Professors are tearing their hair out over AI detectors. Timothy Paustian has tried everything to stop his students from writing essays with AI. When ChatGPT first came out, Paustian, a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, tested AI detectors that promised to flag machine-generated prose. They were "comically bad," he told me. Then he started sneaking invisible prompts into his assignments that only chatbots would respond to.

What if the doomers and skeptics are both a little bit right? O ne 27-year-old quit his job, and everybody (including but not limited to the singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow) appears to have lost it. The past two weeks have been dizzying. The 27-year-old, Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic, went public with an alarming allegation: That the people inside Silicon Valley's leading AI companies truly believe their products might pose an extinction level threat to humanity. AI safety advocates, often dubbed doomers, have been saying this for over a decade.

The longtime tech journalist says she's seen Silicon Valley make the same mistakes again and again. As the AI industry likes to tell it, superintelligent bots could one day cure cancer and end poverty. Or in the worst-case scenario, they might wipe out all humans from the face of the Earth. In recent weeks, Silicon Valley's existential concerns about the technology it is racing to build have blown up. The tech journalist Kara Swisher sees it differently. "We have to stop thinking AI is going to kill humanity," she told executive editor Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic Festival. If the AI future goes sideways, bots won't be to blame. "These are people at the helm of these things." In the several decades that Swisher has covered Silicon Valley--formerly as a reporter at, now as the host of two podcasts--she says that she's seen tech whizzes make the same mistakes again and again: failing to take proper precautions against the products they are building. "One of the things about tech people is they're the smartest people in the world, in case you need to know, because they like to tell you," she said. In her interview with LaFrance, Swisher also discussed the economic implications of the AI race, who is likely to win, and how Americans can respond to this dizzying and worrying AI moment. You have been paying attention to the tech world and AI for basically ever. And now it seems like within the past, say, two weeks, the rest of the world is suddenly paying much closer attention. So I wanted to start just by talking about where you think we are, in this moment.

First, AI stole their books. Earlier this summer, Tamra Westberry received a Facebook notification that made her heart sink. A fellow author had taken to social media to endorse Westberry's latest book, Project Erebus, after reading about it in a weekly roundup of the latest paranormal-romance releases. Independent authors like Westberry, who is based in Texas and has published dozens of books under the pen name Tara West, usually welcome an encouraging word and a bit of cross-promotion. She had never heard of a book called Project Erebus .

Happening now: Join staff writer Ian Bogost for a live Q&A about his latest stories; his course, Ordinary Extraordinary; and more. Click on Discussions to enter! What happens when our therapists are no longer able to feel? Therapy can involve a lot of words, but it's often the pauses that matter most. If you transcribed a session, the pauses would look like nothing: beats of silence, extra breaths, slowing down. But these can represent the crux of the practice: entry points into feeling.

Happening now: Join staff writer Ian Bogost for a live Q&A about his latest stories; his course, Ordinary Extraordinary; and more. Click on Discussions to enter! For AI doomers, signs and portents are everywhere. When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, almost four years ago, it couldn't do basic arithmetic. Now the company has unreleased models that are more fluent in higher mathematics--the language of the universe--than all but the most highly trained mathematicians.

AI just solved one of the world's hardest math problems. In late July, one of the world's most famous mathematicians issued a warning to his field. Math is entering a "turbulent period," the UCLA professor Terence Tao said in front of a packed lecture hall at the International Congress of Mathematicians. AI is getting so good at math, he said, that it's causing a "crisis in our mathematical values and practices." Earlier in the same week that Tao gave his talk at math's most prestigious conference, a researcher at Anthropic had used Claude to disprove an 87-year-old math conjecture.

It's All Fun and Games Until You Give AI Your Credit Card AI personal assistants are now acting on people's behalf in the real world--and all sorts of strange things are going wrong. In the race to develop intelligent machines, the leading AI companies have built bots that can whip up spreadsheets at a moment's notice, write sophisticated code, and even solve long-standing math problems. But when it comes to the more mundane tasks of life--such as ordering groceries or booking flights--these tools sometimes still struggle. Now a new bot called Instinct is outperforming the AI giants. Instinct lets people ask for help with all kinds of tasks by texting the bot directly through iMessage or WhatsApp.

Anthropic's CEO warns that the makers of artificial intelligence "owe it to humanity to try" to slow down. Four days after a researcher publicly quit his job at Anthropic, warning that top AI firms are not "acting responsibly" and that their products might be on track to "kill us all," the company's CEO, Dario Amodei, seemed to basically agree. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," Amodei wrote in a 3,800-word essay that he published today on his personal website and posted to social media. By now, we've all become accustomed to AI industry figures issuing dire prophecies about the power of their products. Yet Amodei's essay stands out for its urgency and for the moment at which it arrived.

Apple needs to learn to take risks again. Steve Jobs used the catchphrase to introduce the original iPhone in 2007. In his 15 years running the company, Tim Cook deployed it only a handful of times, including before his 2014 announcement of the Apple Watch. Today, nine days into his tenure as Apple's CEO, John Ternus said the magic words. Apple's next big invention, the company revealed at a launch event in Cupertino, is a $2,000 iPhone that sports--get ready--a "remarkable hinge." This is the iPhone Duo, a foldable gadget that opens like a book to reveal a capacious 7.6-inch screen.