Such is the pace of change in AI that it has been, yet again, quite a weekend. On Saturday, Dario Amodei, boss of Anthropic, published an essay, We Must Pace the Frontier, urging his industry to slow down. Within the hour Elon Musk replied: ‘Dario is right’. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, followed. By Sunday, Amodei was on Face the Nation, again asking everyone to apply the brakes on the grand and momentous technology of our time.
None of it proves imminent superintelligence. But it is the sound of something ominous
The cynical explanation is obvious. OpenAI has just shelved this year’s IPO; Altman suddenly believes it unwise. Anthropic meanwhile is readying its own flotation, at nearly a trillion dollars, and maybe it is getting nervous that the markets will look askance at a business with no long-term model, seriously menaced by open-source rivals from China. Put it another way, these companies have no durable moat. And what better moat than a law? David Sacks, Trump’s AI czar, shot right back: ‘Stop pretending you need to suspend antitrust law in order to create a cartel.’ Meanwhile Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind in London, where ambitions were always different to the Bay Area, has been notably cooler, saying the direction is right, ish, but details are needed.
