This is an excerpt from Source by Alex HeathA newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated to The Verge subscribers only once a week.
The leaders of three leading frontier AI labs took aim at each other like presidential primary candidates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week.
I helped start the news cycle. during an interview on Tuesday I asked Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, about OpenAI’s decision to test ads in ChatGPAT. “It’s interesting that they moved so quickly for this,” he said. “Maybe they feel they need to make more revenue.”
The next day, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei laid it all out 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 race to the death with another big player,” he said. He also teased an upcoming essay focused on the “bad things” that AI could bring — a dark counterpart to his optimism “Machine of Loving Grace” Essay 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”.
“We don’t need to monetize a billion free users because we’re in a death race with another big player.”
OpenAI’s response 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 avoid regulatory battles that threatened its existence. He is now the most high-profile policy head of any AI lab and has been applying strategies dating back to his campaign days to the AI race.
When I sat down with Lehane for breakfast near the main promenade in Davos on Thursday morning, he was ready to fire back. In response to Hassabis’ advertising comments, Lehane pointed out the obvious irony. “If you want to give people access you have to pay for the computation,” he told me. “I’m delighted to be interacting with the world’s largest online advertising platform every day, seven days a week.” He also called Amodei’s comments “elitist” and “undemocratic”.
“Often you’ll have someone who is trying to move past the second tier who says provocative things, because it creates a feedback loop,” she told me between bites of scrambled eggs. “It gets you some attention. My experience in politics is that it’s often short-lived because ultimately, if you’re saying these things, people will hold you accountable to your actual solutions. If we’re going to lose a huge chunk of jobs (to AI), what are you really going to do to address it, especially if you’re raising these questions, right?”
He added, “People who criticize often don’t focus on how to make this technology widely accessible.” “They come from a background that focuses almost exclusively on enterprise use cases. It’s a very elitist approach.”
“Often you’ll have someone who is trying to move on from another level, who says provocative things, because it creates a feedback loop. That gets you some attention.”
The reality is much more nuanced than the jabs AI labs are throwing at each other. Like Google, OpenAI is aggressively trying to take over Anthropic’s enterprise AI business. 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 eventually monetize most of ChatGPT’s usage, is a nice try.
Throughout our conversation, Lehane kept returning to his political outline. He told me that being in Davos “felt a bit like walking into town” in Manchester, New Hampshire, before the primary race: the weather, the signs everywhere, and the campaigns descending into a compressed environment, all trying to attract attention.
“We have front-runner status,” Lehane said. “Even though the frontrunner started out as the hidden horse, we’ve now established ourselves based on our innovation. And everyone else is trying to catch up.”
After my conversations with AI leaders in Davos this week, I got the impression that the industry has collectively decided to get on board with OpenAI. Hassabis and Amodei praised each other on stage during the WEF’s official panel this week “The Day After AGI.”
“I think the thing we really have in common is that both companies are led by researchers who focus on models, who focus on solving important problems in the world,” Amodei said during the panel. “I think these are companies that are going to be successful going forward, and I think we share that together.” (Sam Altman skipped Davos this year Allegedly Tens of billions more dollars are being raised in the Middle East.)
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s rivals tell me they are particularly angered by Altman’s aggressive efforts to expand AI capacity, and some are frustrated at being shut out of deals by a nonprofit company that has yet to show it has the revenue to pay off its lucrative commitments.
With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and the AGI race heating up, I expect the rhetoric to get even more heated this year. Lehane told me that as Election Day gets closer, campaigns get worse. If he’s right about the analogy, we’re still in the early primaries.
