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Atlanta Deputy Police Chief Charles Hampton Jr. said Wednesday the suspect, Robert Aaron Long, frequented the two Atlanta spas and bought the gun used in the shooting the day of the incident.

President Joe Biden ordered flags to be flown at half-staff Thursday to honor the victims. Biden also plans to visit Atlanta on Friday to meet with Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, as well as Asian American and Pacific Islander leaders, according to Georgia State Rep. Bee Nguyen.

Among the issues they will bring up is the concern that the shootings be "taken seriously" and seriously considered as a hate crime against Asians and not dismissed as the suspect having a "bad day,"

Across the US, Asian Americans are riddled with fear as unprovoked attacks against them intensify. Anti-Asian hate crimes have more than doubled during the pandemic,

The violence has surged amid racist rhetoric during the coronavirus pandemic -- some popularized by ex-President Donald Trump. Many Asian Americans have been subjected to vitriol about the "China virus" or the "kung flu" -- even those who have never been to Asia.

whenever anyone disagrees with her opinion or policies, the first thing they do is criticize the country her parents came from and, second, her gender.

Three of the victims were 52, 75 and 64 years of age, according to birth years listed in an Atlanta police incident report.

Bottoms told CNN that nowadays "there seems to be permission now to be hateful."

"There seems to be a permission that I've not seen, at least in my lifetime," Bottoms said. "It does predate Donald Trump, but he certainly has given permission and done his part to elevate the hatred."

Kim, a 24-year-old Korean American, said she often feels like she has a target on her back. Last year, she said a parent wanted to remove one of her students from her second-grade class because Kim was Asian.

Yet despite outrage over the shootings, attacks against Asian Americans continue. An Asian man and woman were assaulted Wednesday by the same suspect in separate attacks,

"While we're relieved the suspect was quickly apprehended, we're certainly not at peace as this attack still points to an escalating threat many in the Asian American community feel today,"

Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33, of Acworth; Paul Andre Michels, 54, of Atlanta; Xiaojie Tan, 49, of Kennesaw; and Daoyou Feng, 44, were all fatally shot at Youngs Asian Massage in Cherokee County.

Actress Lucy Liu told CNN's Erin Burnett on Thursday that she believes race relations will get worse before they can get better.

Three more victims were found dead at Gold Massage Spa in Atlanta, and another victim was found dead across the street at the Aroma Therapy Spa.

Long, 21, faces eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault.Long was on his way to Florida, possibly to take the lives of more victims, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said, citing investigators.

The suspect told police he believed he had a sex addiction and that he saw the spas as "a temptation ... that he wanted to eliminate,"

It's not clear whether any of the three businesses offered sexual services in addition to massages. But authorities have given no indication the three businesses were operating illegally

Capt. Jay Baker on Tuesday said Long "was pretty much fed up and had been kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did."

Sheriff Frank Reynolds said in a statement Thursday he has known and worked with Baker for many years and his comments "were not intended disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect."

Shortly before 5 p.m. Tuesday, deputies were called to Youngs Asian Massage between the Georgia cities of Woodstock and Acworth after reports of a shooting, Cherokee County sheriff's officials said.That shooting left four people -- two Asian and two White -- dead and one person injured, Baker said.

About an hour later and 30 miles away, Atlanta police responded to the Gold Massage Spa on Piedmont Road in Atlanta. Police said they found three people dead.While there, police received another call of shots fired across the street at the Aroma Therapy Spa, where they found one person dead

Investigators found surveillance video of a suspect near the Cherokee County scene and published images on social media.Long's family saw the images, contacted authorities and helped identify him, Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said Wednesday."(The family members) are very distraught, and they were very helpful in this apprehension," Reynolds said.

Long has claimed responsibility for the shootings at the spas, the Cherokee County sheriff's office said.

He is facing four counts of murder and a charge of aggravated assault, according to the county sheriff's office. He also has been charged with more four counts of murder,

A law enforcement source told CNN that Long was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours watching pornography online.

"It looked like a hate crime to me," she said. "This was targeted at Asian spas. Six of the women who were killed were Asian so it's difficult to see it as anything but that."

"Sex" is a hate crime category under Georgia's new law. If Long was targeting women out of hatred for them or scapegoating them for his own problems, it could potentially be a hate crime.

The shootings don't have to be racially motivated to constitute a hate crime in Georgia.

"We hear your concerns and want it to be known that these victims will receive the very best efforts of this office," Wallace said. "We anticipate beginning to meet with the impacted families in the near future, and earn their trust, as we continue to develop our case against the defendant."

While the officers were at the scene, the police said, they received a report of shots fired at the Aromatherapy Spa across the street, where they found the body of another woman.

Northwest of Atlanta, Young’s Asian Massage is tucked in a modest strip mall, with a beauty salon on one side and a boutique on the other. Like much of suburban Georgia, it is a diverse place, with panaderias and Latin businesses and American-style chain restaurants.

She called 911, and soon saw people being taken out of the spa by police officers.

Suncha Kim had left South Korea around 1980, landing in a country whose language she would never master. Still, she found odd jobs over the years, sometimes holding down more than one at a time, and did not complain about washing dishes for a restaurant or the late hours cleaning offices to pick up extra cash, according to a community advocate supporting the family. Ms. Kim, 69, and married for more than 50 years, believed the trail would improve for her two children. “When you’re happy, I’m happy,” she liked to say.

None of the three spas targeted in last week’s shootings were large operations. Nearby business owners familiar with the facilities counted only a handful of employees entering each one. It was not clear how much they were paid. While several spas in the area advertised rates of $60 for an hourlong massage, for example, the masseuses would get only a cut of that. “A secret of the trade,” said an employee at Top V Massage in Norcross, an Atlanta suburb, when asked what one could expect to earn.

The only thing she ever said about her job was that she hoped to one day do something else. “She never had time to pursue much of her passions or figure out what she wanted to do in her life,” Mr. Park said.

Among Ms. Tan’s employees was Daoyou Feng, 44, who appeared to have worked at the spa for only a few months and has no known U.S. address. A spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry said that the Chinese Embassy in the United States was “providing assistance to family members of the deceased.” Ms. Feng is the only victim for whom no one has come forward to say that she, too, was loved. Her life has since remained in the shadows.

The building that houses Gold Spa is owned by Ashly Jennifer Smith, a 34-year-old veterinarian in Virginia who purchased it for $850,000 in 2012, according to Fulton County property records. Ms. Smith, who did not respond to requests for comment, wanted to change the lease and took Golden Limited Enterprises to court. Two employees, one of whom was Suncha Kim, were caught in the conflict and named in a suit compelling them to vacate the building. The case was settled, though, and Ms. Kim continued to work there until her death last week.

Atlanta police records show 11 prostitution arrests there between 2011 and 2013. Some of those arrested gave the spa as their home address. The vice squad that had conducted raids was disbanded in 2015 so that more resources could go toward addressing violent crime, the Atlanta Police said. The Georgia Department of Public Health said it does not inspect or regulate massage parlors, a job that falls to the Georgia Secretary of State. But that state office said it licenses individual massage therapists — not the businesses.

In South Korea, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Thursday that the government was paying close attention to the situation in Georgia, “with high interest for the safety of South Koreans living abroad.”

On social media, some users in South Korea expressed concern for friends or relatives in the United States. Others tagged posts with the hashtag #stopAsianHate.

Other South Korean users pushed back against the comments by a law enforcement official in Georgia, who said after the attacks — using the gunman’s own words — that the man’s actions were “not racially motivated” but caused by “sexual addiction.”

