The Outsider Perspective Issue 464 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Except to Chicago. The city is in the middle of dealing with Trump’s National Guard surge. But that’s the least of their problems, which include a governor who admitted $1.4 million in gambling earnings to the IRS this past year.

No, Chicago is on here because one of its newest landmarks turned out to be a fraud. The infamous “rat hole,” a pothole shaped like a rat, which appeared overnight, isn’t actually a rat. Researchers have determined that it’s more likely a squirrel caused the pothole, which looks suspiciously like a rat. You can look at it and decide for yourself.

It’s not an AI-generated pothole, though. That’s for sure. I can’t say the same for the rest of this newsletter, which will focus on how AI is growing even more this year—links to follow.

Quick Hits:

The Supreme Court is poised to seriously curtail the Voting Rights Act. At the end of the last term, I made note of a rehearing request for the Supreme Court: Louisiana v. Callais. Getting a rehearing on a case like that is rare, and when the Court emphasized it was rehearing the Section 2 arguments, that signaled a massive earthquake ahead. All the commentary agrees: there are at least six votes to curb the VRA after oral arguments. Specifically, allowing states to draw racial majority-minority districts is going to get curtailed, which Democrats believe will wreck them. The NY Times wrote a piece panicking about this reality, claiming Democrats are poised to lose 19 seats in the House because of the VRA. I am less sure of this. At first blush, the GOP will get more seats, but you’ll also be making the same drawn districts more purple. Also, nothing stays the same forever. Democrats are assuming a lot of things about these districts. What Democrats hate about this is that they won’t be able to run radicals in these districts and get an automatic win.t
Amy Coney Barrett’s media tour continues. This week, she spoke with Ross Douthat at the NYT. It’s a great interview and I recommend it. Her new book is already being assigned in Supreme Court classes at both college and law schools; professors love it.
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Where you can find me this week

Please subscribe, rate, and review The Horse Race on YouTube — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter and The American Almanac.

Trump Embodies Peace Through Strength – Conservative Institute

A Tale Of Two Vice Presidents – Conservative Institute

Democrats Are Losing The Government Shutdown – Conservative Institute

Artificial Intelligence Is Evolving

Nvidia, the poster child of the AI explosion we’re in, is sitting right at $4.5 trillion valuation. It was the first company to reach $3 trillion and $4 trillion in value. Most analysts expect it to become the first $5 trillion company, perhaps as soon as this year. The explosion here is massive and boggles the mind.

All Nvidia is doing is selling chips to AI model creators like OpenAI, Grok, Anthropic, and the rest. Both the United States and China rely on these chips to advance their technologies. It’s clearly a bubble, but there’s also a very real sense in which the valuation is accurate.

The AI revolution is the new space race. The United States and China are locked in an unstoppable race to develop the most potent version of AI. Billions upon billions of dollars are being poured into the water and electricity required to get the massive data centers off the ground.

To give you a sense of how rapidly things are changing, a recent survey estimated 52% of all written content on the internet right now is AI-generated. At the start of this decade, that number was near zero. That number skyrocketed in 2022, when ChatGPT was released in November.

At the end of 2024, we were approaching 60% of all content being AI-written, with that falling back a bit since then, but still trending up. That number is going to increase even more as OpenAI opens the floodgates to X-rated content.

Sam Altman wrote the following:

We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems. Still, given the seriousness of the issue, we wanted to get this right.

Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases.

In a few weeks, we plan to release a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4o (we hope it will be better!). If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing).

In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.

I follow OpenAI’s direction on AI closely for two reasons. 1) They’re the market leader. 2) What they do will direct the rest of the industry. Knowing fully aware, some models already allow adult-oriented content.

Nate Silver’s observation was close to mine on this development: “OpenAI’s recent actions don’t seem to be consistent with a company that believes AGI is right around the corner.”

Let’s take a brief sidetrack and talk AGI – aka Artificial General Intelligence.

