Key takeaways

  • The furious debate over artificial intelligence has hardened into warring camps -- and a cautious middle.Here is a look at the battle lines…
  • Here is a look at the battle lines in the war over a technology that is now the backbone of the economy and could decide the future of the…
  • Today, most of the doomers warning against the impact of artificial intelligence come from inside the companies themselves, from academia…

What happened

Here is a look at the battle lines in the war over a technology that is now the backbone of the economy and could decide the future of the planet. OpenAI was founded in part because its backers, including first investor Elon Musk, feared that AI's development would end up in the hands of Google, which they believed could not be trusted with the technology.

Diametrically opposed to the doomers are the accelerationists, who believe in technology's advancement, its inevitability and its fundamental benefit for society -- and who also make their fortunes on its success. Garry Tan, who runs the startup incubator Y Combinator, is among the loudest of those voices, casting safety-driven regulation as a threat to the small companies that cannot absorb its costs.

Why it matters

Today, most of the doomers warning against the impact of artificial intelligence come from inside the companies themselves, from academia, or both. Those inside the industry are best represented by Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic, now a major AI giant heading toward a historic IPO. His stance is decried as hypocritical, coming from a company that is itself pushing out cutting-edge technology.

Former Google researcher Geoffrey Hinton and fellow computer scientist Yoshua Bengio led the warnings about AI's threats in the months after the release of ChatGPT in 2022, which kickstarted the latest AI frenzy.

What to watch

MIT physicist Max Tegmark, who heads the Future of Life Institute, organised the open letter in 2023 that called for a six-month pause in the development of the most advanced AI systems, drawing thousands of signatures, including Musk's. Further outside the industry is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a self-taught theorist who has spent two decades arguing that a sufficiently powerful AI would wipe out humanity.

Also worth noting is Yann LeCun, who shared the Turing Award with Hinton and Bengio and has spent years dismissing their warnings of existential danger as overblown. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are veterans of talking about safety in tech while navigating Washington successfully to keep regulation to a minimum. With AI, they are still walking that fine line.