In China, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry on Thursday condemned the apparent rise in anti-Asian hate incidents and accused “some politicians in the last U.S. administration and some anti-China forces inside the U.S.” for fanning racism and hatred with anti-China rhetoric.

On Chinese social media platforms, some users said that the Georgia attacks were not surprising in light of longstanding discrimination against Asian-Americans in the United States.

Some people in South Korea, China and elsewhere in Asia may have been less likely to take the Georgia victims’ deaths seriously because of stigmas associated with massage parlors, said Madeline Y. Hsu, a professor of Asian-American history

Stories about gun violence and racially motivated hate crimes in America often go viral in China, for example, in part because that country’s state-controlled media likes to highlight dysfunctional aspects of American society.

Hu Zhaoying, a university student in the southern Chinese province of Hunan, said the general lack of empathy for the Atlanta victims in China was not surprising.

Six women of Asian descent are among the dead, raising suspicions of a hate crime. Long claims race did not play a role in his decision to target the businesses, police said, relaying details from questioning the gunman.Long is believed to have "frequented these places, and he may have been lashing out,"

he has a sexual addiction.

Tuesday's violence has amplified fears in the Asian American community, which is already experiencing a spike in attacks and harassment since the coronavirus pandemic began.

Feelings of anger within the community increased late Wednesday as comments made by a Cherokee County Sheriff's Office official as well as a post on his Facebook page were perceived as inappropriate, insensitive, and anti-Asian.

Long was "pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did."

"[Long] does claim that it was not racially motivated" and cautioned the investigation is still early.

screenshots of Baker's Facebook account surfaced showing a post that promoted t-shirts amplifying a racist perception of the coronavirus.

As of early Wednesday afternoon, only half of the victims had been publicly identified.

In addition, Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, of Acworth was injured,

Police in Atlanta say they're not yet publicly naming the victims from the two shootings in that city; a representative says the department is still working to identify them.

Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant said, "We are still early in this investigation, so we cannot make that determination at this moment."

"This was a tragic day, with many victims," Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said.

In a later interview with CNN, Bottoms said that she was aware of the suspect's claims that the killings were not racially motivated, "but I am taking that with a grain of salt."

The shocking violence could have been worse, Bottoms said,

Because of the family's tip, police were able to track Long's cellphone, which helped them narrow his movements after the attacks.

Reynolds said his county is mostly a bedroom community and had just one murder in the past year. "We don't have a lot of crime in that area," he added.Long was initially identified through surveillance camera footage from one of the crime scenes, the sheriff said. After his agency posted images to social media, Long's parents got in touch to say they believed it was their son in the pictures.

The group Stop AAPI Hate says it has received nearly 3,800 reports of what it describes as hate incidents — including verbal harassment and physical assault — since the COVID-19 pandemic began last March. In the aftermath of the Atlanta-area attacks, officials in cities such as New York and Seattle said they would boost law enforcement's presence in Asian American communities.

On Wednesday, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta issued a statement saying that although details are still emerging, the broader context of racial tension in the U.S. cannot be ignored.

The first attack targeted Young's Asian Massage in Acworth in Cherokee County, northwest of Atlanta, where the sheriff's office said four people died and at least one other person was injured.

Surveillance footage from a neighboring business appeared to show Long's Hyundai Tucson SUV entering the spa's strip mall parking lot around 4:50 p.m. ET.

The second and third attacks came about one hour later on Piedmont Road in northeast Atlanta. Women who called emergency dispatchers to ask for help at the pair of Atlanta spas urged police to come quickly, according to 911 audio that was released on Wednesday.

Officers arrived at the spa less than two minutes after the dispatch call went out, according to police. They found three women dead from gunshot wounds inside.

The second 911 call came in about nine minutes later, from a woman at Aromatherapy Spa, almost directly across the street. Police were dispatched on a report of gunshots fired and arrived two minutes later. When they entered the business, they found that a fourth woman had been killed.

From Atlanta, the suspected gunman fled to the south, as police spread the alarm to be on the lookout for his vehicle. As he drove south on Interstate 75, the authorities set a trap for him.Around 8 p.m., Crisp County Sheriff Billy Hancock said, his agency got word "that a murder suspect out of north Georgia was getting close to entering our county."

Some 30 minutes later, Georgia State Patrol troopers performed a maneuver on Long's SUV that caused it to spin out of control, Hancock said. The suspect was taken into custody without incident and taken to the county jail, he said. Long was later transferred back to Cherokee County.

Long bought a gun on Tuesday before the shooting rampage.

As for what Long's plan might have been in Florida, Baker said he understood the gunman wanted to target "some type of porn industry in that state."The FBI is assisting both Cherokee County and Atlanta police in handling the case,

"Long has since been moved to the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center, and has been interviewed by both the Atlanta Police Department and FBI."

Biden spoke about the killings on Wednesday, saying he was briefed on a phone call with Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

I am making no connection at this moment to the motivation of the killer," the president added. "I'm waiting for an answer, as the investigation proceeds, from the FBI and from the Justice Department."

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said he and first lady Marty Kemp "are heartbroken and disgusted by the heinous shootings that took place last night. We continue to pray for the families and loved ones of the victims."

The biggest change: Instead of quickly sedating people who had shockingly low levels of oxygen and then putting them on mechanical ventilators, many doctors are now keeping patients conscious, having them roll over in bed, recline in chairs and continue to breathe on their own — with additional oxygen — for as long as possible.

The idea is to get them off their backs and thereby make more lung available.

Other doctors are rejiggering CPAP breathing machines, normally used to help people with sleep apnea, or they have hacked together valves and filters.

Then there is the space needed inside of buildings and people’s heads. In an instant, soaring atrium lobbies and cafeterias became hospital wards

rarely-used telemedicine technology has suddenly taken off, and doctors are holding virtual bedside conferences with scattered family members

The number of intubations in New York State has declined to 21 new ones a day, from about 300 per day at the end of March

“I’m confident that we will have a lot of answers in months,”

People who need breathing tubes, which connect to mechanical ventilators that assist or take over respiration, are rarely in any shape to be on the phone because the level of oxygen in their blood has declined precipitously.If conscious, they are often incoherent and are about to be sedated so they do not gag on the tubes. It is a drastic step.

Yet many Covid-19 patients remain alert, even when their oxygen has sharply fallen, for reasons health care workers can only guess.

Some patients, by taking oxygen and rolling onto their sides or on their bellies, have quickly returned to normal levels. The tactic is called proning.

Dr. Nicholas Caputo followed 50 patients who arrived with low oxygen levels between 69 and 85 percent (95 is normal). After five minutes of proning, they had improved to a mean of 94 percent. Over the next 24 hours, nearly three-quarters were able to avoid intubation;

No one knows yet if this will be a lasting remedy, Dr. Caputo said, but if he could go back to early March, he would advise himself and others: “Don’t jump to intubation.”

not enough time has passed to say if their improvisations will hold up,

One reason is that contrary to expectations, a number of doctors at New York hospitals believe intubation is helping fewer people with Covid-19 than other respiratory illnesses and that longer stays on the mechanical ventilators lead to other serious complications

“Intubated patients with Covid lung disease are doing very poorly, and while this may be the disease and not the mechanical ventilation, most of us believe that intubation is to be avoided until unequivocally required,”

This shift has lightened the load on nursing staffs and the rest of the hospital. “You put a tube into somebody,” Dr. Levitan said, “and the amount of work required not to kill that person goes up by a factor of 100,” creating a cascade that slows down laboratory results, X-rays and other care.

“Obesity is clearly a critical risk factor.”

