Day: March 2, 2024

After Altair Jaspe moved from Venezuela to the Colombian capital, Bogotá, she was taken aback by the way she was addressed when she walked into any shop, cafe or doctor’s office.

In a city that was once part of the Spanish empire, she was no longer “señora,” as she would have been called in Caracas, or perhaps, in her younger years, “muchacha” or “chama.” (Venezuelan terms for “girl” or “young woman.”)

Instead, all around her, she was awarded an honorific that felt more fitting for a woman in cape and crown: Your mercy.

Would your mercy like a coffee?

Will your mercy be taking the appointment at 3 p.m.?

Excuse me, your mercy, people told her as they passed in a doorway or elevator.

“It brought me to the colonial era, automatically,” said Ms. Jaspe, 63, a retired logistics manager, expressing her initial discomfort with the phrase. “To horses and carts,” she went on, “maybe even to slavery.”

“But after living it,” she went on, “I understood.”

In most of the Spanish-speaking world, the principal ways to say “you” are the casual “tú,” and the formal “usted.” But in Colombia there is another “you” — “su merced,” meaning, “your mercy,” “your grace” or even “your worship,” and now contracted to the more economical “sumercé.”

(In some parts of the Spanish-speaking world there is yet a different “you” employed — the hyper casual “vos.”)

In Bogotá, a city of eight million people nestled in the Andes Mountains, “sumercé” is ubiquitous, deployed not just by taxi drivers and shopkeepers to attend to clients (how can I help your mercy?), but also by children to refer to parents, parents to refer to children, and (sometimes with tender irony) even by husbands, wives and lovers to refer to each other (“would your mercy pass the salt?” or “your mercy, what do you think, should I wear these pants today?”).

It is used by the young and old, by urbanites and rural transplants, by Bogotá’s most recent past mayor (“trabaje juiciosa, sumercé!” she was once caught on camera yelling at a street vendor, “get to work, your mercy!”), and even by the front woman for one of the country’s best-known rock bands, Andrea Echeverri of Aterciopelados.

The Spanish founded Bogotá in 1538 after a brutal conquest of the Indigenous Muisca people, and the city soon became a center of colonial power.

“Sumercé” is indeed a relic of that era, and scholars have documented its use as a sign of courtesy in institutional relationships (a letter from the governor of Cuba to the conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1518); a sign of respect in families (one brother-in-law to another in 1574); and, in particular, as a sign of servitude from slaves or servants to their masters.

But modern-day advocates of “sumercé” say that its current popularity lies in the fact that it has lost that hierarchical edge, and today signifies respect and affection, not reverence or a distinction of social class.

Ms. Jaspe said she eventually came to see “sumercé” as a casual term of endearment, as in “sumercé, qué bonito le queda ese sombrero.” (“Your mercy, how lovely that hat looks on you.”)

After Colombia gained its independence from the Spanish in the early 1800s, “sumercé” hung on in the department of Boyacá, a lush agricultural region in central Colombia, just north of Bogotá.

Jorge Velosa, a singer-songwriter and famous voice of Boyacá (he once played Madison Square Garden in the region’s traditional wool poncho, known as a ruana) recalled that in his childhood home “sumercé” was how he and his siblings referred to their mother, and their mother to referred to them.

“Sumercé,” he said, was a sort of middle ground between the stiff “usted” — used only in his house as a preamble to a scolding — and the almost overly casual “tú.”

Eventually, “sumercé” migrated south along with many Boyacenses, to Bogotá, becoming as much a part of the lexicon of central Colombia as “bacano” (cool), “chévere” (also cool), “parce” (friend), “paila” (difficult), “qué pena” (sorry) and “dar papaya.” (Literally, “give papaya,” but more figuratively, “act oblivious.” As in: “Your mercy, don’t act oblivious in the street, you’ll get robbed!”).

For the most part “your mercy” has remained a feature of central Colombia, and is rarely used on the country’s coasts, where “tú” is more common, or in cities like Cali (“vos”) and Medellín (“tu,” “usted” and sometimes “vos.”)

But in the capital and its surroundings, “sumercé” is emblazoned on hats, pins and T-shirts and incorporated into the names of restaurants and markets. It is the title of a new documentary about Colombian environmental activists. And it is celebrated in songs, podcasts and Colombian Spanish lessons across Spotify and YouTube.

“At this point it marks no social class,” said Andrea Rendón, 40, of Bogotá. “We are all sumercé.”

