SEASON 4 OPENER: AI Doom and the US v China race

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Send us Fan Mail Check our Matt & Jimmy' products here: Browzr | Discover the Web Beyond Algorithms Des Cartwright — Paintings Meridian Health Tracker KickoffHQ: Live Start Times & Scores for Every Sport Germanya — Deutsch lernen A senior researcher quits, a “10% chance we all die” quote goes viral, and suddenly the AI safety debate stops sounding like a niche forum argument.  We try to make sense of why the mood has changed, and what it means when the people building frontier models talk about catastrophic risk while still racing to release the next system.  We dig into concrete failure modes: models that hack, systems that optimise ruthlessly for narrow goals, and the growing push towards recursive self-improvement where AI writes more of its own code and even helps with alignment.  We keep it practical and slightly uncomfortable: once humans are no longer the slow part, what does control even look like, especially when everything is connected to the internet and incentives reward capability over caution?  Then we put the whole thing through a US China lens. China regulates AI in a more centralised, security-first way, while the US frames the problem as safety and loss