Nearly since the launch of ChatGPT, the conversation around artificial intelligence has veered between two poles. On one side there are the people we think of as skeptics - think Gary Marcus or Emily Bender - who begin with the proposition that large language models have critical flaws that will prevent them from reaching anything like superintelligence. On the other there are the accelerationists - represented loudest by the Andreessen Horowitz wing of the Republican Party - who believe that the government should push to advance and proliferate the technology as quickly as possible.

These viewpoints are deeply felt and polarizing, and in various ways they reflect the self-interest of those who hold them. If you're an academic who has spent most of their career advocating for alternative approaches to building Al, for example, you may worry that the industry has veered down the wrong path. On the other hand, if you're an oligarch whose investment portfolio depends heavily on the performance of a wide range of Al-related companies, any regulation that might impede their growth may strike you as intolerable.