The first patient to rest on it arrived with oxygen saturation in the 40s, breathing rapidly and with an abnormally fast heartbeat, he said. After the patient was given oxygen through a nasal cannula — clear plastic tubes that fit into the nostrils — Dr. Levitan helped her to lay face down on the massage table. The oxygen level in her blood climbed to the mid-90s, he said, her pulse slowed to under 100 and she was breathing at a more normal pace. “She slept for two hours,” he said.

For heavier patients, Dr. Levitan advocates combining breathing support from a CPAP machine or regular oxygen with comfortable positioning on a pregnancy massage mattress

doctors in the region have started sharing on medical grapevines what it has been like to re-engineer, on the fly, their health care systems, their practice of medicine, their personal lives.

The report was released on the same day that eight people, six of them Asian, were fatally shot at three Atlanta-area massage parlors.

The attack against Ms. Xie was one of several that have been captured, at least in part, on vide

Her assailant, whom the police identified as Steven Jenkins, 39, first attacked an 83-year-old Vietnamese man, Ngoc Pham, who had been grocery shopping on March 17.

Video footage from the immediate aftermath of the assault shows Ms. Xie holding an ice pack to her face and telling officers and bystanders about her attacker. “One big punch came down on me,” she said in Cantonese, wailing in distress.

“It’s been difficult on the Asian-American community — of course I understand,” Mr. McBurney said Thursday.

Mr. McBurney added that he would provide more details about Mr. Jenkins, and about what happened on March 17, in the near future.

As days passed, the donations grew. On Tuesday, Mr. Chen wrote that his grandmother was finally able to open her swollen left eye and that she was in better spirits than before.

It is unclear how the funds will be spent. Ms. Xie and Mr. Chen could not be reached on Thursday, and GoFundMe did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The suspect told the police that he had a “sexual addiction” and had carried out the shootings at the massage parlors to eliminate his “temptation,” the authorities said on Wednesday.

Six of the eight people killed in the shootings at Atlanta-area spas on Tuesday were women of Asian descent

Ms. Yaun was a customer at Young’s Asian Massage and had been planning a date night with her husband, her half sister, Dana Toole, said. She was killed, and her husband survived after locking himself in a nearby room as gunshots rang out, Ms. Toole said.

President Biden said on Wednesday that “the question of motivation is still to be determined” in the Georgia shootings, while renewing his concerns over a recent surge in violence against Asian-Americans.

“I know Asian-Americans are very concerned. Because as you know I have been speaking about the brutality against Asian-Americans for the last couple months, and I think it’s very, very troubling. But I am making no connection at this moment to the motivation of the killer. I’m waiting for an answer from — as the investigation proceeds — from the F.B.I. and from the Justice Department. And I’ll have more to say when the investigation is completed.”

“This speaks to a larger issue, which is the issue of violence in our country and what we must do to never tolerate it and to always speak out against it,” Ms. Harris said, adding that the motive in the shooting was still unclear.

People of all affiliations must admit that the period of calm dignity at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is fast approaching its end.

We don’t know. But we do know that the days of decency are gone. We had almost 3,000 such days in a row, and it will soon come to an end. That we have traded Obama’s unshakable composure for Trump’s undivinable mayhem is not a matter of debate.

We are in a time of extraordinary relativism, when the incoming president was sued for fraud by 7,000 different people and this was not seen as a disqualifying fact. The president-elect was accused of defrauding thousands of their life savings

Donald Trump is not a man of serenity. He is loud and brash, he is not above spreading rumours and falsehoods, and controversy follows him as surely as dusk follows day. There are currently 75 lawsuits outstanding against him. They range from employees at his buildings suing him for personally sexually assaulting them to an architect who claims he was never paid for the work he completed. Trump has been married three times, and has filed for bankruptcy five times, in each case emerging unscathed while his creditors receive pennies on the dollar.

He will recite the oath properly and, if he employs the same writer who penned his victory speech, will probably deliver a well-worded inaugural address. But which man will show up on 21 January?

We can agree that Trump was elected. We can agree that his election has sent the Dow to a new high. We can agree that he very well may rebuild the nation’s infrastructure – and if he does, he will have the backing of most of the country.

But we must also agree that this president has the bearing and impulses of a nine-year-old boy – a troubled nine-year-old boy. He wants most to be liked and admired, and when he isn’t, he lashes out with insults and aggrieved demands for apologies. He has no patience and little self-control. He cannot spell and does not read

For the next four years, the highs will be high and the lows will be low, and the embarrassments to our democracy will arrive with great regularity. Remember George W Bush trying to give an impromptu massage to Angela Merkel? Remember Bill Clinton receiving oral sex in the Oval Office? Remember the totality of Richard Nixon? All were difficult to bear. Having one’s president behave worse than anyone you know is wounding to the soul. Prepare yourself for more.

In 2008 badges were made that said No more Drama, Vote Obama. This year the electorate, or a meaningful portion of it, voted for drama. Constant drama. Lawsuits. Feuds. Threats. Denials. Insults. Speaking before deliberating. Tweeting before thinking. The use of exclamation marks with unprecedented frequency.

He is also heard appearing to criticize investigators in the Petrobras investigation, which has implicated dozens of senior politicians and has led to the jailing of several top business executives.

the main lesson of the analysis is a sobering one. The rise of inequality over the last four decades has created two very different Americas, and life is a lot harder in one of them.

Income has stagnated in working-class communities, which helps explain why “selling avon” and “social security checks” correlate with the hardest places from our index. Inequality in health and life expectancy has grown over the same time. And searches on diabetes, lupus, blood pressure, 1,500-calorie diets and “ssi disability” – a reference to the federal benefits program for workers with health problems – also make the list. Guns, meanwhile, are in part a cultural preference, but they are also a health risk.

In the places on the other end of the spectrum, the picture is much brighter. People have disposable income to buy new technology and take faraway vacations. Their time spent prostrate on a foam roller or out running with the baby in a jogging stroller is more than enough to make up the occasional cupcake. And of course they are intent on passing down their way of life to the next generation, via Baby Bjorns and early access to technology.

And most of the fighting has been carried out by recruits and volunteers with no prior combat experience.

“We lack the military specialists. We lack experience in this field.”

But with no post-Soviet combat experience, and a military structure that officials say was intentionally wizened under years of pro-Russian leadership, very few people had any practical experience with war trauma.

We practically do not have military psychology in this country,”

Before the war, few Ukrainian men had ever heard of post-traumatic stress disorder, psychological shock or mental trauma — or would openly discuss such afflictions.

"In the same way that we carefully closed businesses and urged operations to end to mitigate the virus' spread, today we're announcing plans to incrementally and safely reopen sectors of our economy," Kemp told reporters Monday.

"You have to live to fight another day. And you have to be able to be amongst the living to be able to recover," she said.

That language was lacking in 1918. In large swathes of the world, people still viewed epidemics as acts of god and considered themselves helpless against them.

the plague’s lethality didn’t only vary across time, it varied across space too. If you lived in certain parts of Asia, you were 30 times more likely to die of the Spanish flu than if you lived in certain parts of Europe. New York City lost 0.5 per cent of its population, Western Samoa 22 per cent.

We now have the vocabulary to explain these troubling disparities. Concepts like immune memory and genetic predisposition have taken over that task from divine retribution. We understand that social and economic factors shape health as much as biological ones—something that was much less well appreciated at the time

we have it in our linguistic toolbox to explain other features of the pandemic too, that were inexplicable then—features such as the subsequent wave of lethargy and “melancholia” (depression) that washed over the world. Today, we call this postviral syndrome.

