From CNBC, September 13:
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the “toughest dilemma” about his proposal to slow the advancement of AI is what happens if China does not do the same.
- Amodei published an essay on Saturday urging AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models.
- The essay landed during a pivotal time for the AI industry, which is facing public backlash over its data centers and comes amid former-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s warning about the threat to humanity.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Sunday that the “toughest dilemma” about his proposal to slow the advancement of artificial intelligence is what happens if adversarial nations, namely China, choose not to do the same.
“The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of of AI progress,” Amodei told CBS News’ “Sunday Morning.” “I think that’s going to be very difficult because the incentives to pull ahead and the military advantage that you get from that are so large. And honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible, but we should we should try.”
Amodei published an essay on Saturday urging AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models, a move that followed stark warnings from industry researchers last week about the technology’s growing potential to cause catastrophic harm. An Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, announced he quit his job out of concern that the company, and its chief rival, OpenAI, are “gambling with our lives.”
Amodei’s essay landed during a pivotal time for the AI industry, which is facing public backlash over its data centers and mounting calls for regulation out of Washington. Anthropic and OpenAI are also gearing up for potentially historic IPOs, though neither company has set an official date for a debut. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Saturday that the company will likely not go public this year, in part because of concerns around safety.
“Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public,” Altman said in an interview with Fortune.
Altman’s relationship with Amodei, who defected from OpenAI to start Anthropic, has been strained in recent years. But Altman expressed support for Amodei’s essay in a post on X on Saturday, writing that he agrees on the need to “pace the frontier.”
Several other industry leaders, including Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, and Elon Musk, CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, also welcomed Amodei’s proposal.
“Dario’s essay points towards the right path forward,” Hassabis wrote in a post on X on Saturday. “The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.”
In the essay, Amodei proposed a three-step plan aimed at slowing the pace of development without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”
Amodei said Anthropic has “unilaterally” committed to the first step of the plan, which grants third-party evaluators employee-level access to the company to verify safety practices and report incidents. The second step encourages leading AI companies within democratic countries to coordinate and establish common safety standards, and the third calls for coordination between democratic governments and authoritarian governments.
“Dario is right that there should be some oversight,” Musk wrote in a post on X early Sunday morning. “Peer review of AI by competitors is the right way to start this off.”
Musk, who has for years warned about the potential risks of AI, was quick to express support for Amodei on Saturday....
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