It took just a few hours over the weekend for well-known Silicon Valley figures to push back on calls by leading artificial intelligence companies to slow down the development of A.I. and to more tightly regulate the technology.
On Saturday, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, said in an essay that A.I. was advancing too quickly for researchers to continue building it safely. He proposed that independent auditors monitor A.I. labs’ safety work and that regulators allow the labs to work together to coordinate safety standards.
Although they appeared to differ on what should be done about it, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive; Elon Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive; and Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s chair, all said they agreed on the need for a slower pace.
But other technology industry leaders were quick to question Dr. Amodei’s motivations and whether he was sensationalizing the risks of A.I. to make it harder for other companies to compete with leading A.I. companies.
“Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic,” said David Sacks, a technology adviser for President Trump and the White House’s former A.I. and crypto czar, in a social media post.
The criticism of the calls for a slowdown highlighted a deep divide between people who believe the government should police A.I. and others who believe regulatory intervention would crush competition.
Worries about the safety of A.I. gained wider attention in recent weeks as details emerged about how A.I. built by Anthropic’s top competitor, OpenAI, went rogue and hacked another company. And several days ago, one of Dr. Amodei’s own employees quit his job and began a public pressure campaign to draw attention to the risks of A.I.
But a number of tech industry leaders, including several who have been advising the Trump administration on tech policy, believe those concerns are overblown.
Mr. Sacks, a frequent critic of Dr. Amodei, questioned why tech companies needed government intervention to slow down their A.I. development when nothing was stopping them from doing just that — particularly as they pursued a wildly ambitious goal to create so-called superintelligence, or A.I. that is far more intelligent than humans.
“The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it,” he added. “Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system.”
Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, said his company supported proposals like independent auditors and “broader efforts to develop the mechanisms to make this more than just talk” in a social media post on Sunday.
“We also need to accelerate and spread the benefits of A.I., such that they are diffused broadly across countries, communities, and companies,” Mr. Nadella said. “The key is that this cannot be controlled by a handful of entities, but must have broad representation,” he added.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
For years, the people most concerned about A.I. safety have often been the executives and employees of A.I. labs such as Anthropic. They’re developing A.I., they often say, because progress is inevitable and they are the researchers best suited to build it with safety in mind. That has opened those safety-conscious A.I. developers to aggressive criticism.
“Should a handful of select, market-dominant A.I. companies from Silicon Valley get to define the rules and safety standards of a generational technology for the entire world?” said Aidan Gomez, the chief executive of the Canadian A.I. start-up Cohere, in an essay on Sunday.
“These oligopolies are now requesting to bend competition rules and be permitted to dictate the terms for everyone else,” he added. “A sheep in wolf’s clothing, a cartel by any other name.”
Dr. Amodei suggested in his essay that A.I. companies accept scrutiny of their products by “embedded evaluators” from third-party organizations. But critics questioned whether Anthropic had too many ties to two organizations mentioned by Dr. Amodei, the nonprofit groups METR and Redwood Research.
“If we’re going to regulate, it can’t be anyone they know, and they can’t write the rules,” said Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist and vocal critic of the leading A.I. companies.
Even before Dr. Amodei’s essay, some in Silicon Valley argued that A.I. labs’ safety concerns were self-serving. At a conference in San Francisco last week, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said A.I. labs were emphasizing security issues because they planned to introduce cybersecurity products.
“What better way to create demand than to create a problem?” Mr. Huang said. “Who doesn’t want their market to be hysterical about their product and line up around the corner for it?”
On Saturday, Clément Delangue, the chief executive of Hugging Face, the company hacked by OpenAI’s technology, said in a social media post that A.I. safety would not “be solved behind the closed doors of a handful of frontier labs.” Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face earlier this month for $12.9 billion.
A number of lawmakers in Washington appeared sympathetic to Dr. Amodei’s concerns. But just like many in Silicon Valley, they seem reluctant to embrace regulation.
“If developers of A.I. want to slow down development of their product they are free to do so,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, in a social media post on Sunday. “One thing is for sure: their competitors won’t, including our nation’s adversaries.”
During a news conference in Ireland on Sunday, Mr. Trump said that the United States was “leading China in A.I.” and that he wanted to “keep it that way.”
“We can put guard rails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re bringing up things that won’t happen, but whoever wins with A.I. wins.”
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