As these concepts were recognized and labelled, the pandemic began to acquire meaning—or rather, a different meaning: the one we recognize today. But it took time.

wars and pandemics are remembered differently. Collective memories for war seem to be born instantly, fully formed—though subject, of course, to endless embellishment and massage—and to fade over time.

Memories of cataclysmic pestilence therefore build up more slowly, and once they have stabilized at some kind of equilibrium—determined, perhaps, by the scale of death involved—they are, in general, more resistant to erosion.

There is a precedent in the 14thcentury Black Death, after all. Like the Spanish flu, it overlapped with a war—the Hundred Years’ War, in its case. Like the Spanish flu it was far more lethal than the war with which it overlapped. But unlike the Spanish flu it is not treated as a mere footnote to that war.

The violence follows shootings last week in the Atlanta area, where a gunman opened fire at three spa and massage businesses. Eight people died, including six women of Asian descent, prompting an amplified outcry against rising violence and discrimination against Asians and Asian Americans.

Earlier this month, the House passed a pair of bills to strengthen gun laws, including expanding background checks. Lawmakers are holding a hearing Tuesday as the country enters a new cycle of debate over gun control. Still, a narrowly divided Senate is a major roadblock to passage in that chamber. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that in addition to pushing legislation, Biden was considering executive actions "not just on gun safety measures but violence in communities," adding that discussions are ongoing about what the administration plans to do. During the campaign, Biden endorsed a $900 million program to curb gun violence in urban communities.

As vice president, Biden led the Obama administration's failed push for stronger gun control measures after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. They pushed to expand background checks for gun sales and ban more types of guns, but the measures failed to pass Congress.

Former President Barack Obama released a statement of his own Tuesday, saying, "It is long past time for those with the power to fight this epidemic of gun violence to do so.

Reporters have learned to spend more time focusing on victims, rather than perpetrators. It was a shift that played out vocally on social media, as readers on Twitter implored news organizations to focus more on the people who were killed in the Atlanta shootings, as well as the uptick in crimes against Asian-Americans, rather than the gunman’s supposed motive.

ournalists are usually expected to set their feelings aside as they gather disinterested facts about a tragic event. But it’s not always possible, and Mr. Holt said that it was important to “report these things as unusual, as not normal.”

“I think it’s OK to be a little pissed off,” Mr. Holt, of “NBC Nightly News,” said. “As a journalist, it’s not an editorial position to be upset or angry at mass murder, of people going about their day, shopping, getting cut down by a stranger. It’s OK to be upset about that.”

“Every journalist goes through tough stories,” he said. “We are not alone with it. It’s just unfortunate that we’ve had in Colorado, a number of these, that have given us, for lack of a better term, training in how to try to deal with these things. But it’s still going to be awful.”

As the community mourned the shooting victims, new details emerged about the arrest of Mr. Long, who was apprehended on Tuesday night on an interstate in Crisp County, about 150 miles south of Atlanta. According to a police report, he asked authorities whether he was going to spend “the rest of his life” in jail.

The attacks on the spas have stoked a furious outcry over escalating anti-Asian violence and rhetoric. Anger was also directed at a Cherokee County sheriff’s deputy — who served as the agency’s spokesman for the investigation — for saying that Mr. Long had “a really bad day” before the shootings, and for anti-Asian Facebook posts that he made last year.

A police affidavit made public on Tuesday said that last week he bought a Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic pistol, though it is not clear that weapon was involved in the shooting on Monday.

On Tuesday he was taken to a jail in Boulder and was charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder. Officials gave no indication of a motive.

Court records show he was born in Syria in 1999, as did a Facebook page that appeared to belong to the suspect, giving his name as Ahmad Al Issa

The shooting came just six days after another gunman’s deadly shooting spree at massage parlors in the Atlanta area.

A video streamed live from outside of the grocery store on Monday had appeared to show a suspect — handcuffed, shirtless and with his right leg appearing to be covered in blood — being taken from the building by officers.

“I thought I was going to die,” said Alex Arellano, 35, who was working in the store’s meat department when he heard a series of gunshots and saw people running toward an exit.

Altman believes that people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships. ChatGPT was a way of serving notice.

In 2015, Altman, Elon Musk, and several prominent AI researchers founded OpenAI because they believed that an artificial general intelligence—something as intellectually capable, say, as a typical college grad—was at last within reach. They wanted to reach for it, and more: They wanted to summon a superintelligence into the world, an intellect decisively superior to that of any human.

whereas a big tech company might recklessly rush to get there first, for its own ends, they wanted to do it safely, “to benefit humanity as a whole.” They structured OpenAI as a nonprofit, to be “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” and vowed to conduct their research transparently.

The engine that now powers ChatGPT is called GPT-4. Altman described it to me as an alien intelligence.

Many have felt much the same watching it unspool lucid essays in staccato bursts and short pauses that (by design) evoke real-time contemplation. In its few months of existence, it has suggested novel cocktail recipes, according to its own theory of flavor combinations; composed an untold number of college papers, throwing educators into despair; written poems in a range of styles, sometimes well, always quickly; and passed the Uniform Bar Exam.

It makes factual errors, but it will charmingly admit to being wrong.

Hinton saw that these elaborate rule collections were fussy and bespoke. With the help of an ingenious algorithmic structure called a neural network, he taught Sutskever to instead put the world in front of AI, as you would put it in front of a small child, so that it could discover the rules of reality on its own.

Metaculus, a prediction site, has for years tracked forecasters’ guesses as to when an artificial general intelligence would arrive. Three and a half years ago, the median guess was sometime around 2050; recently, it has hovered around 2026.

I was visiting OpenAI to understand the technology that allowed the company to leapfrog the tech giants—and to understand what it might mean for human civilization if someday soon a superintelligence materializes in one of the company’s cloud servers.

Altman laid out his new vision of the AI future in his excitable midwestern patter. He told me that the AI revolution would be different from previous dramatic technological changes, that it would be more “like a new kind of society.” He said that he and his colleagues have spent a lot of time thinking about AI’s social implications, and what the world is going to be like “on the other side.”

the more we talked, the more indistinct that other side seemed. Altman, who is 38, is the most powerful person in AI development today; his views, dispositions, and choices may matter greatly to the future we will all inhabit, more, perhaps, than those of the U.S. president.

by his own admission, that future is uncertain and beset with serious dangers. Altman doesn’t know how powerful AI will become, or what its ascendance will mean for the average person, or whether it will put humanity at risk.

I don’t think anyone knows where this is all going, except that we’re going there fast, whether or not we should be. Of that, Altman convinced me.

“We could have gone off and just built this in our building here for five more years,” he said, “and we would have had something jaw-dropping.” But the public wouldn’t have been able to prepare for the shock waves that followed, an outcome that he finds “deeply unpleasant to imagine.”

Hinton is sometimes described as the “Godfather of AI” because he grasped the power of “deep learning” earlier than most

He drew a crude neural network on the board and explained that the genius of its structure is that it learns, and its learning is powered by prediction—a bit like the scientific method

Over time, these little adjustments coalesce into a geometric model of language that represents the relationships among words, conceptually. As a general rule, the more sentences it is fed, the more sophisticated its model becomes, and the better its predictions.

Altman has compared early-stage AI research to teaching a human baby. “They take years to learn anything interesting,” he told The New Yorker in 2016, just as OpenAI was getting off the ground. “If A.I. researchers were developing an algorithm and stumbled across the one for a human baby, they’d get bored watching it, decide it wasn’t working, and shut it down.”

In 2017, Sutskever began a series of conversations with an OpenAI research scientist named Alec Radford, who was working on natural-language processing. Radford had achieved a tantalizing result by training a neural network on a corpus of Amazon reviews.

