Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
The leaders of the three preeminent frontier AI labs spent this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, taking shots at each other like candidates in a presidential primary.
I helped start the news cycle. During an interview on Tuesday, I asked Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis about OpenAI’s decision to test ads in ChatGPT. “It’s interesting they’ve gone for that so early,” he said. “Maybe they feel they need to make more revenue.”
The next day, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei piled it on 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 some death race with some other large player,” he said. He also teased an upcoming essay focused on the “bad things” AI could bring — a dark counterpart to his optimistic “Machines of Loving Grace” essay from last year. During another Davos appearance, he compared the US allowing Nvidia to sell GPUs to China to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”
“We don’t need to monetize a billion free users because we’re in some death race with some other large player.”
OpenAI’s retort came from Chris Lehane, its head of policy and perhaps the most formidable political operator in Silicon Valley. Lehane earned the nickname “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. Now he’s the most high-profile policy chief of any AI lab and is applying tactics from his campaigning days to the AI race.
When I sat down with Lehane for breakfast on Thursday morning near the main Promenade in Davos, he was ready to punch back. In response to Hassabis’ ad comments, Lehane pointed to the obvious irony. “You do have to pay for compute if you’re going to give people access,” he told me. “I’m happy to have that conversation with the biggest online advertising platform in the world every day, seven days a week.” He also called Amodei’s comments “elitist” and “undemocratic.”
“You’ll often have someone who is trying to move up from the second tier say things that are provocative, because it creates a feedback loop,” he told me between bites of scrambled eggs. “That gets you some 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 to your actual solutions. If we’re going to lose a big chunk of jobs [to AI], what are you actually doing to address it, particularly if you’re raising these questions, right?”
“The people making those critiques are often not focused on how to make this technology broadly accessible,” he continued. “They tend to come from a background that focuses almost exclusively on enterprise use cases. That’s a very elitist approach.”
... continue reading