The most disorienting thing about today’s A.I. industry is that the people closest to the technology — the employees and executives of the leading A.I. labs — tend to be the most worried about how fast it’s improving.

This is quite unusual. Back in 2010, when I was covering the rise of social media, nobody inside Twitter, Foursquare or Pinterest was warning that their apps could cause societal chaos. Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t testing Facebook to find evidence that it could be used to create novel bioweapons, or carry out autonomous cyberattacks.

But today, the people with the best information about A.I. progress — the people building powerful A.I., who have access to more-advanced systems than the general public sees — are telling us that big change is near. The leading A.I. companies are actively preparing for A.G.I.’s arrival, and are studying potentially scary properties of their models, such as whether they’re capable of scheming and deception, in anticipation of their becoming more capable and autonomous.