obsolescence , a newsletter about AI futurism and AI alignment. Although a committed doomer herself, Cotra has worked hard to understand the p...

Nathan Lambert is the author of the popular AI newsletter Interconnects . He is also a research scientist who leads post-training at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a research organization funded by the estate of Paul Allen. This means that the organization can afford to train its own models—and it’s one of the only such organizations committed to doing so in an open manner. So La...

Jon Askonas, an Assistant Professor of Politics at Catholic University of America, is well connected to conservatives and Republicans in Washington DC. In this December 16 conversation, he talked to Tim and Dean about Silicon Valley’s evolving relationship to the Republican party, who will be involved in AI policy in the second Trump Administration, and what AI policy issues are likely to be be pr...