A recently released music video, “Sumercé,” by the rapper Wikama Mc, embodies the folk-cool status the phrase has achieved.

In a house party scene that could be set almost anywhere in the Colombian Andes, the artist sports a ruana while celebrating the “Colombian flow” of the female object of his affection, who he brags “dances carranga” — folk music popularized by Mr. Velosa — and also reggaeton, modern party beats popularized by international megacelebrities like J. Balvin.

“Talk to me straight, sumercé,” he raps, before offering his girlfriend a cordial tip of his traditional felt hat.

The song has attracted more than 18,000 views since it was uploaded to YouTube in December. Impressive, considering the artist has 500 followers on the platform.

Ms. Echeverri, the rock star, linked her use of the phrase to a punk aesthetic, which seeks a “horizontal” relationship with everyday people. (In a recent video interview she used it to draw the program’s host closer, speaking of a remake of one of “those songs that maybe your mercy has heard so many times.”)

Sumercé, she explained in a separate interview, “is affectionate, but also respectful.”

Not everyone sees it that way, of course. Carolina Sanín, a well-known writer, has criticized those who argue that “sumercé” is so ubiquitous in Colombia that it should be embraced, uncritically, as a cultural norm.

Even in a region known for its pronounced inequality, Colombia’s class divisions remain particularly entrenched. It takes the average poor Colombian 11 generations to reach the national median income, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, two more than in Brazil, three more than in Chile and five more than in Argentina.

Decades of violence have reinforced these barriers, allowing a small group to amass capital and territory. To some, “sumercé” can feel like a perpetuation or even a celebration of these hierarchical relationships.

“Not paying into the social system and accumulating land have also been referred to as ‘our custom,’” Ms. Sanín wrote on Twitter.

“Words are important,” she continued. “With words, paths to justice are forged.”

A linguist in Bogotá, Javier Guerrero-Rivera, recently surveyed 40 Colombian university students, and found that 85 percent said they were not bothered by the term, and felt a sense of respect and tenderness when it was directed at them. Another 10 percent felt indifferent toward the phrase. Just 5 percent said the term was dismissive or made them uncomfortable.

Juan Manuel Espinosa, deputy director of the Caro and Cuervo Institute, which is dedicated to studying the particularities of Colombian Spanish, said that he believed the social division described by people like Ms. Sanín was precisely what attracted many Colombians to the word.

“‘Sumercé’ is a way to create a connection in a very fragmented society,” he said.

Jhowani Hernández, 42, who operates office cleaning machines, described using “your mercy” with his wife, Beatriz Méndez, 50, a housekeeper, “cuando me saca la piedra” (Colombian for “when she makes me angry”) but mostly “para dar cariño” (“to show affection”).

Still, Daniel Sánchez, 31, a documentary filmmaker in Bogotá, said that he had moved away from using “sumercé,” after he began thinking about “the whole background of the phrase,” meaning “that servile and colonialist thing that is not so cool.”

Now, when he wants to convey respect and affection, he employs a different, less fraught Colombianism: “Veci,” meaning simply “neighbor.” As in: “Veci, don’t give papaya in the street, you’ll get robbed.”

Simón Posada contributed reporting from Bogotá.

When Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, for breach of contract on Thursday, he turned claims by the start-up’s closest partner, Microsoft, into a weapon.

He repeatedly cited a contentious but highly influential paper written by researchers and top executives at Microsoft about the power of GPT-4, the breakthrough artificial intelligence system OpenAI released last March.

In the “Sparks of A.G.I.” paper, Microsoft’s research lab said that — though it didn’t understand how — GPT-4 had shown “sparks” of “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a machine that can do everything the human brain can do.

It was a bold claim, and came as the biggest tech companies in the world were racing to introduce A.I. into their own products.

Mr. Musk is turning the paper against OpenAI, saying it showed how OpenAI backtracked on its commitments not to commercialize truly powerful products.

Microsoft and OpenAI declined to comment on the suit. (The New York Times has sued both companies, alleging copyright infringement in the training of GPT-4.) Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

How did the research paper come to be?

A team of Microsoft researchers, led by Sébastien Bubeck, a 38-year-old French expatriate and former Princeton professor, started testing an early version of GPT-4 in the fall of 2022, months before the technology was released to the public. Microsoft has committed $13 billion to OpenAI and has negotiated exclusive access to the underlying technologies that power its A.I. systems.