Most of today’s AI—like ChatGPT, image generators, or recommendation algorithms—is narrow AI. It’s extremely good at specific tasks it’s trained for, such as writing text, recognizing faces, or translating languages. But it can’t move beyond those boundaries. A chess-playing AI can’t suddenly decide to learn chemistry; a self-driving car can’t analyze legal contracts.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), by contrast, would be able to learn and reason across any field, adapting to new problems the way a human mind does. An AGI could write a novel, design an experiment, or fix a broken economic model—all without being explicitly trained for each. It wouldn’t just follow patterns; it would understand them.

In simple terms:

Current AI is like a collection of savants—brilliant in one domain, useless outside it.
AGI would be a polymath—able to transfer knowledge, form goals, and think abstractly about anything.

Researchers debate when (or whether) we’ll reach AGI. Still, the concept represents a turning point: the moment when machines stop being tools that assist human intelligence and start becoming entities that possess it. Another term for AGI is “the singularity.”

ChatGPT and LLMs are the closest thing we’ve ever had to AGI because they can work across multiple domains. But we’re still not there, just yet.

The question I’ve debated for a while is whether AGI is even possible. The most optimistic of the AI crowd believe AGI is imminent. They point to the rapid scaling we’ve seen. The pessimists point out that even though we’re close, we’re not there yet. And it’s questionable that we can get there.

Silver’s observation is correct insofar as OpenAI is moving towards winning over more users, driving adoption, and pushing out competitors. This is OpenAI trying to make money off their model, which is still the market leader. If you were on the brink of AGI, you’d monetize then, not now.

In that sense, we’ve flatlined a bit on AI development. However, OpenAI is removing the guardrails. ChatGPT has been a pain to use for certain tasks in the political or historical world because it doesn’t want to deal with “dangerous ideas.“

For instance, we were joking internally at work this week about countries where Americans could walk in and take them over. We tried pitching the idea to ChatGPT, which refused to take on the question because it dealt with the possible violent overthrow of a country.

It’s an example, one of many, of dumb ways in which ChatGPT is useless. It also doesn’t like to be overly biased one way or another, which makes it essentially useless in examining divisive issues in politics.

But even with that opening, the company is temporarily halting depictions of Martin Luther King Jr. on its new video site Sora 2, following the King estate’s complaint about negative portrayals.

But for every version of King, there’s the opposite side. For instance, here are some YouTube music videos that have blown my mind over the last few weeks:

Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby“ redone into a 1960s soul song. It’s like James Brown decided to cut it.
50 Cent’s “In Da Club“ redone as a ’50s soul song.
A 1970s video of Star Trek, if everyone were a disco dancer.
Star Trek, except everyone is in Miami Vice.
Harry Potter reimagined as a biker gang.
Star Wars as the Vietnam War.

Each one of these depicts a real person or a copyright-protected creation. The videos, though, depict AI-created lyrics, voices, and music. The creators are likely chipping in a little or a lot, depending on the video, on the back-end.

But in the span of a few months, new creators are popping up solely due to the tech. Will it last? I have no idea. But for the moment, these kinds of channels are pushing the limits of the tech. And each one is slightly better than the previous one, as both the human and the AI improve.

The point is this: OpenAI is being responsible for the King estate. That’s not happening with anyone or anything else. There were viral videos of animals and people getting sucked off porches on a Ring camera the last two weeks, all AI-created. Before that, the viral videos were old, fat ladies crashing through glass bridges.

I have no idea where this will end up, because that’s impossible to know. Trillions of dollars are being pumped into artificial intelligence. That’s not an exaggeration. Every 3-6 months, we get a new update that changes how it operates, while adoption rates skyrocket.

People are adopting AI into their lives faster than they adopted the internet. That is partially due to the internet being a hardware thing, where you had to physically deliver equipment to people to connect. But even given that, we’re seeing astonishing adoption rates.

Even without AGI, AI is changing everything. The current trend is that people are settling into improving their use of it. AI is creating better writing, images, videos, and sound. It’s far from perfect, but we’re witnessing a genuine revolution at a speed and scale unlike anything in history.

Quick Hits:

Where you can find me this week

Artificial Intelligence Is Evolving

Links of the week

X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week

Satire of the week

Thanks for reading!