JOHN YANG: Tonight on PBS News Weekend, the Trump administration orders the National Guard to Los Angeles following clashes between immigration officers and protesters.

Then a book that pulls back the curtain on a company that's considered a driving force behind the boom of artificial intelligence, open AI.

WOMAN: They were going to be open and collaborative and they wanted this technology to be ushered into the public purely for social benefit.

And that is not the what I found.

JOHN YANG: And how gene editing technology may offer a breakthrough approach to combating a devastating disease ravaging Florida's citrus industry.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Good evening.

I'm John Yang.

In Los Angeles, quiet streets have greeted the first of 2,000 National Guard troops sent by President Trump in response to two days of clashes between protesters and immigration officers.

Demonstrators had gathered at places around the city where officers were carrying out raids, some of them throwing things.

Authorities used power, pepper spray and flashbang grenades to try to restore order.

In a memo to the Pentagon and the attorney general, Mr. Trump said he was acting under a rarely used law because the demonstrations constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, objected, saying on social media that the Guard's presence will escalate tensions and erode public trust.

Democratic Representative Nanette Barragan represents Paramount, California, a heavily Latino city where there were clashes yesterday at a Home Depot.

Representative, thanks for joining us.

What do you think accounts for the fact that things are calm now?

REP. NANETTE BARRAGAN (D) California: I haven't seen any immigration activity today that and raids like we saw in the last couple of days.

So I think that is a factor.

But look, you know, people are afraid, they're worried, they're concerned.

I think that's why you're seeing the protests.

They are protesting mass deportations and what this administration has been doing for the last several months, whether it's trampling on due process, just deporting people.

There is no targeted effort to actually find serious criminal offenders.

And that is what you're seeing people protest.

It's saying, get out of our communities.

JOHN YANG: What's your reaction to the president sending in the National Guard?

NANETTE BARRAGAN: Well, I think this is -- I think the governor's right.

I think this is an effort by this president, number one, to distract from his failed policies, whether it's about to take millions of health care away from people, whether it is the tanking economy, prices are going up, he reverts right back to what he knows, and that is immigration.

And so I think this is his way of showing force.

I think it's a unnecessary effort.

I spoke to local law enforcement yesterday evening.

They had things under control.

They got things under control without the National Guard, and so did LAPD.

So we know that the National Guard really is just an effort for the president to escalate things and have more tension and show, you know, flex his muscle.

Maybe that's a better way to put it.

But it's unnecessary, and it's really a dangerous power grab.

JOHN YANG: You talk about the anger.

We've seen pictures of people throwing things at officers trying to block their vehicles.

Is that an appropriate response?

NANETTE BARRAGAN: I condemn all violence, and we are telling people to protest peacefully.

You can have civil disobedience peacefully as well.

But we do not believe that people should be throwing items at law enforcement.

And violence is no answer.

I will also say, I think that last night we saw people who were taking advantage of the situation, who I don't think were there really to protest the immigration conduct and activity.

They were destroying property, they were looting.

Those people should be arrested.

And that is not what the movement against the immigration action is.

So we want to continue to have people be peaceful.

JOHN YANG: And what do you make of the president's description of this as a rebellion against the government's authority?

NANETTE BARRAGAN: You know, this is more of the President manufacturing something that's not there.

You know, this is a situation where in California.

We, our local law enforcement does not participate in federal immigration conduct.

And that's what he wants.

He's acting like a dictator.

And we're seeing that happen, both in his language.

We're seeing it happen in the way he's defined, even court orders, how he's trampling on due process.

JOHN YANG: Help us understand what the difference is between what immigration was doing in the last two days that sparked all this anger and what they've done in the past.

NANETTE BARRAGAN: So what they've done in the past is immigration has been showing up at hospitals as women were delivering to separate their babies and deport the mothers.

They've been showing up at schools.

They've been showing up just about any place, even work sites.

They even picked up a U.S.

Marshal, mistaking him for an immigration person they wanted to deport.

And in the last couple of days, we've seen immigration show up and just indiscriminately show up at places like a Home Depot parking lot where people are trying to find a job.

