The Six-Letter Word That Unites AI Factions

If the stakes for effectively deploying artificial intelligence were not so high, then the technology would not be a front-burner strategic priority throughout the corporate world; the Big Tech sector would not be allocating billions of capital-expenditure dollars to it; and rivalries would not be breaking out over goals and principles like the one between Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

The high-tech billionaires, co-founders of the ChatGPT developer OpenAI, have feuded over whether the company was forsaking its original nonprofit, “benefit of humanity” ideals. Altman, the CEO, was ousted by his board in November 2023 before being reinstated a week later. In the fallout, OpenAI director and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left to start a venture with “one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence.”

That “singular focus,” and the branding of Team Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence Inc., points toward the positive consequences of AI as many true believers see them unfolding. Anthropic, co-founded by Dario Amodei, who previously worked on the GPT-2 and GPT-3 models at OpenAI, calls itself an “AI safety and research company.” Its ...