As they chatted with the system, they were amazed. It wrote a complex mathematical proof in the form of a poem, generated computer code that could draw a unicorn and explained the best way to stack a random and eclectic collection of household items. Dr. Bubeck and his fellow researchers began to wonder if they were witnessing a new form of intelligence.

“I started off being very skeptical — and that evolved into a sense of frustration, annoyance, maybe even fear,” said Peter Lee, Microsoft’s head of research. “You think: Where the heck is this coming from?”

What role does the paper play in Mr. Musk’s suit?

Mr. Musk argued that OpenAI had breached its contract because it had agreed to not commercialize any product that its board had considered A.G.I.

“GPT-4 is an A.G.I. algorithm,” Mr. Musk’s lawyers wrote. They said that meant the system never should have been licensed to Microsoft.

Mr. Musk’s complaint repeatedly cited the Sparks paper to argue that GPT-4 was A.G.I. His lawyers said, “Microsoft’s own scientists acknowledge that GPT-4 ‘attains a form of general intelligence,’” and given “the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.) system.”

How was it received?

The paper has had enormous influence since it was published a week after GPT-4 was released.

Thomas Wolf, co-founder of the high-profile A.I. start-up Hugging Face, wrote on X the next day that the study “had completely mind-blowing examples” of GPT-4.

Microsoft’s research has since been cited by more than 1,500 other papers, according to Google Scholar. It is one of the most cited articles on A.I. in the past five years, according to Semantic Scholar.

It has also faced criticism by experts, including some inside Microsoft, who were worried the 155-page paper supporting the claim lacked rigor and fed an A.I marketing frenzy.

The paper was not peer-reviewed, and its results cannot be reproduced because it was conducted on early versions of GPT-4 that were closely guarded at Microsoft and OpenAI. As the authors noted in the paper, they did not use the GPT-4 version that was later released to the public, so anyone else replicating the experiments would get different results.

Some outside experts said it was not clear whether GPT-4 and similar systems exhibited behavior that was something like human reasoning or common sense.

“When we see a complicated system or machine, we anthropomorphize it; everybody does that — people who are working in the field and people who aren’t,” said Alison Gopnik, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “But thinking about this as a constant comparison between A.I. and humans — like some sort of game show competition — is just not the right way to think about it.”

Were there other complaints?

In the paper’s introduction, the authors initially defined “intelligence” by citing a 30-year-old Wall Street Journal opinion piece that, in defending a concept called the Bell Curve, claimed “Jews and East Asians” were more likely to have higher I.Q.s than “blacks and Hispanics.”

Dr. Lee, who is listed as an author on the paper, said in an interview last year that when the researchers were looking to define A.G.I., “we took it from Wikipedia.” He said that when they later learned the Bell Curve connection, “we were really mortified by that and made the change immediately.”

Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s chief scientist, who was a lead contributor to the paper, wrote in an email that he personally took responsibility for inserting the reference, saying he had seen it referred to in a paper by a co-founder of Google’s DeepMind A.I. lab and had not noticed the racist references. When they learned about it, from a post on X, “we were horrified as we were simply looking for a reasonably broad definition of intelligence from psychologists,” he said.

Is this A.G.I. or not?

When the Microsoft researchers initially wrote the paper, they called it “First Contact With an AGI System.” But some members of the team, including Dr. Horvitz, disagreed with the characterization.

He later told The Times that they were not seeing something he “would call ‘artificial general intelligence’ — but more so glimmers via probes and surprisingly powerful outputs at times.”

GPT-4 is far from doing everything the human brain can do.

In a message sent to OpenAI employees on Friday afternoon that was viewed by The Times, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, explicitly said GPT-4 was not A.G.I.

“It is capable of solving small tasks in many jobs, but the ratio of work done by a human to the work done by GPT-4 in the economy remains staggeringly high,” he wrote. “Importantly, an A.G.I. will be a highly autonomous system capable enough to devise novel solutions to longstanding challenges — GPT-4 can’t do that.”

Still, the paper fueled claims from some researchers and pundits that GPT-4 represented a significant step toward A.G.I. and that companies like Microsoft and OpenAI would continue to improve the technology’s reasoning skills.

The A.I. field is still bitterly divided on how intelligent the technology is today or will be anytime soon. If Mr. Musk gets his way, a jury may settle the argument.

It would be easy to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI as a case of sour grapes.