They're not criminals.

And so this is his mass deportation effort, which is not focused on finding criminals.

And I think that is one of the reasons you're seeing people protest.

They're protesting these mass deportations.

JOHN YANG: Representative Nanette Barragan, thank you very much.

NANETTE BARRAGAN: Great.

Thank you.

JOHN YANG: And in other news, a peaceful protest in Washington, D.C. where hundreds of LGBTQ plus people and their allies braved the rain on the final day of the weeks' long WorldPride celebration.

The tone was more political than Saturday's parade.

Speakers criticized the Trump administration's rollback of anti-discrimination policies for the LGBTQ plus community and executive orders targeting transgender people.

The mayor of Moscow says Russia intercepted at least 10 Ukrainian drones that were headed for the city.

In Ukraine, one person was killed and another seriously wounded overnight in another round of Russian airstrikes in the Kharkiv region.

Russia has stepped up its attacks since Ukraine's big drone strike on its warplanes.

Ukrainian president below tomorrow, Zelenskyy told ABC News that the covert operation was a setback for Russia's military.

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT: We have our analytics that we destroyed 34 percent of their strategic jets and especially those jets which they used to attack our civil infrastructure, people, children, they killed a lot of people.

The price of this operation, I mean this for Russians, more than $7 billion.

JOHN YANG: NATO says Ukraine hit about 40 Russian warplanes, but estimates that only 10 were destroyed.

Military experts say it will take years for Russia to replace the bombers.

A Colombian senator and presidential hopeful remains in critical condition in a Bogota hospital.

Miguel Uribe was shot Saturday at a campaign event in Bogota.

People staged vigils and waved Colombian flags outside his hospital.

Authorities said they arrested a 15-year-old carrying a pistol.

The government is offering a $730,000 reward for information about who was behind the attack.

In a statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the attempted assassination and said inflammatory rhetoric from leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro was to blame.

And at the French Open in Paris, a stunning comeback for 22 year old Carlos Alcaraz defending his title in a marathon match.

He rallied from two sets down and saved three match points to beat world number one, Jannik Sinner.

The match was the longest ever French Open final, 5 hours and 29 minutes, and it ended in a tiebreaker.

Still to come on PBS News Weekend, we sit down with the author of a book that looks at OpenAI and where it may take us.

And we explore a potentially groundbreaking solution to a disease devastating the citrus industry.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is one of the world's most famous and secretive companies.

It's on a mission to try to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

That's a theoretical type of AI that possesses human intelligence and can perform any intellectual task a person can, as opposed to more specific tasks like image recognition or how to win a chess.

Investigative journalist Karen Hao's new book, "Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares, and Sam Altman's Open Air," offers a skeptical look at where the company is headed.

Here's Ali Rogin.

ALI ROGIN: Karen, thank you so much for joining us.

You've been following OpenAI from the very beginning when it introduced itself as a research nonprofit with very lofty goals.

Tell us about those early days.

KAREN HAO, Author, "Empire of AI": Yeah, so I was the first journalist to ever profile OpenAI and I embedded within the company for three days in August of 2019.

And the reason why I thought it was worth profiling them in that moment in time is because they were beginning to shift away from those nonprofit origins.

They had just restructured to put a for profit within the nonprofit that suggested there would be some kind of commercial intent later on.

And I was asking executives and employees to explain to me what was the mission.

And they insisted that the mission was the same, that they were trying to ultimately build AI completely without commercial interest, and they were going to be open and collaborative and they wanted this technology to be ushered into the public purely for social benefit.

And that is not what I found.

I found that they were very competitive, they were very secretive, and that certainly they had to have some kind of commercialization plan because they had just received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.

ALI ROGIN: And of course, we can't talk about the company and the ethos of the company without talking about its CEO, Sam Altman.

You track his rise in the company and then his firing and then subsequent reinstatement, which really shocked a lot of folks in Silicon Valley.

How much has Sam Altman and his views informed the direction of AI in Silicon Valley?

