Anthropic’s CEO took to the stage at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday to reiterate his call for a slowdown of AI development. Following shortly after, Nvidia’s CEO argued against such deceleration.
Dario Amodei used an automotive analogy to make his point: when a competing car company has a safety incident like brake failures, it is a moment for all car companies to stop and review their own practices, he said at Salesforce’s Dreamforce convention on Tuesday.
“It’s very tempting to attack your competitor and say these guys are unsafe,” he said. “But I think the more responsible way to respond to it is to say, let’s look at our own record. We may not have had this big, high-profile incident, but I’m sure we’re not perfect.”
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang countered not long after, “Run as fast as you can.”
Amodei is calling for three courses of action: embedding third-party evaluators inside AI companies, coordinating safety standards among Democratic countries and, eventually, larger global coordination. At Dreamforce, Amodei said Anthropic has committed to independent evaluators and is “going to have a dialogue with the rest of the industry” on the other two steps.
Amodei, xAI’s Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have all recently called for a slowdown in the pace of AI development. The comments from the CEOs follow warnings from Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher, who resigned with a public declaration that AI could lead to the extinction of humanity within the decade. His comments have stirred a larger debate within Silicon Valley, gained the attention of regulators and alarmed the public.
Huang, who also made an appearance at Dreamforce on Tuesday, said companies should not slow down AI development. He argued that new regulations aren’t necessary, advising AI companies to simply wait to release products until they know they are safe rather than begging the US government to intervene.
Huang said he envisions a future where “every company, every enterprise … would become an AI company”. He said companies will become more ambitious when armed with AI and reiterated the idea that those who don’t embrace the technology will get left behind.
He also pushed back on the idea that AI is going to destroy jobs, calling it “completely nonsense”.
One day prior at the All-In summit in Los Angeles, Donald Trump called Huang while the CEO was on stage. Huang put the president on speakerphone as Trump called the growing concern about AI a “hoax” and asserted again that a slowdown would only benefit China.
Huang responded: “We’re going to make sure that everybody wins in the AI race of America.”
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The rising concern over AI comes as both OpenAI and Anthropic head for initial public offerings, which could give investors and the public insight into the companies’ finances. Some analysts have predicted the IPOs will be among some of the largest in history. Amid the AI panic, Altman said he plans to delay OpenAI’s IPO until next year over safety concerns.
At Dreamforce on Tuesday, Amodei said the thing that surprises him most about AI is the speed of its proliferation.
“It’s been the pace of the progress – not just of the technology but of the economic side of it,” he said about the growing adoption of AI. “We had a prediction of just how capable these models would be. But I think what we didn’t appreciate is that it would lead to these companies growing so fast.”
