August 2026
Mulligan ran national-security programs before working on AI. Nuclear, space, the internet — every previous technology of this weight was born inside or alongside the state. This one is not, and she argues most of what feels unprecedented about AI follows from that.
Transcript
It is. And it's because, you know, we've long anticipated that eventually the models would get good enough that they would begin to conduct the research that improves themselves. And this idea, which is known in the AI industry as recursive self-improvement, is not quite upon us yet, but it's getting really close. And so like, I can't even think five years into the future in terms of where this technology will be by then because it's so impossible. It's so non-linear at this point. And we're really reaching much more of an exponential.
What are other ways that make this AI revolution fundamentally different from every tech revolution before it?
The biggest one from where I sit is that this is really the first time in American history that a technology of this consequence is being developed exclusively by the private sector with no government involvement. You think back to the advent of electricity, nuclear fusion, the internet, the Human Genome Project, GPS. All of those are examples of technologies that were developed with government as a stakeholder in the development of the technology. They had a seat at the frontier table. They may not have been driving the whole thing, but they had at least a finger on the steering wheel. That is not true about AI. And it's really unique in that all the AI labs are operating really independently of government and government doesn't have a major AI initiative that can in any way compete with or compare with what is happening in private industry. And I think that's not necessarily a bad thing or a cause to be concerned, but it's been a bit uncomfortable for government and destabilizing for how we normally think about how government involvement and technological advancements should proceed. And I think it gives the government maybe more blind spots or at least different blind spots than the government would have if they were involved in the creation or the genesis or were somehow a direct stakeholder in the development of the technology.
Most people think AI is chat GPT. What's the much bigger story that they're missing?
Well, let me start by saying ChatGPT is pretty awesome. Chat is kind of the entry. It's the gateway. What it did that is phenomenal is it took the barrier almost entirely away, the technical barrier to regular people of all kinds being able to access and use this technology and experience its benefits. You don't have to be a developer. You don't have to know anything about technology. But for enterprises and particularly for government and also for the future, if you're like envisioning like, where is this all headed? It is really workflow transformation that is going to be the central thing. And it is the idea that every organization, whether it's a government or an enterprise, has some number of core workflows that are essential to what they do. If you're a drug manufacturer, it's like the process of evaluating and testing different types of pharmaceuticals. If you're the intelligence community, the analytic workflow and the collection workflows are good examples. Every workflow you can imagine has the potential to be transformed using AI. And it doesn't mean replaced. Notice that I'm not using replacement terminology because there are parts of those workflows that can be enhanced or changed or maybe made more efficient using AI. But there are also in every single one of those workflows parts that can't be. When I look ahead, I see chat, particularly for government, as being kind of necessary but insufficient. I think where government in particular needs to go, we aren't there yet, but we're on the path, is really starting to reimagine what might be possible if we, you know, thought about our core workflows in a different way.
Two years ago, AI seemed impressive, but limited. Today, it reasons. What changed?
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