KAREN HAO: I really think OpenAI is a manifestation of Altman.

He is a product of Silicon Valley himself and he is very much a product of this philosophy of growth at all costs.

Try and be ambitious about changing the world and assume that the world is a zero sum game and that winners take all in this race.

And so you see a lot of how Open Air operates today is an embodiment of that.

They chose to take an AI development approach that is based on this growth at all costs mentality, where they're trying to train their models on the entire internet.

They're trying to train them on massive supercomputers that are starting to really strain the energy resource availability around the world.

They are trying to exploit a lot of labor to fortify that particular AI development paradigm.

And ultimately he is positioning AG development as this aggressive race where OpenAI needs to be number one.

Because if not, if an American company is not going to beat that global race, then China will overtake it.

And there is this zero sum game mentality around the rhetoric.

ALI ROGIN: You have a position in this book, and it is that AI evolving in this way is indeed a threat to humanity.

What do you see as the biggest risks?

KAREN HAO: For me, it is very different from the doomer threats where the doomers believe that AI could fundamentally go rogue and it could develop consciousness and therefore kill everyone.

That is not what I think is actually the risk here.

I do not think that I will go rogue.

There is no scientific evidence for that particular claim.

But what we are seeing in the real world right now is that this particular AI paradigm is creating an enormous consolidation of economic and political power in the hands of these companies.

And my title, "Empire of AI" is a nod to the argument that these companies actually need to be thought of as new forms of empire because they are laying claim to extraordinary historic levels of resources.

They are exploiting an extraordinary amount of labor, they are monopolizing knowledge production.

So most of the AI research is actually filtered through the lens of what is good for these companies versus not because they have a monopoly on the top AI talent in the world.

And ultimately all empires have this narrative that there are evil empires and there are good empires.

And the reason why they, the good empire, have to be an empire in the first place and engage in all this resource and power consolidation is because they must be strong to beat back that evil empire.

But ultimately we are just seeing a profound, profound unprecedented consolidation of power.

And the threat is when we reach an age where people at the top can just do whatever they want, develop this technology however they want, deploy it however they want, and potentially lead to mass environmental consequences, mass economic consequences, huge amounts of job loss, that ultimately most of the people in the world are going to feel this loss of agency in determining their own future.

And when people do not feel that they have a voice to self-determine, democracy dies.

So the greatest threat is to democracy.

ALI ROGIN: You also document many of the problems with AI and the unfettered growth that it is experiencing.

Proponents, including Sam Altman himself, would argue that there are dramatic tremendous benefits as well.

Is there anything good you see about AI and the pursuit of artificial general intelligence?

KARON HAO: AI is such an interesting word because it's sort of like the word transportation and that you have bicycles, you have gas guzzling trucks, you have rocket ships, they're all forms of transportation, but they all serve different purposes and they have different cost benefit trade-offs.

And to me the quest to artificial general intelligence has the worst trade-offs because you are trying to build fundamentally an everything machine, but ultimately it can't actually do all of the things.

So not only do you confuse the public about what you can actually do with these technologies, which leads to harm because then people start asking it for things like medical information and instead getting medical misinformation back.

But also it requires all of these things that I described, the colossal resource consumption, the colossal labor exploitation.

But there are many, many different types of AI technologies that I think are hugely beneficial.

And this is task specific models that are meant to target solving a specific well scoped challenge, something like integrating renewable energy into the grid, weather prediction, drug discovery, health care, where you identify cancer earlier on in an MRI scan.

These are all very task specific.

It's very clear what the use case is.

It's -- you can curate very, very small data sets, train them on very, very small computers.

And I think if we want broad based benefit from AI, we need broad based distribution of these types of AI technologies across all different industries.

ALI ROGIN: The book is "Empire of AI."

Karen Hao, thank you so much for bringing your insights.

KAREN HAO: Thank you so much Ali.

JOHN YANG: Sam Altman declined an interview request.

We remain open to it in the future.

Finally tonight, researchers in Florida are testing a new gene edited tree that they hope will be able to fight off the tiny insects that have been devastating Florida's orange groves for years.

