AI labs engage in knife fight for reputation in Davos

This is an excerpt from Sources by Alex Heatha newsletter about artificial intelligence and the technology industry, is only distributed to The Verge subscribers once a week.

The leaders of the three leading artificial intelligence labs spent this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, trading accusations like candidates in a presidential primary.

You helped start the news cycle. During an interview on Tuesday. I asked Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis talks about OpenAI’s decision to test ads in ChatGPT. “It’s interesting that they did it so early,” he said. “Maybe they feel they need to generate more revenue.”

The next day, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei continued talking about this during an interview I watched at the Wall Street Journal House in Davos. “We don’t need to monetize a billion free users because we’re in a death race with some of the other big players,” he said. He also teased an upcoming article focusing on the “bad things” AI could bring — a dark counterpart to his optimism Article “Machines of Love Grace.” From last year. During another appearance in Davos, he compared the US allowing Nvidia to sell GPUs to China to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”

OpenAI’s response came from Chris Lehane, its head of policy and perhaps the most formidable policy operative in Silicon Valley. Lehane earned the title of “Master of Disaster” in the Clinton White House, where he specialized in opposition research and crisis management. At Airbnb, he helped the company survive regulatory battles that threatened its existence. He is now the most high-profile policy chief at any AI lab, and has been applying tactics from his campaign days to the AI ​​race.

When I sat down with Lehane for breakfast Thursday morning near the main park in Davos, he was ready to respond. In response to Hassabis’s ad comments, Lehane pointed out the obvious irony. “You have to pay for computing if you’re going to give people access,” he told me. “I’m thrilled to have this conversation with the world’s largest online advertising platform every day, seven days a week.” He also described Amodei’s comments as “elitist” and “undemocratic.”

“You often find someone trying to rise from the bottom line saying provocative things, because it creates a feedback loop,” he told me between bites of scrambled eggs. “This gets your attention. My experience in politics is that it often ends up being short-lived because ultimately, if you’re saying these things, people are going to hold you accountable for your actual solutions. If we’re going to lose a significant portion of jobs (to AI), what are you actually doing to address that, especially if you’re raising these questions, right?”

“People who make these criticisms often don’t focus on how to make this technology widely available,” he continued. “They tend to come from a background that focuses almost exclusively on enterprise use cases. This is a very elitist approach.”

Reality is more subtle than those jabs that AI labs give each other. OpenAI is aggressively trying to take over Anthropic’s enterprise AI business, as it is with Google. And while it’s true that ChatGPT is the most widely used chatbot, reframing its advertising push as part of some kind of democratic virtue, rather than a financially motivated move to monetize most uses of ChatGPT, is great.

During our conversation, Lehane continued to return to his political framework. He told me that being in Davos was “like walking through downtown Manchester” in New Hampshire, before the primary race: the weather, the signs everywhere, the campaigning descending into one compressed environment, all trying to attract attention.

“We have front-runner status,” Lehane said. “Even if the front runner started out as a dark horse, we have now proven ourselves based on our innovation. The others are all trying to get away from that.”

After my conversations with AI leaders this week in Davos, I came away with the impression that the industry has collectively decided to join OpenAI. Hassabis and Amodei praised each other on stage during a formal World Economic Forum panel discussion this week titled “The Day After Artificial General Intelligence.”

“I think what we really have in common is that both companies are led by model-focused researchers, focused on solving important problems in the world,” Amodei said during the session. “I think this is the type of company that will be successful moving forward, and I think we share that very much between us.” (Sam Altman skipped Davos this year and so is he It is said in the Middle East to raise tens of billions of dollars.)

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s competitors tell me they’re particularly troubled by Altman’s aggressive attempts to shore up AI capacity, and some are frustrated at being shut out of deals by an unprofitable company that hasn’t yet shown it has the revenue to pay for the eye-popping commitments it’s making.

With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and the race toward artificial general intelligence accelerating, I expect the rhetoric to intensify this year. Lehane told me that campaigns get worse as Election Day approaches. If he’s right about that analogy, we’re still in the early primaries.