AI boosters want you to believe government officials don’t know anything about AI. Fast Company spoke to a half-dozen D.C. vets whose candid takes on what’s real, what’s hype, and what’s next may surprise you. Tech giants are making grand promises for the AI age. The technology, we are told, might discover a new generation of medical interventions, and possibly answer some of the most difficult questions facing physics and mathematics. Large language models could soon rival human intellectual abilities, they claim, and artificial superintelligence might even best us. This is exciting, but also scary, they say, since the rise of AGI, or artificial general intelligence, could pose an uncontrollable threat to the human species.