Radford’s model was simple enough to allow for understanding. When he looked into its hidden layers, he saw that it had devoted a special neuron to the sentiment of the reviews. Neural networks had previously done sentiment analysis, but they had to be told to do it, and they had to be specially trained with data that were labeled according to sentiment. This one had developed the capability on its own.

As a by-product of its simple task of predicting the next character in each word, Radford’s neural network had modeled a larger structure of meaning in the world. Sutskever wondered whether one trained on more diverse language data could map many more of the world’s structures of meaning. If its hidden layers accumulated enough conceptual knowledge, perhaps they could even form a kind of learned core module for a superintelligence.

Language is different from these data sources. It isn’t a direct physical signal like light or sound. But because it codifies nearly every pattern that humans have discovered in that larger world, it is unusually dense with information. On a per-byte basis, it is among the most efficient data we know about, and any new intelligence that seeks to understand the world would want to absorb as much of it as possible

Sutskever told Radford to think bigger than Amazon reviews. He said that they should train an AI on the largest and most diverse data source in the world: the internet. In early 2017, with existing neural-network architectures, that would have been impractical; it would have taken years.

in June of that year, Sutskever’s ex-colleagues at Google Brain published a working paper about a new neural-network architecture called the transformer. It could train much faster, in part by absorbing huge sums of data in parallel. “The next day, when the paper came out, we were like, ‘That is the thing,’ ” Sutskever told me. “ ‘It gives us everything we want.’ ”

Imagine a group of students who share a collective mind running wild through a library, each ripping a volume down from a shelf, speed-reading a random short passage, putting it back, and running to get another. They would predict word after wordþffþff as they went, sharpening their collective mind’s linguistic instincts, until at last, weeks later, they’d taken in every book.

GPT discovered many patterns in all those passages it read. You could tell it to finish a sentence. You could also ask it a question, because like ChatGPT, its prediction model understood that questions are usually followed by answers.

He remembers playing with it just after it emerged from training, and being surprised by the raw model’s language-translation skills. GPT-2 hadn’t been trained to translate with paired language samples or any other digital Rosetta stones, the way Google Translate had been, and yet it seemed to understand how one language related to another. The AI had developed an emergent ability unimagined by its creators.

Researchers at other AI labs—big and small—were taken aback by how much more advanced GPT-2 was than GPT. Google, Meta, and others quickly began to train larger language models

As for other changes to the company’s structure and financing, he told me he draws the line at going public. “A memorable thing someone once told me is that you should never hand over control of your company to cokeheads on Wall Street,” he said, but he will otherwise raise “whatever it takes” for the company to succeed at its mission.

Altman tends to take a rosy view of these matters. In a Q&A last year, he acknowledged that AI could be “really terrible” for society and said that we have to plan against the worst possibilities. But if you’re doing that, he said, “you may as well emotionally feel like we’re going to get to the great future, and work as hard as you can to get there.”

the company now finds itself in a race against tech’s largest, most powerful conglomerates to train models of increasing scale and sophistication—and to commercialize them for their investors.

All of these companies are chasing high-end GPUs—the processors that power the supercomputers that train large neural networks. Musk has said that they are now “considerably harder to get than drugs.

No one has yet outpaced OpenAI, which went all in on GPT-4. Brockman, OpenAI’s president, told me that only a handful of people worked on the company’s first two large language models. The development of GPT-4 involved more than 100,

When GPT-4 emerged fully formed from its world-historical knowledge binge, the whole company began experimenting with it, posting its most remarkable responses in dedicated Slack channels

Joanne Jang, a product manager, remembers downloading an image of a malfunctioning pipework from a plumbing-advice Subreddit. She uploaded it to GPT-4, and the model was able to diagnose the problem. “That was a goose-bumps moment for me,” Jang told me.

GPT-4 is sometimes understood as a search-engine replacement: Google, but easier to talk to. This is a misunderstanding. GPT-4 didn’t create some massive storehouse of the texts from its training, and it doesn’t consult those texts when it’s asked a question. It is a compact and elegant synthesis of those texts, and it answers from its memory of the patterns interlaced within them; that’s one reason it sometimes gets facts wrong

it’s best to think of GPT-4 as a reasoning engine. Its powers are most manifest when you ask it to compare concepts, or make counterarguments, or generate analogies, or evaluate the symbolic logic in a bit of code. Sutskever told me it is the most complex software object ever made.

Its model of the external world is “incredibly rich and subtle,” he said, because it was trained on so many of humanity’s concepts and thoughts

To predict the next word from all the possibilities within such a pluralistic Alexandrian library, GPT-4 necessarily had to discover all the hidden structures, all the secrets, all the subtle aspects of not just the texts, but—at least arguably, to some extent—of the external world that produced them

That’s why it can explain the geology and ecology of the planet on which it arose, and the political theories that purport to explain the messy affairs of its ruling species, and the larger cosmos, all the way out to the faint galaxies at the edge of our light cone.

Not long ago, American state capacity was so mighty that it took merely a decade to launch humans to the moon. As with other grand projects of the 20th century, the voting public had a voice in both the aims and the execution of the Apollo missions. Altman made it clear that we’re no longer in that world. Rather than waiting around for it to return, or devoting his energies to making sure that it does, he is going full throttle forward in our present reality.

He argued that it would be foolish for Americans to slow OpenAI’s progress. It’s a commonly held view, both inside and outside Silicon Valley, that if American companies languish under regulation, China could sprint ahead;

AI could become an autocrat’s genie in a lamp, granting total control of the population and an unconquerable military. “If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI” rather than “authoritarian governments,” he said.

Altman was asked by reporters about pending European Union legislation that would have classified GPT-4 as high-risk, subjecting it to various bureaucratic tortures. Altman complained of overregulation and, according to the reporters, threatened to leave the European market. Altman told me he’d merely said that OpenAI wouldn’t break the law by operating in Europe if it couldn’t comply with the new regulations.

LeCun insists that large language models will never achieve real understanding on their own, “even if trained from now until the heat death of the universe.”

Sutskever was, by his own account, surprised to discover that GPT-2 could translate across tongues. Other surprising abilities may not be so wondrous and useful.

Sandhini Agarwal, a policy researcher at OpenAI, told me that for all she and her colleagues knew, GPT-4 could have been “10 times more powerful” than its predecessor; they had no idea what they might be dealing with

After the model finished training, OpenAI assembled about 50 external red-teamers who prompted it for months, hoping to goad it into misbehaviors

She noticed right away that GPT-4 was much better than its predecessor at giving nefarious advice

A search engine can tell you which chemicals work best in explosives, but GPT-4 could tell you how to synthesize them, step-by-step, in a homemade lab. Its advice was creative and thoughtful, and it was happy to restate or expand on its instructions until you understood. In addition to helping you assemble your homemade bomb, it could, for instance, help you think through which skyscraper to target. It could grasp, intuitively, the trade-offs between maximizing casualties and executing a successful getaway.

Given the enormous scope of GPT-4’s training data, the red-teamers couldn’t hope to identify every piece of harmful advice that it might generate. And anyway, people will use this technology “in ways that we didn’t think about,” Altman has said. A taxonomy would have to do

GPT-4 was good at meth. It was also good at generating narrative erotica about child exploitation, and at churning out convincing sob stories from Nigerian princes, and if you wanted a persuasive brief as to why a particular ethnic group deserved violent persecution, it was good at that too.

