The race to AGI-pill the pope
Pope Leo XIV probably isn't the first person you picture when conversation turns to Artificial General Intelligence doomsday scenarios. But last month, AGI researcher John-Clark Levin found himself inside the Vatican on a mission to put those concerns in front of the pope.
Levin hasn't been acting alone. In the past year, he has been quietly assembling a loose network of roughly three dozen academics, scientists, policy researchers, and priests - a group he half-jokingly calls the "AI Avengers" - who meet virtually to strategize how to get the Vatican thinking more seriously about AI's more extreme possibilities.
His main worry is that t …