Mr. Musk sued OpenAI this week, accusing the company of breaching the terms of its founding agreement and violating its founding principles. In his telling, OpenAI was established as a nonprofit that would build powerful A.I. systems for the good of humanity and give its research away freely to the public. But Mr. Musk argues that OpenAI broke that promise by starting a for-profit subsidiary that took on billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft.

An OpenAI spokeswoman declined to comment on the suit. In a memo sent to employees on Friday, Jason Kwon, the company’s chief strategy officer, denied Mr. Musk’s claims and said, “We believe the claims in this suit may stem from Elon’s regrets about not being involved with the company today,” according to a copy of the memo I viewed.

On one level, the lawsuit reeks of personal beef. Mr. Musk, who founded OpenAI in 2015 along with a group of other tech heavyweights and provided much of its initial funding but left in 2018 over disputes with leadership, resents being sidelined in the conversations about A.I. His own A.I. projects haven’t gotten nearly as much traction as ChatGPT, OpenAI’s flagship chatbot. And Mr. Musk’s falling out with Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, has been well documented.

But amid all of the animus, there’s a point that is worth drawing out, because it illustrates a paradox that is at the heart of much of today’s A.I. conversation — and a place where OpenAI really has been talking out of both sides of its mouth, insisting both that its A.I. systems are incredibly powerful and that they are nowhere near matching human intelligence.

The claim centers on a term known as A.G.I., or “artificial general intelligence.” Defining what constitutes A.G.I. is notoriously tricky, although most people would agree that it means an A.I. system that can do most or all things that the human brain can do. Mr. Altman has defined A.G.I. as “the equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker,” while OpenAI itself defines A.G.I. as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.”

Most leaders of A.I. companies claim that not only is A.G.I. possible to build, but also that it is imminent. Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind, told me in a recent podcast interview that he thought A.G.I. could arrive as soon as 2030. Mr. Altman has said that A.G.I. may be only four or five years away.

Building A.G.I. is OpenAI’s explicit goal, and it has lots of reasons to want to get there before anyone else. A true A.G.I. would be an incredibly valuable resource, capable of automating huge swaths of human labor and making gobs of money for its creators. It’s also the kind of shiny, audacious goal that investors love to fund, and that helps A.I. labs recruit top engineers and researchers.

But A.G.I. could also be dangerous if it’s able to outsmart humans, or if it becomes deceptive or misaligned with human values. The people who started OpenAI, including Mr. Musk, worried that an A.G.I. would be too powerful to be owned by a single entity, and that if they ever got close to building one, they’d need to change the control structure around it, to prevent it from doing harm or concentrating too much wealth and power in a single company’s hands.

Which is why, when OpenAI entered into a partnership with Microsoft, it specifically gave the tech giant a license that applied only to “pre-A.G.I.” technologies. (The New York Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI over use of copyrighted work.)

According to the terms of the deal, if OpenAI ever built something that met the definition of A.G.I. — as determined by OpenAI’s nonprofit board — Microsoft’s license would no longer apply, and OpenAI’s board could decide to do whatever it wanted to ensure that OpenAI’s A.G.I. benefited all of humanity. That could mean many things, including open-sourcing the technology or shutting it off entirely.

Most A.I. commentators believe that today’s cutting-edge A.I. models do not qualify as A.G.I., because they lack sophisticated reasoning skills and frequently make bone-headed errors.

But in his legal filing, Mr. Musk makes an unusual argument. He argues that OpenAI has already achieved A.G.I. with its GPT-4 language model, which was released last year, and that future technology from the company will even more clearly qualify as A.G.I.

“On information and belief, GPT-4 is an A.G.I. algorithm, and hence expressly outside the scope of Microsoft’s September 2020 exclusive license with OpenAI,” the complaint reads.

What Mr. Musk is arguing here is a little complicated. Basically, he’s saying that because it has achieved A.G.I. with GPT-4, OpenAI is no longer allowed to license it to Microsoft, and that its board is required to make the technology and research more freely available.

His complaint cites the now-infamous “Sparks of A.G.I.” paper by a Microsoft research team last year, which argued that GPT-4 demonstrated early hints of general intelligence, among them signs of human-level reasoning.

But the complaint also notes that OpenAI’s board is unlikely to decide that its A.I. systems actually qualify as A.G.I., because as soon as it does, it has to make big changes to the way it deploys and profits from the technology.

Moreover, he notes that Microsoft — which now has a nonvoting observer seat on OpenAI’s board, after an upheaval last year that resulted in the temporary firing of Mr. Altman — has a strong incentive to deny that OpenAI’s technology qualifies as A.G.I. That would end its license to use that technology in its products, and jeopardize potentially huge profits.

