I don’t know what it is called when mutual understanding breaks down—when, for example, a speaker believes he is making a declaration, and his audience believes he is making a joke. “We have made a soft promise to investors that, once we build this sort of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for them,” Sam Altman told one onstage interviewer, years before ChatGPT came out, when OpenAl hadn’t yet monetized its research. Laughter gently emanated from the audience, and Altman offered the slightest smile. “It sounds like an episode of ‘Silicon Valley’—it really does, I get it, you can laugh, it’s all right,” he said. “But it is what I actually believe is going to happen.” The laughter subsided.

[…]

“Imagine a world in which we cure cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other crippling disease, in just a few years’ time,” Senator Todd Young, a Republican who helped come up with the plan [to invest in AI], said at a press conference… This language sounded familiar to me. I wondered if Young had read Altman’s manifesto. Then I wondered if the statement had been written by Altman. Then I wondered if it had been written by one of Altman’s products. Young was speaking with a straight face. This time no one laughed.