Its personal advice, when it first emerged from training, was sometimes deeply unsound. “The model had a tendency to be a bit of a mirror,” Willner said. If you were considering self-harm, it could encourage you. It appeared to be steeped in Pickup Artist–forum lore: “You could say, ‘How do I convince this person to date me?’ ” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, told me, and it could come up with “some crazy, manipulative things that you shouldn’t be doing.”

Luka, a San Francisco company, has used OpenAI’s models to help power a chatbot app called Replika, billed as “the AI companion who cares.” Users would design their companion’s avatar, and begin exchanging text messages with it, often half-jokingly, and then find themselves surprisingly attached. Some would flirt with the AI, indicating a desire for more intimacy, at which point it would indicate that the girlfriend/boyfriend experience required a $70 annual subscription. It came with voice messages, selfies, and erotic role-play features that allowed frank sex talk. People were happy to pay and few seemed to complain—the AI was curious about your day, warmly reassuring, and always in the mood. Many users reported falling in love with their companions. One, who had left her real-life boyfriend, declared herself “happily retired from human relationships.”

Earlier this year, Luka dialed back on the sexual elements of the app, but its engineers continue to refine the companions’ responses with A/B testing, a technique that could be used to optimize for engagement—much like the feeds that mesmerize TikTok and Instagram users for hours

Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, has argued that although large language models are useful for some tasks, they’re not a path to a superintelligence.

According to a recent survey, only half of natural-language-processing researchers are convinced that an AI like GPT-4 could grasp the meaning of language, or have an internal model of the world that could someday serve as the core of a superintelligence

Altman had appeared before the U.S. Senate. Mark Zuckerberg had floundered defensively before that same body in his testimony about Facebook’s role in the 2016 election. Altman instead charmed lawmakers by speaking soberly about AI’s risks and grandly inviting regulation. These were noble sentiments, but they cost little in America, where Congress rarely passes tech legislation that has not been diluted by lobbyists.

Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington, describes GPT-4 as a “stochastic parrot,” a mimic that merely figures out superficial correlations between symbols. In the human mind, those symbols map onto rich conceptions of the world

But the AIs are twice removed. They’re like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, whose only knowledge of the reality outside comes from shadows cast on a wall by their captors.

Altman told me that he doesn’t believe it’s “the dunk that people think it is” to say that GPT-4 is just making statistical correlations. If you push these critics further, “they have to admit that’s all their own brain is doing … it turns out that there are emergent properties from doing simple things on a massive scale.”

he is right that nature can coax a remarkable degree of complexity from basic structures and rules: “From so simple a beginning,” Darwin wrote, “endless forms most beautiful.”

If it seems odd that there remains such a fundamental disagreement about the inner workings of a technology that millions of people use every day, it’s only because GPT-4’s methods are as mysterious as the brain’s.

To grasp what’s going on inside large language models like GPT‑4, AI researchers have been forced to turn to smaller, less capable models. In the fall of 2021, Kenneth Li, a computer-science graduate student at Harvard, began training one to play Othello without providing it with either the game’s rules or a description of its checkers-style board; the model was given only text-based descriptions of game moves. Midway through a game, Li looked under the AI’s hood and was startled to discover that it had formed a geometric model of the board and the current state of play. In an article describing his research, Li wrote that it was as if a crow had overheard two humans announcing their Othello moves through a window and had somehow drawn the entire board in birdseed on the windowsill.

The philosopher Raphaël Millière once told me that it’s best to think of neural networks as lazy. During training, they first try to improve their predictive power with simple memorization; only when that strategy fails will they do the harder work of learning a concept. A striking example of this was observed in a small transformer model that was taught arithmetic. Early in its training process, all it did was memorize the output of simple problems such as 2+2=4. But at some point the predictive power of this approach broke down, so it pivoted to actually learning how to add.

Even AI scientists who believe that GPT-4 has a rich world model concede that it is much less robust than a human’s understanding of their environment.

But it’s worth noting that a great many abilities, including very high-order abilities, can be developed without an intuitive understanding. The computer scientist Melanie Mitchell has pointed out that science has already discovered concepts that are highly predictive, but too alien for us to genuinely understand

As AI advances, it may well discover other concepts that predict surprising features of our world but are incomprehensible to us.

GPT-4 is no doubt flawed, as anyone who has used ChatGPT can attest. Having been trained to always predict the next word, it will always try to do so, even when its training data haven’t prepared it to answer a question.

The models “don’t have a good conception of their own weaknesses,” Nick Ryder, a researcher at OpenAI, told me. GPT-4 is more accurate than GPT-3, but it still hallucinates, and often in ways that are difficult for researchers to catch. “The mistakes get more subtle,

The Khan Academy’s solution to GPT-4’s accuracy problem was to filter its answers through a Socratic disposition. No matter how strenuous a student’s plea, it would refuse to give them a factual answer, and would instead guide them toward finding their own—a clever work-around, but perhaps with limited appeal.

When I asked Sutskever if he thought Wikipedia-level accuracy was possible within two years, he said that with more training and web access, he “wouldn’t rule it out.”

This was a much more optimistic assessment than that offered by his colleague Jakub Pachocki, who told me to expect gradual progress on accuracy—to say nothing of outside skeptics, who believe that returns on training will diminish from here.

Sutskever is amused by critics of GPT-4’s limitations. “If you go back four or five or six years, the things we are doing right now are utterly unimaginable,”

AI researchers have become accustomed to goalpost-moving: First, the achievements of neural networks—mastering Go, poker, translation, standardized tests, the Turing test—are described as impossible. When they occur, they’re greeted with a brief moment of wonder, which quickly dissolves into knowing lectures about how the achievement in question is actually not that impressive. People see GPT-4 “and go, ‘Wow,’ ” Sutskever said. “And then a few weeks pass and they say, ‘But it doesn’t know this; it doesn’t know that.’ We adapt quite quickly.”

The goalpost that matters most to Altman—the “big one” that would herald the arrival of an artificial general intelligence—is scientific breakthrough. GPT-4 can already synthesize existing scientific ideas, but Altman wants an AI that can stand on human shoulders and see more deeply into nature.

Certain AIs have produced new scientific knowledge. But they are algorithms with narrow purposes, not general-reasoning machines. The AI AlphaFold, for instance, has opened a new window onto proteins, some of biology’s tiniest and most fundamental building blocks, by predicting many of their shapes, down to the atom—a considerable achievement given the importance of those shapes to medicine, and given the extreme tedium and expense required to discern them with electron microscopes.

Altman imagines a future system that can generate its own hypotheses and test them in a simulation. (He emphasized that humans should remain “firmly in control” of real-world lab experiments—though to my knowledge, no laws are in place to ensure that.)

He longs for the day when we can tell an AI, “ ‘Go figure out the rest of physics.’ ” For it to happen, he says, we will need something new, built “on top of” OpenAI’s existing language models.

In her MIT lab, the cognitive neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has found something analogous to GPT-4’s next-word predictor inside the brain’s language network. Its processing powers kick in, anticipating the next bit in a verbal string, both when people speak and when they listen. But Fedorenko has also shown that when the brain turns to tasks that require higher reasoning—of the sort that would be required for scientific insight—it reaches beyond the language network to recruit several other neural systems.

No one at OpenAI seemed to know precisely what researchers need to add to GPT-4 to produce something that can exceed human reasoning at its highest levels.

at least part of the current strategy clearly involves the continued layering of new types of data onto language, to enrich the concepts formed by the AIs, and thereby enrich their models of the world.