“Given Microsoft’s enormous financial interest in keeping the gate closed to the public, OpenAI, Inc.’s new captured, conflicted and compliant board will have every reason to delay ever making a finding that OpenAI has attained A.G.I.,” the complaint reads. “To the contrary, OpenAI’s attainment of A.G.I., like ‘Tomorrow’ in ‘Annie,’ will always be a day away.”

Given his track record of questionable litigation, it’s easy to question Mr. Musk’s motives here. And as the head of a competing A.I. start-up, it’s not surprising that he’d want to tie up OpenAI in messy litigation. But his lawsuit points to a real conundrum for OpenAI.

Like its competitors, OpenAI badly wants to be seen as a leader in the race to build A.G.I., and it has a vested interest in convincing investors, business partners and the public that its systems are improving at breakneck pace.

But because of the terms of its deal with Microsoft, OpenAI’s investors and executives may not want to admit that its technology actually qualifies as A.G.I., if and when it actually does.

That has put Mr. Musk in the strange position of asking a jury to rule on what constitutes A.G.I., and decide whether OpenAI’s technology has met the threshold.

The suit has also placed OpenAI in the odd position of downplaying its own systems’ abilities, while continuing to fuel anticipation that a big A.G.I. breakthrough is right around the corner.

“GPT-4 is not an A.G.I.,” Mr. Kwon of OpenAI wrote in the memo to employees on Friday. “It is capable of solving small tasks in many jobs, but the ratio of work done by a human to the work done by GPT-4 in the economy remains staggeringly high.”

The personal feud fueling Mr. Musk’s complaint has led some people to view it as a frivolous suit — one commenter compared it to “suing your ex because she remodeled the house after your divorce” — that will quickly be dismissed.

But even if it gets thrown out, Mr. Musk’s lawsuit points toward important questions: Who gets to decide when something qualifies as A.G.I.? Are tech companies exaggerating or sandbagging (or both), when it comes to describing how capable their systems are? And what incentives lie behind various claims about how close to or far from A.G.I. we might be?

A lawsuit from a grudge-holding billionaire probably isn’t the right way to resolve those questions. But they’re good ones to ask, especially as A.I. progress continues to speed ahead.

Thousands of residents were left without power, and life came to a standstill for many in the Sierra Nevada region on Saturday after a winter storm dumped as much as two feet of snow overnight and created treacherous conditions.

About 49,000 customers in Nevada and California were without electricity on Saturday morning, according to PowerOutage.us. With whiteout conditions in the mountains, ski resorts in the Lake Tahoe area paused operations. And highway officials shut down Interstate 80, the main artery that traverses the Sierra Nevada over Donner Summit, a key trucking route from the San Francisco Bay Area. Traffic cameras revealed semi trucks parked alongside the highway, waiting out the overnight closure.

​​California Highway Patrol said there was no estimated time of reopening the freeway.

The Central Sierra Snow Laboratory, a research station located atop Donner Summit, reported that 20.7 inches of snow had fallen as of Saturday morning, and that 39.8 inches had fallen over the past 48 hours. Palisades Tahoe, a resort that closed ski area operations on Saturday across all terrain, reported 24 inches of new snow in the past 24 hours.

Yosemite National Park remained closed at least through noon Sunday, park officials said.

In the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, the huge mountain range that runs along the spine of California, forecasters rated the avalanche danger as high, and they expected avalanche hazards to worsen throughout the day because of the new snow and continued winds. Overnight, winds reached as high as 171 miles per hour.

Several avalanches were reported in the backcountry on Friday, according to public observations on the Sierra Avalanche Center website, including at least one partial burial — a skier was caught when snow buried him up to his shoulders, but he was dug out about 10 minutes later. There were no injuries or fatalities reported.

In the morning in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., before snow plows could reach residential streets, some local residents had to fend for themselves to dig out amid the steady snowfall.

Autumn Worden, 28, plowed her four-wheel drive Subaru through deep trenches of snow. “I was rocking and rolling getting out of my neighborhood,” said Ms. Worden, a barista at a coffee roastery in Stateline, Nev., just east of South Lake Tahoe.

“I made it to work though,” she said, adding that there was about a foot of snow on the roads when she headed out this morning.

Meteorologists began sounding the alarms earlier this week about “life-threatening blizzard conditions” expected through Sunday in the Sierra Nevada.

