This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here. Earlier this year, The Atlantic published a story by Gary Marcus, a well-known AI expert who has agitated for the technology to be regulated, both in his Substack newsletter and before the Senate. (Marcus, a cognitive scientist and an entrepreneur, has founded AI companies himself and has explored launching another.) Marcus argued that “this is a moment of immense peril,” and that we are teetering toward an “information-sphere disaster, in which bad actors weaponize large language models, distributing their ill-gotten gains through armies of ever more sophisticated bots.” I was interested in following up with Marcus given recent events. In the past six weeks, we’ve seen an executive order from the Biden administration focused on AI oversight; chaos at the influential company OpenAI; and this Wednesday, the release of Gemini, a GPT competitor from Google. What we have not seen, yet, is total catastrophe of …