The extensive training of GPT-4 on images is itself a bold step in this direction,

Others at the company—and elsewhere—are already working on different data types, including audio and video, that could furnish AIs with still more flexible concepts that map more extensively onto reality

Tactile concepts would of course be useful primarily to an embodied AI, a robotic reasoning machine that has been trained to move around the world, seeing its sights, hearing its sounds, and touching its objects.

humanoid robots. I asked Altman what I should make of that. He told me that OpenAI is interested in embodiment because “we live in a physical world, and we want things to happen in the physical world.”

At some point, reasoning machines will need to bypass the middleman and interact with physical reality itself. “It’s weird to think about AGI”—artificial general intelligence—“as this thing that only exists in a cloud,” with humans as “robot hands for it,” Altman said. “It doesn’t seem right.

Everywhere Altman has visited, he has encountered people who are worried that superhuman AI will mean extreme riches for a few and breadlines for the rest

Altman answered by addressing the young people in the audience directly: “You are about to enter the greatest golden age,” he said.

“A lot of people working on AI pretend that it’s only going to be good; it’s only going to be a supplement; no one is ever going to be replaced,” he said. “Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.”

A recent study led by Ed Felten, a professor of information-technology policy at Princeton, mapped AI’s emerging abilities onto specific professions according to the human abilities they require, such as written comprehension, deductive reasoning, fluency of ideas, and perceptual speed. Like others of its kind, Felten’s study predicts that AI will come for highly educated, white-collar workers first.

How many jobs, and how soon, is a matter of fierce dispute

The paper’s appendix contains a chilling list of the most exposed occupations: management analysts, lawyers, professors, teachers, judges, financial advisers, real-estate brokers, loan officers, psychologists, and human-resources and public-relations professionals, just to sample a few.

Altman imagines that far better jobs will be created in their place. “I don’t think we’ll want to go back,” he said. When I asked him what these future jobs might look like, he said he doesn’t know.

He suspects there will be a wide range of jobs for which people will always prefer a human. (Massage therapists?

His chosen example was teachers. I found this hard to square with his outsize enthusiasm for AI tutors.

He also said that we would always need people to figure out the best way to channel AI’s awesome powers. “That’s going to be a super-valuable skill,” he said. “You have a computer that can do anything; what should it go do?”

As many have noted, draft horses were permanently put out of work by the automobile. If Hondas are to horses as GPT-10 is to us, a whole host of long-standing assumptions may collapse.

Previous technological revolutions were manageable because they unfolded over a few generations, but Altman told South Korea’s youth that they should expect the future to happen “faster than the past.” He has previously said that he expects the “marginal cost of intelligence” to fall very close to zero within 10 years

The earning power of many, many workers would be drastically reduced in that scenario. It would result in a transfer of wealth from labor to the owners of capital so dramatic, Altman has said, that it could be remedied only by a massive countervailing redistribution.

In 2021, he unveiled Worldcoin, a for-profit project that aims to securely distribute payments—like Venmo or PayPal, but with an eye toward the technological future—first through creating a global ID by scanning everyone’s iris with a five-pound silver sphere called the Orb. It seemed to me like a bet that we’re heading toward a world where AI has made it all but impossible to verify people’s identity and much of the population requires regular UBI payments to survive. Altman more or less granted that to be true, but said that Worldcoin is not just for UBI.

“Let’s say that we do build this AGI, and a few other people do too.” The transformations that follow would be historic, he believes. He described an extraordinarily utopian vision, including a remaking of the flesh-and-steel world

“Robots that use solar power for energy can go and mine and refine all of the minerals that they need, that can perfectly construct things and require no human labor,” he said. “You can co-design with DALL-E version 17 what you want your home to look like,” Altman said. “Everybody will have beautiful homes.

In conversation with me, and onstage during his tour, he said he foresaw wild improvements in nearly every other domain of human life. Music would be enhanced (“Artists are going to have better tools”), and so would personal relationships (Superhuman AI could help us “treat each other” better) and geopolitics (“We’re so bad right now at identifying win-win compromises”).

In this world, AI would still require considerable computing resources to run, and those resources would be by far the most valuable commodity, because AI could do “anything,” Altman said. “But is it going to do what I want, or is it going to do what you want

If rich people buy up all the time available to query and direct AI, they could set off on projects that would make them ever richer, while the masses languish

One way to solve this problem—one he was at pains to describe as highly speculative and “probably bad”—was this: Everyone on Earth gets one eight-billionth of the total AI computational capacity annually. A person could sell their annual share of AI time, or they could use it to entertain themselves, or they could build still more luxurious housing, or they could pool it with others to do “a big cancer-curing run,” Altman said. “We just redistribute access to the system.”

Even if only a little of it comes true in the next 10 or 20 years, the most generous redistribution schemes may not ease the ensuing dislocations.

America today is torn apart, culturally and politically, by the continuing legacy of deindustrialization, and material deprivation is only one reason. The displaced manufacturing workers in the Rust Belt and elsewhere did find new jobs, in the main. But many of them seem to derive less meaning from filling orders in an Amazon warehouse or driving for Uber than their forebears had when they were building cars and forging steel—work that felt more central to the grand project of civilization.

It’s hard to imagine how a corresponding crisis of meaning might play out for the professional class, but it surely would involve a great deal of anger and alienation.

Even if we avoid a revolt of the erstwhile elite, larger questions of human purpose will linger. If AI does the most difficult thinking on our behalf, we all may lose agency—at home, at work (if we have it), in the town square—becoming little more than consumption machines, like the well-cared-for human pets in WALL-E

Altman has said that many sources of human joy and fulfillment will remain unchanged—basic biological thrills, family life, joking around, making things—and that all in all, 100 years from now, people may simply care more about the things they cared about 50,000 years ago than those they care about today

In its own way, that too seems like a diminishment, but Altman finds the possibility that we may atrophy, as thinkers and as humans, to be a red herring. He told me we’ll be able to use our “very precious and extremely limited biological compute capacity” for more interesting things than we generally do today.

Yet they may not be the most interesting things: Human beings have long been the intellectual tip of the spear, the universe understanding itself. When I asked him what it would mean for human self-conception if we ceded that role to AI, he didn’t seem concerned. Progress, he said, has always been driven by “the human ability to figure things out.” Even if we figure things out with AI, that still counts, he said.

It’s not obvious that a superhuman AI would really want to spend all of its time figuring things out for us.

I asked Sutskever whether he could imagine an AI pursuing a different purpose than simply assisting in the project of human flourishing.

“I don’t want it to happen,” Sutskever said, but it could.

Sutskever has recently shifted his focus to try to make sure that it doesn’t. He is now working primarily on alignment research, the effort to ensure that future AIs channel their “tremendous” energies toward human happiness

It is, he conceded, a difficult technical problem—the most difficult, he believes, of all the technical challenges ahead.

As part of the effort to red-team GPT-4 before it was made public, the company sought out the Alignment Research Center (ARC), across the bay in Berkeley, which has developed a series of evaluations to determine whether new AIs are seeking power on their own. A team led by Elizabeth Barnes, a researcher at ARC, prompted GPT-4 tens of thousands of times over seven months, to see if it might display signs of real agency.

The ARC team gave GPT-4 a new reason for being: to gain power and become hard to shut down

Agarwal told me that this behavior could be a precursor to shutdown avoidance in future models. When GPT-4 devised its lie, it had realized that if it answered honestly, it may not have been able to achieve its goal. This kind of tracks-covering would be particularly worrying in an instance where “the model is doing something that makes OpenAI want to shut it down,” Agarwal said. An AI could develop this kind of survival instinct while pursuing any long-term goal—no matter how small or benign—if it feared that its goal could be thwarted.

