Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross

But nonetheless, this is the sign, I think, of vibrant competition in the West.

And this is a net positive for society that OpenAI and Anthropic are competing so vigorously.

I'll maybe go a little bit further from a variety of vantage points.

I no longer even think if you're a startup that just saying that you're an AI startup or even actually being an AI startup is sufficient.

Increasingly, what I'm seeing across the board is an expectation that you not just be an AI startup, but that you be a recursively self-improving AI startup.

Increasingly, I see across the board, investors want to see AI companies that are

recursively self-improving, that are building better versions of themselves using what they have right now.

And I think certainly OpenAI, Anthropic, and XAI all easily pass the bar of being recursively self-improving.

And I think Waymo also to a certain extent

passes that bar because Waymo has the ability to improve its models by steering its cars in just such a way as to maximize information gain.

So I think I would forecast in the near term, the bar is going up, in fact, from just being an AI startup to being now a recursively self-improving AI startup.

With revenue traction.

Well, sure.

But that bar has been there for the long term.

No one said the singularity was going to be cheap.

My initial comment is I think there's a sense in which it was inevitable that AI was going to be politicized like this.

It touches so many aspects of society.

It would be, I think, counterfactual nonsense to expect it not ever to be politicized.

Maybe in some sense it's remarkable that it took this long for quote-unquote left-right axis to emerge on the subject of superintelligence.

There are natural polls, pro-AI issues,