Some residents, however, were determined not to let the snow disrupt their plans.

Brendan Madigan, owner of Alpenglow Sports, an outdoor gear shop in Tahoe City, will not be closing his store. “We take a lot of pride in being open,” he said. “We feel like we’ve got hardy customers — it’s the mountains — and we have a responsibility to be here if people need us.”

Mr. Madigan said many recent customers in the store have been making storm-specific purchases. “Most people are doing retail therapy because the ski area is closed,” he said.

When it comes down to it, a lot of Democrats wish President Biden were not running this fall. Only 28 percent of Democrats in a new survey by The New York Times and Siena College expressed enthusiasm about his candidacy and 38 percent said flatly that Mr. Biden should not be their nominee.

But even as many Democrats both in Washington and around the country quietly pine for someone else to take on former President Donald J. Trump, who leads nationwide in the poll by 5 percentage points, no one who matters seems willing to tell that to Mr. Biden himself. Or if they are, he does not appear to be listening.

Surrounded by a loyal and devoted inner circle, Mr. Biden has given no indication that he would consider stepping aside to let someone else lead the party. Indeed, he and the people close to him bristle at the notion. For all the hand-wringing, the president’s advisers note, no serious challenge has emerged and Mr. Biden has dominated the early Democratic primaries even more decisively than Mr. Trump has won his own party’s nominating contests.

The Biden team views the very question as absurd. The president in their view has an impressive record of accomplishment to run on. There is no obvious alternative. It is far too late in the cycle to bow out without considerable disruption. If he were ever to have opted against a second term, it would have been a year ago when there would have been time for a successor to emerge. And other than someone with Biden in their name, it is hard to imagine who would have enough influence to even broach the idea with him, much less sway him.

“There is no council of elders and I’m not sure if there was that an incumbent president, no matter who it was, would listen to them,” said David Plouffe, the architect of President Barack Obama’s campaigns and one of the strategists who helped him pick Mr. Biden as his vice-presidential running mate in 2008. “He thinks, ‘Hey, I won and I beat the guy who’s going to run against me and I can do it again.’”

Members of Mr. Biden’s team insist they feel little sense of concern. The president’s closest aides push back in exasperation against those questioning his decision to run again and dismiss polls as meaningless this far before the vote. They argue that doubters constantly underestimate Mr. Biden and that Democrats have won or outperformed expectations in 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 and even a special House election this year.

“Actual voter behavior tells us a lot more than any poll does and it tells a very clear story: Joe Biden and Democrats continue to outperform while Donald Trump and the party he leads are weak, cash-strapped, and deeply divided,” Michael Tyler, the Biden campaign’s communications director, said on Saturday. “Our campaign is ignoring the noise and running a strong campaign to win — just like we did in 2020.”

Outside the White House, though, many Democrats wish that the no-panic White House would exhibit some urgency. Mr. Biden’s weakness in polls, especially those showing him trailing in all of the half-dozen swing states necessary to assemble an Electoral College majority, have generated widespread anxiety within the party. Some privately say that Georgia and Arizona may be out of reach, requiring Mr. Biden to sweep Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

The discontent is not necessarily a judgment on the merits of Mr. Biden’s presidency. Many Democrats say he has done a good job on many fronts — winding down the pandemic, rebuilding the economy, managing wars in Europe and the Middle East and enacting landmark legislation on infrastructure, climate change, health care, industrial policy, veterans’ care and other issues.

But his support has been undercut by concern about his age, his support for Israel’s war on Hamas, the record influx of migrants at the southwest border and the lingering effects of inflation even though it has come back down. More than 100,000 Democrats in Michigan, or 13 percent of the total, just cast protest votes for “uncommitted” to voice their dissatisfaction, most notably over Gaza.

Mr. Biden, 81, is just a little older than Mr. Trump, 77, and both have exhibited moments of confusion and memory lapses. After his annual physical this past week, Mr. Biden’s doctor pronounced him “fit for duty.” But polls show that more of the public is unsettled by Mr. Biden’s advancing years than Mr. Trump’s.

“Would I rather that Joe Biden were 65? Sure, that would be great,” said Elaine Kamarck, director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Democratic National Committee. “But he’s not. And that’s why I think we’re in the silly season where everybody is casting around for some alternate scenario.”

The alternate scenarios remain far-fetched. The long-shot challenger, Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, has gotten no traction and with Super Tuesday coming up this week it is almost certainly too late for a more heavyweight candidate to jump into the contest even if any were willing to take on the president, which none seem prepared to do.