Here's PBS Iowa's Colleen Krantz.

COLLEEN KRANTZ (voice-over): Ron English's family had been in the Florida citrus industry for generations.

But when a disease called citrus greening began ravaging his orange and grapefruit groves, his family business came to a crashing halt.

RON ENGLISH, Valrico, Florida: About 2015, we decided that greening had hurt us enough to where the quality of the fruit wasn't there.

And when it hit us hard.

What we knew to do to keep the trees alive didn't work.

So we made a decision just to shut our operation down.

My father in law and our family had been in the citrus business since 1895.

COLLEEN KRANTZ (voice-over): What happened to the English family has become increasingly common across Florida.

Since citrus greening first emerged about 20 years ago, producers in the state have lost 63 percent of their citrus bearing acres.

Some growers switched to other forms of agriculture while many others, like English, sold to developers.

RON ENGLISH: We were able to sell something we didn't want to do.

COLLEEN KRANTZ (voice-over): All this massive change has been caused by a tiny bacterium spread by the non-native Asian citrus psyllid.

The insects burrow inside leaf folds and deposit the bacteria when they feed.

There is no cure for the infected trees.

All will eventually die.

For generations, Americans have associated Florida with oranges, but the state's orange production has plummeted 90 percent, the lowest annual production in nearly a century.

So now an all-out effort is underway to find a fixed.

And Ron English is back in the citrus game.

He oversees a test grove for a company called Soilcea.

That company has partnered with the University of Florida, which is developing citrus trees that are genetically edited to protect against greening even after exposure to the bacteria.

The company is rapidly refining the most promising genetic edits to make the trees more resistant to the bacteria that cause citrus greens, known for short as HLB.

YIANNI LAGOS, CEO, Soilcea: What we're doing is finding the specific genes that are susceptible to HLB and using CRISPR precision breeding to turn off this interaction.

And we have a tree that we're saying is showing early HLB resistance.

We hope it's going to last for a lot longer.

But we only have trees that have been in the field for a couple of years.

Every six months we're getting more and more confident.

COLLEEN KRANTZ (voice-over): In the past decade, Florida growers have tried one potential solution after another, including using steam to kill the bacteria.

All either failed or required constant management that was too costly.

YIANNA LAGOS: We do feel the pressure they get at the growers quickly because, I mean, they're really struggling, right?

It's really, I mean, it's a real testament to the growers that they've stayed in this industry even with citrus greening.

COLLEEN KRANTZ (voice-over): So far researchers say the trees that result from precision breeding look much healthier than the control trees.

QUINTON ALLEN, Senior Scientist: Different gene targets are showing tolerance where the plant actually still gets infected.

But it's a big, beautiful tree compared to the controls.

We're seeing others where the amount of bacteria in the plant is so low or almost undetectable compared to the controls.

COLLEEN KRANTZ (voice-over): The hope is that the work of the University of Florida and Soilcia will ultimately bear fruit.

But it will take several more years before the gene edited trees can start producing enough oranges.

And then the next stage will involve evaluating taste and yield.

MAN: If everything goes well, I think we'd be looking at the end of 2026 or maybe spring of 2027, where we kind of get those first commercial trees out there.

So to really start bringing the industry back, it's going to take some time.

COLLEEN KRANTZ (voice-over): As for Ron English, he's optimistic that his grandchildren might someday have the opportunity to get the family back into the citrus business, thanks to science.

RON ENGLISH: What we're doing is the key to getting back, and once we can get people started and start planting, I think it'll catch on.

COLLEEN KRANTZ (voice-over): For PBS News Weekend, I'm Colleen Bradford Krantz in Tampa, Florida.

JOHN YANG: Now online, why buy now, pay later programs have become so popular, and what consumers should keep in mind to protect themselves.

All that and more is on our website, pbs.org/NewsHour.

And that is PBS News Weekend for this Sunday.

Tomorrow on the NewsHour a look at how the Trump administration is putting people with extremist ties in critical roles.

I'm John Yang.

For all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us.

Have a good week.