Why AI companies are abandoning doomerism

In today’s episode decoder, we will try to find a “digital god”. I figured we’ve been doing this long enough, so let’s get on with it. Can we build artificial intelligence so powerful that it will change the world and answer all our questions? The artificial intelligence industry has decided that the answer is yes.

In September, Sam Altman from OpenAI published a blog entry claiming that we will have superintelligent artificial intelligence in “a few thousand days.” Earlier this month, Dario Amodei, CEO of OpenAI competitor Anthropic, published a 14,000-word post outlining what exactly he thinks such a system will be capable of once it arrives, which he believes could be as early as 2026.

What’s fascinating is that the visions presented in both posts are so similar – both promise radical superintelligent AI that will bring massive improvements to work, science and health care, and even democracy and prosperity. Digital God, baby.

But while the visions are similar, the companies are in many ways openly opposed: Anthropic is the original story of OpenAI’s defection. Dario and a group of other researchers left OpenAI in 2021 after becoming concerned about its increasingly commercial direction and approach to security, so they created Anthropic to be a safer and slower AI company. Until recently, the emphasis was really on safety; just last year, a main New York Times company profile he called it a “white-hot artificial intelligence doomsday center.”

But the launch of ChatGPT and the subsequent boom in generative AI kicked off a colossal technological arms race, and now Anthropic is as present in the game as any. It raised billions in funding, mostly from Amazon, and built Claude, a chatbot and language model that can compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4. Now Dario writes long blog posts about spreading democracy through artificial intelligence.

So what’s going on here? Why is Anthropic’s CEO suddenly so positive about AI when he was previously known to be a safer and slower alternative to OpenAI’s progress at all costs? Is this just another artificial intelligence hype aimed at investors? And if AGI is really close, how do we even measure it, what does it mean to be protected?

To break it all down, I launched Edge senior AI reporter Kylie Robison to discuss what this means, what’s happening in the industry and whether we can trust AI leaders to tell us what they really think.

If you would like to read more about some of the news and topics discussed in this episode, click on the links below:

• Machines of Loving Grace | Dariusz Amodei
• The Age of Intelligence | Sam Altman
• Anthropic CEO believes artificial intelligence will lead to utopia | Edge
• AI manifestos are flooding the tech zone | Axles
• OpenAI just raised $6.6 billion to build ever-larger AI models | Edge
• OpenAI used to be a research lab – now it’s just another tech company | Edge
• The latest artificial intelligence update Anthropic can exploit the computer independently | Edge
• Agents are the future that AI companies promise — and desperately need | Edge
• California Governor Vetoed Major AI Security Bill | Edge
• Inside the white-hot AI doomsday center | NOW
• Microsoft and OpenAI’s close collaboration shows signs of falling apart | NOW
• $14 Billion Question Dividing OpenAI and Microsoft | WSJ
• Anthropic presented a valuation of $40 billion in financing talks | Information