Plenty of dinner-table conversations in Washington these days focus on what would happen if Mr. Biden changed his mind at the last minute the way President Lyndon B. Johnson did in 1968 or experienced a health situation that prompted him to drop out. If that happened before the Democratic National Convention in August, it would set the stage for the first open competition at a convention in decades. After the convention, any vacancy at the top of the ticket would be filled by the Democratic National Committee.

All the talk, though, is just that. Mr. Biden is helped by the fact that no one from the next generation of Democrats waiting in the wings, like Vice President Kamala Harris or Governors Gavin Newsom of California or Gretchen Whitmore of Michigan, has a proven national following or track record of success in primaries.

“You could name five or six alternatives to Biden but they haven’t been through the system,” said Ms. Kamarck, one of the country’s leading experts on the nomination process who has just published the fourth edition of her quadrennial guide, “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates.”

“We don’t know enough about them to hand them a nomination,” she continued. “It’s crazy. The whole thing is so nutty. There is no alternative.”

Ms. Kamarck said that more and more, Democrats have come to accept that. “Democrats are increasingly getting very, very vocal in their defense of Biden,” she said. “The guy’s a good guy. He’s not senile. He’s made good choices. The economy’s the best economy in the world. I mean, shut up. Let’s get behind this guy.”

The notion that someone outside his family could talk Mr. Biden into stepping aside has always been a fanciful one. There are few Democrats with the kind of gravitas that might mean something to Mr. Biden. He still feels sore that Mr. Obama gently pushed him not to run in 2016, deferring to Hillary Clinton, who went on to lose to Mr. Trump in the fall. Mr. Biden is old enough to have no mentors left and few peers from his Senate days. And Jill Biden and other family members strongly support this final run.

“There were only two people who could prevent Joe Biden from being the nominee — Joe Biden if he decides not to run or someone serious who would challenge him,” said Mr. Plouffe. And no matter how appealing a younger Democrat might seem in theory, he added, nothing is certain until someone actually runs and wins. “The political graveyard is full of people who look good on paper,” he said.

Mr. Plouffe agreed that “the concerns about his age are more pronounced than people thought” a year ago. “The only thing you can do is normalize it and ultimately take the fight to Trump.” He said he was pleased to see Mr. Biden get out more, go on late-night television and utilize Tik Tok. The more voters see him, Mr. Plouffe reasoned, the less any particular miscue might matter.

An important moment for the president to assert himself will come on Thursday night when he delivers his State of the Union address to what historically should be his largest television audience of the year. He will talk about his record and what he wants to do for the next four years. But as important as any policy pronouncement will be how he presents himself.

The president’s advisers express confidence that when the moment of decision arrives, most voters will again prefer Mr. Biden, whatever his faults, to Mr. Trump, a twice-impeached defeated former president who faces 91 felony counts, has been found liable in civil trials for sweeping business fraud and sexual assault and talks of being a “dictator” for a day.

“Where most Democrats are,” said Mr. Plouffe, “is, ‘OK, this is going to be really hard, a high degree of difficulty, but ultimately there’s probably enough of the country who doesn’t want to sign up for a second Trump term that we can make this work.’”

Justin Homen kept driving across his vast Texas ranch, but he only found the same bleak scenes: blackened grassland, charred cow carcasses and smoldering debris turned almost entirely to ash.

Then he arrived at the place he thinks of as a hidden oasis: a pond and small lake that, in better times, bask in the emerald glow of looping, leafy trees and tall grass. As he stepped out of the cab of his truck and onto the singed grass, his mutter was nearly drowned out by the wind.

“Pretty sickening.”

On a normal Friday afternoon, he might check on his herd and then come here with an old friend, pour a glass of whiskey and cast a line into the pond. Now, he was facing the realization that almost all of his family’s century-old ranch, a swath of land nearly the size of Manhattan, had been burned this week when the largest fire in state history tore through the Texas Panhandle.

Mr. Homen, 41, finds himself among scores of cattle ranchers across the Great Plains looking at an uncertain future. Thousands of animals have been killed, and outbuildings and homes have been destroyed in fires across Texas, Nebraska and Kansas. The Smokehouse Creek fire, near Mr. Homen’s ranch outside the town of Pampa, has expanded to more than one million acres and threatens to grow further this weekend with windy, dry conditions expected.

