Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition:
- OpenAI details two week training pause, more security controls following Hugging Face hack.
- Anthropic on course for $65 billion in annual revenue.
- OpenAI debuts ChatGPT for teens.
- Can AI models figure out the rules of the game?
I’m just back from three weeks of vacation. Thanks to my colleagues Bea Nolan and Emily Forlini for holding down the fort here while I was away.
For much of that time, I was engaged in outdoor activities—camping, hiking, kayaking, fishing, running, and swimming—or indoor ones that are not digitally-mediated, such as dining out with family or listening to live entertainment. Sure, my family and I did sometimes use Google Search to look stuff up, and the AI-summarized answers it provided were often impressively detailed and accurate. It was definitely a lot more convenient than having to hunt for information across multiple web pages. But that’s about where my interaction with AI started and stopped. Overall, my three week break was a refreshing reminder of all the ways in which AI has not transformed society and, hopefully, never will.
The big AI news over the weekend was the debate over Dario Amodei’s lengthy post on X defending the company’s approach to both regulation and talking about AI’s many risks. Amodei, who rarely appears on the Elon Musk-controlled social media platform, made the post in response to comments investor Gavin Baker made on the “All In” podcast, which is cohosted by former Trump AI czar David Sacks, himself no fan of Anthropic.
Baker said that he’d been told “by multiple people I trust” that Amodei had said that Anthropic was so confident of both AI’s potential and his company’s position at the forefront of AI development that “Anthropic might be the only private company in the world at some point.” Baker described this as evidence of Anthropic’s “maximalist” vision, in which only it and the U.S. government decided who could access super powerful AI. Meanwhile, Sacks called it “hubristic” and repeated his claims that Amodei’s strategy is “regulatory capture”—where Anthropic uses fear of AI’s risks to persuade the government to enact stringent regulation on the technology that only Anthropic can easily comply with, eliminating competition from other AI startups or open-source models.
Baker went on to criticize Amodei for fueling the public’s overwhelmingly negative perception of AI, a factor that has played into opposition to data center construction around the U.S. Baker worries this negativity is making business difficult for AI companies and also fears it will imperil American leadership in the technology. He called on Amodei to present a more positive image of AI.
Amodei hits back
Anthropic denies Amodei ever said anything like what Baker claims. “Complete and utter nonsense,” Sasha de Marigny, Anthropic’s chief brand and communications officer, replied on X. (Sacks later pointed out that Amodei himself did not directly address Baker’s claim.) Meanwhile, Amodei posted on X that he thinks Silicon Valley libertarians such as Baker tend to see all regulation as slowing technology down and resulting in regulatory capture, whereas others “outside of this bubble” see regulation as constraining corporate power and benefitting “ordinary people.” Amodei said he thought both positions oversimplified things and that “it’s complicated and really depends on what the ‘regulation’ consists of.”
Amodei said Anthropic tries “very hard to make proposals that disadvantage (slow down) frontier AI companies while *advantaging* smaller competitors.” He noted that many of the regulations it has favored either contained specific exemptions for companies below a certain revenue threshold or that spent less than a certain amount on model training, or were designed only to apply to cutting-edge models, while exempting less-capable ones.
He said he did believe AI naturally tended to concentrate economic power, because of the compute requirements to train and serve powerful AI models, but that this was very different from saying that only one or a few companies would exist in the future. And he said open source models only partly addressed this concentration of power, since they still required compute to train and run. He said he favored “rules of the road” that would “leave room for open-weights models while also addressing the specific risks that they bring.”
As for Baker’s criticism that his own statements were responsible for turning the public against AI, Amodei said “I don’t think [the public’s negative view of AI] is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust.” He said he didn’t think the AI industry could win back that trust with “a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin.” Instead, he said AI companies actually had to deliver on the positive benefits of AI—such as actually curing cancer. “I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world,” he wrote. “That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.”
A DMV for AI? What’s wrong with that?
Amodei’s post resulted in lots more back-and-forth between critics and defenders on X. On the regulation point, Sacks wrote that creating any kind of regulatory agency for AI–he called it “a DMV for AI”—would hobble the U.S. tech sector, “create long queues as AI models wait for testing and approval” and “handicap the U.S. relative to China, which will not adopt the same constraints.” Sacks also wrote that “Dario believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute; we believe it is too powerful to centralize.”
My own take is that Dario is right to call out the false dichotomy in Sacks’ AI regulation narrative. As Stuart Russell, the UC Berkeley computer scientist, frequently quips, a sandwich shop in San Francisco has to comply with more regulation than OpenAI or Anthropic (that’s less true after the passage of California’s state level law on frontier AI last year but it’s still true at the federal level). Does regulation somewhat limit the number of restaurants? Sure. But there’s still plenty of competition. There’s more than 3,000 restaurants in San Francisco.
Now, do larger restaurant chains have an easier time complying with the rules? Probably—there are some economies of scale to compliance and, yes, the big chains have lobbying muscle and political connections that most mom-and-pop shops don’t. But is the public better served from having some food safety regulations and labor regulation and product liability laws rather than none? Of course it is. And I would argue the same goes for the auto industry. For all of Sacks’ maligning of the DMV, most people support the idea of licensing drivers and periodically inspecting vehicles to make sure they are road-worthy. Is there some concentration in the auto industry? Sure, but regulation is not the primary reason.
As for the idea that regulation sets the U.S. back in a technological race with China, it is important to remember that China already has some AI laws, around data labeling and identifying AI-generated content, that are stricter than those in the U.S. It is also the case that if what the U.S. cares about is the national security implications of powerful AI, then it could exempt models developed specifically for national security purposes from the rules. (Although this is probably a bad idea—see WarGames or Terminator. It’s useful to remember we managed to win the Cold War while also having fairly strict regulation around the manufacture and transport of nuclear material. I am not sure having safety rules around the development of frontier AI should be any different.)
With that, here’s more AI news.
Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn
Before we get to the news, just a reminder to check out our new vodcast, Fortune AI Weekly. This week, Bea Nolan and Emily Forlini discuss Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 6,000-word manifesto, leadership changes at OpenAI, and talk to Lovable co-founder and CEO Anton Osika about he startup’s $13.3 billion valuation and $400 million Series C funding. You can check out the vod here on YouTube.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com