This is an alternative scenario I wrote for the AI 2027 bounty.

The date is January 20, 2033.

You are Pete Buttigieg, President of the United States, and it is the first day of your tenure. You feel restless, as you had spent the last week or so reciting your inauguration speech.

As you settle into your seat at the Oval Office, you feel a sense of surrealism, almost as if part of you feels like it’s all a dream. You still can’t believe you’ve just became the most powerful man in the world, despite the knowledge that your landslide victory was essentially guaranteed.

Vance’s approval rating had been polling in the twenties. In all honesty, he shouldn’t have won in the first place.

His victory in 2028 over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was essentially a deus ex machina. Trump’s rash economic decisions had caused the US’s credit rating to fall to an AA-, and foreign reception of the US, even by its traditional allies like Canada and the EU, had fallen to an all-time low. In early 2028, the Democrats had a net favorability over the Republicans of around 8 points, and it was looking increasingly likely that Vance would follow suit in Harris’ path.

By June, the Democratic primary had concluded, and you had unfortunately lost to AOC. At this point, AI had already become a “culture war” issue (Republicans pro-AI and Democrats against), and AOC had taken a firm interventionist stance, to the point where regulating AI art to protect artists had become part of her platform. She was popular otherwise too, with her main campaign promise being to raise the federal minimum wage to $15.

In July, however, something totally unexpected occurred. Stargate, now with Google DeepMind and xAI in its ranks (but not Anthropic, as Dario Amodei staunchly opposed Trump’s approach to AI), announced that AGI, both conversational and agentic, had been achieved. They announced a new model, Athena, a chatbot that could double as an agent.

Realistically, Athena wasn’t that much better than o7 or Grok 5#. What set it apart was that it was dirt-cheap, with an API price of only $5 for each million tokens. Free users (if they were an ID-verified citizen of the US or a few other designated countries) got 50 free prompts and 10 free tasks per day, and premium users paying $25 a month got an unlimited number of each. In contrast, the “big four” AI companies charged $250-500 per month for their top models, a pric...

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