The fire’s consequences are far-reaching for ranchers, like Mr. Homen, whose cattle were largely spared. Scorched grazing lands means their surviving cows may starve if left alone. For many, the tasks ahead feel gargantuan: bury dead cattle, mend broken fences, distribute bales of hay trucked in from hundreds of miles away.

“It’ll end ranching for some,” said Tate Rosenbusch, who met Mr. Homen in middle school when the two would show livestock together and who worked for a time at an agriculture-focused bank. “There’s some that will not be able to get back into it — either they’re just emotionally or financially drained.”

And starting over will not be easy. Cattle prices have shot up amid dry conditions in recent years, meaning the idea of replacing the dead cows is a nonstarter for many ranchers.

Interest rates are also high, making loans less appealing, and many ranchers are facing a stack of bills this time of year as they prepare for spring planting, plowing fields, buying fertilizer and seeds and shelling out for gas for their equipment.

“It’s never a good time, but right now is a really, really bad time,” said Mr. Rosenbusch, 41, who owns a farm and also helps run a trucking and towing company.

How soon the land recovers is largely out of their hands.

“It’s all dependent on rain at this point,” Mr. Rosenbusch said. “Unfortunately, none of that is in your control. You can do all the rain dancing you want to.”

The Smokehouse Creek fire began on Monday and spread quickly in the sparsely populated areas near Texas’ border with Oklahoma.

Mr. Homen and Mr. Rosenbusch cut open fences, hoping the cattle would be able to escape if necessary. When the flames arrived, they drove out in trucks with water tanks to try to beat back the flames. For a time, they kept the fire at bay, but then the wind shifted. All was lost.

“We worked our ass off on it for 30 hours and saved maybe 100 acres,” Mr. Homen said. He and Mr. Rosenbusch recalled how they would put out a fire on a patch of land only to turn around a few minutes later and see it ablaze again.

Now, many ranches are strewn with dead and injured animals.

For those who lost a large number of animals — some lost hundreds — the immediate problem is figuring out how to bury them all. A state contractor, Lone Star Hazmat, was trawling the roadways this week, loading onto a truck dozens of dead cows that had made it to the road before perishing.

And even for the cattle that survived, Mr. Homen said, the fire and smoke could cause health problems down the road or lead pregnant cows to give birth prematurely.

That could mean a financial hit a year from now if ranchers have fewer yearlings to sell, either for reproduction or to meat producers. And for now, there is the urgent problem of keeping the cows fed with no grass to munch on.

On Friday, Mr. Homen and Mr. Rosenbusch visited several dozen cows on farmland that Mr. Homen operates near his ranch. The cows had been eating the remains of corn and sorghum harvested last fall, and the fire passed them by. Mr. Homen said he usually moves the cows down to his ranch by this time of year but hadn’t gotten around to it yet, a delay that had ended up saving the lives of many of the cows.

The cows mooed and jostled with each other as Mr. Homen dumped cubes of feed from his truck for them to eat. For now, ranchers are largely relying on truckloads of hay brought in by generous farmers, much of them from many miles away.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Sam Schafer, a rancher who described himself as semiretired and who was marveling at the stacks of hay being dropped off this week. Donning a cowboy hat and a white button-down shirt, he was helping to deliver bales a few at a time to ranches in the area, including Andy Jahnel’s.

Mr. Jahnel said he had fled his home as the fire raced toward his property, which has been in his family since the turn of the 20th century.

“I left because there was a cloud of smoke like a tornado coming,” Mr. Jahnel said. “Just dark black.”

Of his 1,120 acres, only about 25 percent remained unscathed, he said. All 13 of his horses had miraculously survived.

The temporary solution of delivering hay is one that will not last for many ranchers. Mr. Homen and Mr. Rosenbusch said that after the donations stop coming, individually feeding cattle — rather than having them graze — would not make economic sense.

“If you have to feed them every bite, they’re going to eat and you’re going to go broke,” Mr. Rosenbusch said.

As Mr. Homen surveyed the property on Friday, he and Mr. Rosenbusch tried to find any positive they could in the destruction that the fire had wrought. The fire moved so quickly that it had burned onlyaround the ranch’s structures. And, if they were lucky, the inferno probably had also taken out the moles that chewed through electric lines and gotten rid of those invasive Russian olive trees.

But the path ahead felt heavy.

“Find as many cows as we can and go on,” Mr. Homen said. “In this business, you can’t just throw your hands up and walk away. You’re married to it.”

Mitch Smith contributed reporting.