Why AI Companies Are Betting Personality Beats Intelligence

Nathaniel Whittemore (0:00)

Most highly enfranchised users of AI would say that the capability of the models they use matters much more to them than personality. And yet when you start to push on that claim, it often doesn't fully hold. Even the most powery power users among us still create a mental tally of how creative versus loquacious versus direct versus succinct versus whatever other criteria one model is relative to another. And those differences impact which models we use for what tasks. And when you expand the aperture a little bit, it turns out that the personality question has, for almost the entire history of generative AI, been lurking as an issue quietly shaping the field's development.

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Yesterday, we talked about Anthropics just announced public benefit fund. It's a plan to use 5% of their shares initially, up to 20% ultimately to invest in causes in both a non-profit and for-profit way that they think will improve the world. If you listen to that episode, you heard that Elon Musk chimed in that they just give people equity instead of putting it in this fund, explaining that that was what he planned to do. Within just a couple hours, that notion had become a public commitment, with Musk pledging to give every kid in America a share of SpaceX.

On X, he wrote, Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many. Later in the day, the president confirmed that this donation would be made through the Trump accounts, which give every child a small nest egg of US equities. The president thanked Musk for his decision to, quote, invest in our children, by far our greatest and most important asset, and give every American child a piece of the American dream. When you multiply the current value of a SpaceX share by the roughly 72 million children in America, the gift could be worth as much as 11 billion dollars. It would also mean the nation's youth would have a 0.5 percent stake in SpaceX.

Despite Elon being a wildly polarizing figure, to say the least, there weren't very many people who popped up to criticize the move. Some, like Gabriel Zuckman, suggested that Elon would be better served to pay more in taxes rather than giving away equity. But the more general take from people who aren't just reflexively on Team Elon was summed up by former presidential candidate and UBI promoter Andrew Yang, who wrote, wow, this would be phenomenal.

A lot of the responses got at exactly the discussion we were having yesterday of the power relationship between money, industry and government. Geiger Capital on X wrote, Elon once again showing the billionaire class how it's done, bypassing the state completely, the fraud, the waste of tax dollars, the NGOs, and giving capital directly to American children. Elon responded to that post adding, yes, giving shares, which are stakes in the future economy directly to the people is the way.

Wrote Altimeter Capital's Brad Gerstner, who first proposed the Trump accounts, incredible Elon, this will be the largest philanthropic gift in history. 70 million accounts, every citizen under 18 and every child born forever more now has a free lifetime investment account, making them an owner in the upside of America and our greatest companies.

Now, obviously I don't want to minimize all the different critiques possible here. I think that conversation from yesterday about AI wealth is one that is just beginning to put it mildly. But I think that just from an observational standpoint, investor Travis Kling has the right of it when he writes, It's worth watching very closely how all this goes down in the coming years. Because what Elon is doing here is basically the other side of the coin that Mamdani is on. AI and robotics are deeply wealth-concentrating technologies inherently. Either the wealthy decide for themselves how to distribute that wealth, like Elon here, or the people will elect politicians that will tax the wealth away from the wealthy, and then the government will spend it how they see fit. Now obviously it might not be quite that binary, but broadly speaking it seems pretty clear to me that there is going to be some amount of redistribution. The question is going to be who is doing it. Next up we stay on the theme of the government's interaction with AI. Pentagon Undersecretary, Emile Michael, says that the government will use the full range of executive powers, including export controls, if AI labs don't comply with the new AI task force. Michael is one of four senior leaders on the task force, which met for the first time last week. Following that meeting, an unnamed official said the task force was looking at export controls as a possible stick, compared of course to a carrot, to enforce compliance. Now Michael is just putting it on the record, telling the information, We have lots of tools, whether it's a restriction on a type of technology being exported because of the advantage we might think it give an adversary, to straight up export controls and limitation on foreign nationals' ability to use that software. You can count on this administration, this president, to act with urgency should there ever be a real issue.