Louis Rosenberg, Unanimous A.I.

Most people don’t appreciate the profound threat that AI will soon pose to human agency. A common refrain is that “AI is just a tool,” and like any tool, its benefits and dangers depend on how people use it. This is old-school thinking. AI is transitioning from tools we use to prosthetics we wear. This will create significant new threats we’re just not prepared for.

The average Fortune 1000 company has more than 30,000 employees and engineering, sales and marketing teams with hundreds of members. Equally large teams exist in government, science and defense organizations. And yet, research shows that the ideal size for a productive real-time conversation is only about 4 to 7 people.

Three years ago, ChatGPT was born. It amazed the world and ignited unprecedented investment and excitement in AI. Today, ChatGPT is still a toddler, but public sentiment around the AI boom has turned sharply negative. The shift began when OpenAI released GPT-5 this summer to mixed reviews, mostly from casual users who, unsurprisingly, judged the system by its surface flaws rather than its underlying capabilities.

With the release OpenAI's Chat GPT-5, the world is one step closer to unleashing a general-purpose superintelligence that can cognitively outperform each of us by a wide margin. As this day nears, I am increasingly worried that we are woefully unprepared for the shockwaves this will send through society — and it’s probably not for the reasons you expect.

Imagine if a large team of 200 people could hold a thoughtful real-time conversation in which they efficiently brainstorm ideas, share knowledge, debate alternatives and quickly converge on AI-optimized solutions. Is this possible — and if so, would it amplify their collective intelligence?

When I was a kid there were four AI agents in my life. Their names were Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde and they tried their best to hunt me down. This was the 1980s and the agents were the four colorful ghosts in the iconic arcade game Pac-Man.

2025 will be the year that big tech transitions from selling us more and more powerful tools to selling us more and more powerful abilities. The difference between a tool and an ability is subtle yet profound.  We use tools as external artifacts that help us overcome our organic limitations. From cars and planes to phones and computers, tools greatly expand what we can accomplish as individuals, in large teams and as vast civilizations.

A common criticism of big tech is that their platforms treat users as little more than glassy eyeballs to be monetized with targeted ads. This will soon change, but not because tech platforms are moving away from aggressively targeting users. Instead, our ears are about to become the most efficient channel for hammering us with AI-powered influence that is responsive to the world around us. Welcome to the Whisperverse.   

Two weeks ago, OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever raised $1 billion to back his newly formed company, Safe Superintelligence (SSI). The startup aims to safely build AI systems that exceed human cognitive capabilities. Just a few months before that, Elon Musk’s startup xAI raised $6 billion to pursue superintelligence, a goal Musk predicts will be achieved within five or six years. These are staggering rounds of funding for newly formed companies, and it only adds to the many billions already poured into OpenAI, Anthropic and other firms racing to build superintelligence.

In the world of science fiction, the notion that humanity will one day connect our brains together into a global “hive mind” dates back to a 1930 novel entitled “Last and First Men” by Olaf Stapledon. It recounts a fictional “future history” in which humanity evolves biologically into a species that can link telepathically and form collective minds of extreme intelligence.

Our lives will soon be filled with conversational AI agents designed to help us at every turn, anticipating our wants and needs so they can feed us tailored information and perform useful tasks on our behalf. They will do this using an extensive store of personal data about our individual interests and hobbies, backgrounds and aspirations, personality traits and political views — all with the goal of making our lives “more convenient.”

With the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) taking place this week, I wanted to explore how easy it would be for a developer to create a digital twin of Las Vegas that can be accessed from any computer with a quick download.