AI Leaders Agree to Slow Things Down & Tesla Makes a Surprising Comeback

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Neal Freyman (0:30)

Good Morning Brew Daily show. I'm Neal Freyman.

Toby Howell (0:32)

And I'm Toby Howell.

Neal Freyman (0:33)

Today, AI leaders agree that it's maybe time to slow things down.

Toby Howell (0:37)

Then what's powering Tesla's surprise EV comeback? It's Monday, September 14th. Let's ride.

Neal Freyman (0:51)

If you find yourself wanting to smooch everyone at an upcoming New Year's Eve party, here's one reason why.

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Toby Howell (1:20)

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Neal Freyman (2:41)

As fears of an AI apocalypse broke into the public consciousness, the industry's top leaders vowed to hit the brakes in a stunning development over the weekend. In a blog post on Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing down progress on the most cutting edge models, warning that a swarm of AI agents could take over the internet in as little as half a year. He wrote, over the last few months, I've become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence, not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.

Other leading figures, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of SpaceX, responded to Amodei's post that they agree on the need to slow down. Altman even went one step further telling Fortune he was going to put the company's much-typed IPO on ice, at least for this year. He said, I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public. Though experts have been warning us for years, concerns over AI safety hit a fever pitch last week when an Anthropic employee quit saying these AI companies were, quote, gambling with people's lives.

Other insiders chimed in with Doomsday Predictions putting the odds of AI wiping out humidity at over 10% within a decade. And while many agree with this prognosis, there is a sizable contingent who accuse AI companies of fear-mongering in order to invite regulation that stifles competition and entrenches their position as industry leaders. Toby, just a head-spinning week, a head-spinning 48 hours with Dario's call to take a deep breath and slow things down.

Toby Howell (4:15)

Let's dive into some of the skeptics, though. Amongst them is Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO. He is arguing that maybe these AI labs are painting this future of a very dire future, where cybersecurity fears are just so big that you're going to need AI to address them. He says, who doesn't want their market to be hysterical about their product and line up around the corner for it? So he was basically saying that they're playing this up. And then some other more, I don't know, skeptical takes on this came from Nick Mark on social media on X. He said, an alternative hypothesis, model performance is plateauing. Compute is getting much more expensive. Data centers are massively unpopular. Slowing down AI development is a way to explain slowing progress, reduce spending, and try to regain some goodwill. And his conclusion was, this is an effort to save the IPO, not humanity, to put kind of a bow tie on that sort of outlook on this. If you do less training, it boosts your margins. It makes things more attractive from a financial perspective, while you can dress it up as sort of this saving humanity, saving the earth type of deal. That is what a loud contingent of skeptics are saying about this slowdown.