After clicking on the link to this article and reading these first few words, you’re probably wondering if a human wrote them. Don’t worry, I don’t mind. Two years ago, this thought might not even have crossed your mind. But today, machines are creating articles, books, images, and computer code that look no different from content created by people.
Remember the “novel-writing machine” and his “versificators” who wrote popular music in the dystopian future of George Orwell’s 1984? Those things exist now, and the change happened so quickly that it has shocked the public, leaving us wondering whether some of today’s office workers will have jobs in the next five to 10 years. Millions of white-collar professionals suddenly appear insecure. Talented young painters are wondering if they should go to art school.
What’s remarkable is how quickly all of this has happened. In the 15 years since I’ve written about the technology industry, I’ve never seen a sector move as quickly as artificial intelligence has in the last two years. The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked a race to create an entirely new type of AI that not only processes information but also generates it. At the time, AI tools could create funny pictures of dogs. Now they’re creating photorealistic pictures of Donald Trump in which pores and skin texture look lifelike.
Many AI builders say this technology paves the way to utopia. Others say it could lead to the collapse of our civilization. In reality, science-fiction scenarios have distracted us from the more insidious ways in which AI threatens to harm society by perpetuating deep-seated prejudices, endangering entire creative industries, and more.
Behind this invisible power are the companies that have taken control of AI’s development and are competing to make it more powerful. Driven by an insatiable hunger to grow, they have cut corners and misled the public about their products, putting themselves on the path to becoming highly questionable custodians of AI.
No other organization in history has amassed so much power or influenced so many people as today’s technology giants. Alphabet Inc.’s Google performs web searches for 90% of Earth’s Internet users, and Microsoft Corp.’s software is used by 70% of humans with computers. The release of ChatGPT sparked a new AI boom that has led to a staggering $6.7 trillion increase in the market valuation of six big tech firms — Alphabet, Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Meta Platform Inc., Microsoft and, most recently, Nvidia Corp. — since November 2022.
Yet none of these companies are satisfied. Microsoft has vied to grab a piece of Google’s $150 billion search business, and Google wants Microsoft’s $110 billion cloud business. To fight their battles, each company has adopted the others’ ideas. Dive into this a little deeper, and you’ll find that the current reality of AI is actually written by two people: Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis.
One of them is a lean, quiet entrepreneur in his late 30s who wears sneakers to the office. The other is a former chess champion in his late 40s who is passionate about sports. Both are highly intelligent, charming leaders who have charted a vision of AI that was so inspiring that people have developed a cult-like following. Both got there because they were obsessed with winning. The world got ChatGPT because of Altman. We got it so quickly because of Hassabis. Their journeys have defined not only the race to the present, but also the challenges we face, including the uphill struggle to pursue an ethical future for AI when it is in the control of so few people.
Hassabis risked scientific ridicule by founding DeepMind in 2010, the world’s first company focused on creating an AI as intelligent as a human. He wanted to make scientific discoveries about the origins of life, the nature of reality and the cure for disease. “Solve intelligence, and then solve everything else,” he said.
A few years later, Altman started OpenAI to try to build the same thing, but with a bigger focus on bringing economic prosperity to humanity, increasing material wealth and “helping all of us live better lives,” he told me. “This could be the best tool humans have ever created, and every single one of us could do things that are far beyond the realm of the possible.”
Their plans were even more ambitious than those of the enthusiastic visionaries of Silicon Valley. They planned to create an AI so powerful that it could transform society and make the fields of economics and finance obsolete. And Altman and Hassabis alone would be the providers of its gifts.
In their quest to become mankind’s ultimate invention, the two men struggled with how such a transformative technology should be governed. At first they believed that tech companies like Google and Microsoft should not control it completely, because those companies prioritize profits over the well-being of humanity. So for several years and on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, they both sought new ways to structure their research labs to make AI’s safety and benevolence their priority. They promised to be careful custodians of AI.
But both wanted to be first. To create the most powerful software in history, they needed money and computing power, and their best source was Silicon Valley. Over time, both Altman and Hassabis decided they needed tech giants after all. As their efforts to create super intelligent AI became more successful and as strange new ideologies nudged them from different directions, they compromised their lofty goals. They handed over control to companies that rushed to sell AI tools to the public with almost no oversight from regulators, and with far-reaching consequences.
