Why Companies Want AI They Can Own

Nathaniel Whittemore (0:00)

A yet-to-be-released open-weight AI model is getting a lot of buzz. This could be the model, people say, that brings the open-source AI crown back to US shores. What's interesting to me, though, is less the model itself and more the evolving discourse around open-weight models in the US. Increasingly, this is not just one conversation, but three. An AI safety conversation, a national security conversation, and an enterprise strategy conversation. Now, if those conversations point in potentially different directions, which will win out? How will they be reconciled? Today, we explore where open-weight AI is in the US right now, and where it might head next.

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Slowly but surely, the hyperscalers are getting the message that they cannot treat community attitudes around data centers as a secondary priority. The latest example comes from Amazon, who on Friday committed to spending more than a billion dollars over the next five years on community projects surrounding their data centers. In addition, the company has said that they've stopped using non-disclosure agreements to keep their deals with local officials under wraps. The commitment came as part of a 3,000-word essay from AWS CEO Matt Garman, who in addition to making those commitments implored the public to think about data centers as a critical infrastructure for modern life. He called the data center buildout the race our nation can't afford to lose and compared it to the construction of the interstate highway system. Garman wrote, With any change, there will be important questions raised, but there will also be misinformation and outright lies. And in the age of social media and 24-7 news, myths take hold faster than ever before. In fact, this buildout is so important geopolitically that there are widespread reports of various countries intentionally seeding misinformation in the US about data centers to trick us into slowing down. Noting 100 data center moratoriums being considered across the country, Garmin continued, if these measures are enacted, the US could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations. As a country, we can't afford to find ourselves in that position. The new community pledge included all of the commitments that are quickly becoming standard, preventing increases to local energy rates, creating local jobs, and ensuring communities have more opportunities to discuss data center projects. The approach to the announcement saw some pushback in the press. The Verge barely touched on the new community pledges, focusing instead on what it called the scary blog warning communities not to block data centers. And part of the issue was that Amazon buried their new pledge beneath a long section debunking the myths around data centers. Tom's Hardware wrote, The first part of Garmin's post actually addressed many of the concerns raised by community members near these developments, calling them and misleading, despite various reports that have raised concerns about utility hikes and noise pollution.

From my perspective, while I am very glad to see these sort of commitments starting to become normalized, I tend to agree that this post was fairly tone deaf and ill-advised to the extent that it was trying to actually appeal to the communities where these data centers are going to happen. It's pretty difficult to imagine anyone will change their opinion because a data center developer said that their genuinely held concerns were false. And whether that's right or wrong, these companies have to realize that they have very different constituencies that they're dealing with. The individual in a community has vastly less consideration for the race our nation can't afford to lose. What they care about is their own lives and the lives of people near them. Period. Wrapping what is an otherwise positive pledge in a blanket of PR and myth busting just undermines the pledge as witnessed by the article that The Verge was able to write. For now, the moves that the data center builders are making are positive. The pitch still needs a lot of work.

And speaking of the pitch needing some work, Sam Altman has handed a huge new bag of ammunition to everyone who dislikes AI. In an interview with Politico, Altman said that there was a quote, lot of daylight between OpenAI and Anthropics views on AI safety. Asked for specifics, Altman responded, we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.

Now, if you are sitting there thinking to yourself, well, that has to be just part of a larger assessment and a much more nuanced argument that Altman is trying to make, you would of course be right. It's pretty clear he didn't come into this interview with that line prepared, wanting to drop it for some big emphasis. But at some point, the folks who are scheduling themselves on all of these interviews are going to realize that whether they like it or not, we live in a soundbite culture. If you say we believe the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology, that's going to be the only thing that anyone publishes for the next couple of days.