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[!summary]Ezra Klein was surprised that GPT-5 and o3 feel like a real leap in how A.I. helps and thinks. Some warn of fast, runaway A.I., but Klein doubts a sudden loss of control even as capabilities grow. A.I. is already quietly changing work and daily life and creating dependence with unknown risks.
Highlights
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GPT-5 is the first A.I. system that feels like an actual assistant.
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This is the first A.I. model where I felt I could touch a world in which we have the always-on, always-helpful A.I. companion from the movie “Her.”
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Right now, the A.I. companies are not making all that much money off these products. If they eventually do make the profits their investors and founders imagine, I don’t think the normal tax structure is sufficient to cover the debt they owe all of us, and everyone before us, on whose writing and ideas their models are built.
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by 2030, data centers alone will consume more energy than all of Japan does now.
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The point of our energy policy should not be to use less energy. The point of our energy policy should be to make clean energy so — ahem — abundant that we can use much more of it and do much more with it.
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In their paper “A.I. as Normal Technology,” Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, both computer scientists at Princeton, argue that the external world is going to act as “a speed limit” on what A.I. can do. In their telling, we shouldn’t think of A.I. as heralding a new economic or social paradigm; rather, we should think of it more like electricity, which took decades to begin showing up in productivity statistics. They note that GPT-4 reportedly performs better on the bar exam than 90 percent of test takers, but it cannot come close to acting as your lawyer. The problem is not just hallucinations. The problem is that lawyers need to master “real-world skills that are far harder to measure in a standardized, computer-administered format.” For A.I.s to replace lawyers, we would need to redesign how the law works to accommodate A.I.s.
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As the now-cliché line goes, this is the worst A.I. will ever be, and this is the fewest number of users it will have. The dependence of humans on artificial intelligence will only grow, with unknowable consequences both for human society and for individual human beings. What will constant access to these systems mean for the personalities of the first generation to use them starting in childhood? We truly have no idea.
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I’m taken aback at how quickly we have begun to treat its presence in our lives as normal. I would not have believed in 2020 what GPT-5 would be able to do in 2025. I would not have believed how many people would be using it, nor how attached millions of them would be to it.