This concentration of power in AI threatens to undermine competition and lead to new intrusions into private life and new forms of racial and gender bias. Ask some popular AI tools to create images of women, and they will create them scantily clad by default; ask for photorealistic CEOs, and they will create images of white men. Some systems create images of black men when asked for a criminal. In a clumsy attempt to correct those stereotypes, Google released an image-generation tool in February 2024 that badly overcompensated, then discontinued it. Such systems are on their way to being incorporated into our media feeds, smartphones, and justice systems, sometimes without due regard for how they might influence public opinion, with a relative lack of investment in ethics and safety research.
Altman and Hassabis’ journey was not much different from the one they took two centuries earlier, when two entrepreneurs named Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse went to war. Both dreamed of creating an impressive system to deliver electricity to millions of consumers. Both were inventors turned entrepreneurs, and both knew that their technology would one day power the modern world. The question was: Which version of the technology would come out on top? In the end, Westinghouse’s more efficient electrical standard became the most popular in the world. But they didn’t win the so-called War of the Currents. Edison’s much larger company, General Electric, won.
As corporate interests pushed Altman and Hassabis to come up with bigger and more powerful models, the tech giants emerged as the winners, but this time the race was to mimic our own intelligence.
Now the world is caught in a tangle. Generative AI promises to make people more productive and bring more useful information to our fingertips through tools like ChatGPT. But every innovation comes at a price. Businesses and governments are adjusting to a new reality where the distinction between real and “AI-generated” is a nonsense. Companies are spending money on AI software to help them untether their workers and increase profit margins. And devices that can conduct new levels of personal surveillance are emerging.
We arrive here following the dreams of two innovators who sought to create AI for good but were ultimately crushed by the forces of monopoly. Their story is one of idealism, but also of naivete and arrogance — and of how it can be nearly impossible to keep an ethical code in the bubble of Big Tech and Silicon Valley. Altman and Hassabis plunged themselves into the quandary of managing AI, knowing that the world needed to manage the technology responsibly if we wanted to prevent it from causing irreversible harm. But they couldn’t create AI with godlike power without the resources of the world’s biggest tech firms. With the goal of improving human life, they would end up empowering those companies, leaving humanity’s welfare and future caught up in the battle for corporate supremacy.
After selling DeepMind to Google in 2014, Hassabis and his co-founders spent several years trying to break away and reconstitute themselves as a nonprofit organization. They wanted to protect their increasingly powerful AI system from being under the sole control of a tech monolith, and they worked on creating a board of independent heavyweights that included former heads of state like Barack Obama who would oversee its use. They also drafted a new legal charter that would prioritize human welfare and the environment. Google at first appeared to go along with the plan and promised billions of dollars to their entity, but its executives were taking the founders with them. In the end, Google tightened its grip on DeepMind, so that the research lab that was once focused on “solving intelligence” to help cure cancer or solve climate change is now primarily focused on developing its main AI product, Gemini.
Sam Altman made a similar change, founding OpenAI on the premise of building AI for the benefit of humanity, “free of financial obligations.” He has spent the last seven years backing out of that commitment, reorganizing his nonprofit as a “limited benefit” company so it could receive billions in investment from Microsoft, and effectively become a product arm for the software firm. Now he’s reportedly looking to restructure again to become more investor friendly and raise several billion dollars more. One possible outcome: He’ll disarm the nonprofit’s board that ensures OpenAI serves humanity’s best interests.
After ChatGPT was released, I was struck by how these two innovators approached their humanistic vision differently. Sure, Silicon Valley’s grandiose promises of making the world a better place often seem like a ploy when its companies create addictive or mediocre services, and its founders become billionaires. But there’s something even more disturbing about Altman and Hassabis’s move away from their founding principles. They were both trying to create artificial general intelligence, or computers that could surpass our brainpower. The consequences were huge. And their changes have now brought today’s tech giants to new levels of influence and power. The rest of us have to discover the price.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