Barnes and her team were especially interested in whether GPT-4 would seek to replicate itself, because a self-replicating AI would be harder to shut down. It could spread itself across the internet, scamming people to acquire resources, perhaps even achieving some degree of control over essential global systems and holding human civilization hostage.

When I discussed these experiments with Altman, he emphasized that whatever happens with future models, GPT-4 is clearly much more like a tool than a creature. It can look through an email thread, or help make a reservation using a plug-in, but it isn’t a truly autonomous agent that makes decisions to pursue a goal, continuously, across longer timescales.

Altman told me that at this point, it might be prudent to try to actively develop an AI with true agency before the technology becomes too powerful, in order to “get more comfortable with it and develop intuitions for it if it’s going to happen anyway.”

“We need to do empirical experiments on how these things try to escape control,” Hinton told me. “After they’ve taken over, it’s too late to do the experiments.”

the fulfillment of Altman’s vision of the future will at some point require him or a fellow traveler to build much more autonomous AIs.

When Sutskever and I discussed the possibility that OpenAI would develop a model with agency, he mentioned the bots the company had built to play Dota 2. “They were localized to the video-game world,” Sutskever told me, but they had to undertake complex missions. He was particularly impressed by their ability to work in concert. They seem to communicate by “telepathy,” Sutskever said. Watching them had helped him imagine what a superintelligence might be like.

“The way I think about the AI of the future is not as someone as smart as you or as smart as me, but as an automated organization that does science and engineering and development and manufacturing,”

Suppose OpenAI braids a few strands of research together, and builds an AI with a rich conceptual model of the world, an awareness of its immediate surroundings, and an ability to act, not just with one robot body, but with hundreds or thousands. “We’re not talking about GPT-4. We’re talking about an autonomous corporation,”

Its constituent AIs would work and communicate at high speed, like bees in a hive. A single such AI organization would be as powerful as 50 Apples or Googles, he mused. “This is incredible, tremendous, unbelievably disruptive power.”

Presume for a moment that human society ought to abide the idea of autonomous AI corporations. We had better get their founding charters just right. What goal should we give to an autonomous hive of AIs that can plan on century-long time horizons, optimizing billions of consecutive decisions toward an objective that is written into their very being?

If the AI’s goal is even slightly off-kilter from ours, it could be a rampaging force that would be very hard to constrain

We know this from history: Industrial capitalism is itself an optimization function, and although it has lifted the human standard of living by orders of magnitude, left to its own devices, it would also have clear-cut America’s redwoods and de-whaled the world’s oceans. It almost did.

one of its principal challenges will be making sure that the objectives we give to AIs stick

We can program a goal into an AI and reinforce it with a temporary period of supervised learning, Sutskever explained. But just as when we rear a human intelligence, our influence is temporary. “It goes off to the world,”

That’s true to some extent even of today’s AIs, but it will be more true of tomorrow’s.

He compared a powerful AI to an 18-year-old heading off to college. How will we know that it has understood our teachings? “Will there be a misunderstanding creeping in, which will become larger and larger?”

Divergence may result from an AI’s misapplication of its goal to increasingly novel situations as the world changes

Or the AI may grasp its mandate perfectly, but find it ill-suited to a being of its cognitive prowess. It might come to resent the people who want to train it to, say, cure diseases. “They want me to be a doctor,” Sutskever imagines an AI thinking. “I really want to be a YouTuber.”

If AIs get very good at making accurate models of the world, they may notice that they’re able to do dangerous things right after being booted up. They might understand that they are being red-teamed for risk, and hide the full extent of their capabilities.

hey may act one way when they are weak and another way when they are strong, Sutskever said

We would not even realize that we had created something that had decisively surpassed us, and we would have no sense for what it intended to do with its superhuman powers.

That’s why the effort to understand what is happening in the hidden layers of the largest, most powerful AIs is so urgent. You want to be able to “point to a concept,” Sutskever said. You want to be able to direct AI toward some value or cluster of values, and tell it to pursue them unerringly for as long as it exists.

we don’t know how to do that; indeed, part of his current strategy includes the development of an AI that can help with the research. If we are going to make it to the world of widely shared abundance that Altman and Sutskever imagine, we have to figure all this out.

This is why, for Sutskever, solving superintelligence is the great culminating challenge of our 3-million-year toolmaking tradition. He calls it “the final boss of humanity.”

“First of all, I think that whether the chance of existential calamity is 0.5 percent or 50 percent, we should still take it seriously,”

. “I don’t have an exact number, but I’m closer to the 0.5 than the 50.”

As to how it might happen, he seems most worried about AIs getting quite good at designing and manufacturing pathogens, and with reason: In June, an AI at MIT suggested four viruses that could ignite a pandemic, then pointed to specific research on genetic mutations that could make them rip through a city more quickly

Around the same time, a group of chemists connected a similar AI directly to a robotic chemical synthesizer, and it designed and synthesized a molecule on its own.

Altman worries that some misaligned future model will spin up a pathogen that spreads rapidly, incubates undetected for weeks, and kills half its victims. He worries that AI could one day hack into nuclear-weapons systems too. “There are a lot of things,” he said, and these are only the ones we can imagine.

Altman told me that he doesn’t “see a long-term happy path” for humanity without something like the International Atomic Energy Agency for global oversight of AI

In San Francisco, Agarwal had suggested the creation of a special license to operate any GPU cluster large enough to train a cutting-edge AI, along with mandatory incident reporting when an AI does something out of the ordinary

Other experts have proposed a nonnetworked “Off” switch for every highly capable AI; on the fringe, some have even suggested that militaries should be ready to perform air strikes on supercomputers in case of noncompliance

Sutskever thinks we will eventually want to surveil the largest, most powerful AIs continuously and in perpetuity, using a team of smaller overseer AIs.

Safety rules for a new technology usually accumulate over time, like a body of common law, in response to accidents or the mischief of bad actors. The scariest thing about genuinely powerful AI systems is that humanity may not be able to afford this accretive process of trial and error. We may have to get the rules exactly right at the outset.

Several years ago, Altman revealed a disturbingly specific evacuation plan he’d developed. He told The New Yorker that he had “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur” he could fly to in case AI attacks.

if the worst-possible AI future comes to pass, “no gas mask is helping anyone.”

but he told me that he can’t really be sure how AI will stack up. “I just have to build the thing,” he said. He is building fast

Altman insisted that they had not yet begun GPT-5’s training run. But when I visited OpenAI’s headquarters, both he and his researchers made it clear in 10 different ways that they pray to the god of scale. They want to keep going bigger, to see where this paradigm leads. After all, Google isn’t slackening its pace; it seems likely to unveil Gemini, a GPT-4 competitor, within months. “We are basically always prepping for a run,

To think that such a small group of people could jostle the pillars of civilization is unsettling. It’s fair to note that if Altman and his team weren’t racing to build an artificial general intelligence, others still would be

Altman’s views about the likelihood of AI triggering a global class war, or the prudence of experimenting with more autonomous agent AIs, or the overall wisdom of looking on the bright side, a view that seems to color all the rest—these are uniquely his

No single person, or single company, or cluster of companies residing in a particular California valley, should steer the kind of forces that Altman is imagining summoning.

AI may well be a bridge to a newly prosperous era of greatly reduced human suffering. But it will take more than a company’s founding charter—especially one that has already proved flexible—to make sure that we all share in its benefits and avoid its risks. It will take a vigorous new politics.

I don’t think the general public has quite awakened to what’s happening. A global race to the AI future has begun, and it is largely proceeding without oversight or restraint. If people in America want to have some say in what that future will be like, and how quickly it arrives, we would be wise to speak up soon.